The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It seems that at this present moment the question should arise in every soul: Where is humanity heading? Where is the path of humanity within the so-called civilized world going? It is the events of the present that undoubtedly lead to this question arising in every soul. Therefore, today, in the first part of our reflections, we will speak about this question: Where is humanity heading?

We have often spoken of purely human differentiations, of the differences that exist between the soul dispositions of people in the West and those in the East. And I have already indicated in a public lecture at the Siegle House how the present-day armed struggle, which is by no means over yet, will be followed by the great battle of spiritual life between the West and the East, and how this battle will be one of the greatest, most significant battles that humanity will have to fight out in the course of its earthly existence.

A truth that has often been spoken here and within our anthroposophical movement in general should be awakened again and again in the soul for the realization of the human being and his tasks, and that is the truth that in the fifteenth century a radical change took place within European humanity , a radical change which at first was little noticed by people, but which is very clear, both for the spiritual life and for the life of the soul, as well as for the outer physical, for the human body, for the prevailing laws of economic life. In all three areas, the emergence of human independence, the emergence of the human consciousness soul, is clearly noticeable around the middle of the fifteenth century. Since that time, man has had to gradually work his way out of the earlier patriarchal conditions of humanity in order to fully grasp his humanity, to rely on his own judgment, his own feelings, and on the will born of his own judgment and his own feelings. But since that time, human development has also, in essence, forked, if I may use the term. This means that humanity stands at a crossroads. While up until the middle of the fifteenth century humanity went more or less straight ahead, as guided by its instincts, from that point in time in the fifteenth century humanity could go either right or left, the path is forked. Such developments do not take place overnight; such developments allow old legacies to flourish in particular. And there are certainly old legacies left over from the stages of human development that were gone through before the fifteenth century. But those qualities of humanity have also developed alongside, which are precisely characteristics of nature, that have actually only moved into the development of humanity since the fifteenth century.

But we can describe in a very specific way what this turning point in the fifteenth century actually consists of. As you know, I have often emphasized that the history taught in schools is only a fable convenante, something that has terribly little to do with the inner development of humanity. One must go to what has truly happened if one wants to understand the development of humanity. If we now want to describe what actually happened in the middle of the fifteenth century, we have to say that until the middle of the fifteenth century, human beings lived more or less instinctively, carrying all kinds of ancient, atavistic abilities from the primeval times of humanity in their blood. This instinctive life must be replaced by a life of soul and spiritual consciousness. And this life of soul and spirit consciousness should actually become the characteristic life of modern humanity. The purely animal instincts that arise from the body should be transformed into soul and spiritual instincts. There are many forces that want to work against this development of the human being towards the soul and spirit. I have often emphasized that, for example, the Catholic Church, at the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 869, by establishing a dogma, forbade people who were Catholics from meditating on the spirit at all. In those days, the spirit was forbidden for European humanity, insofar as it belonged to the Catholic Church. That was, so to speak, the first resistance against what is most necessary for humanity, against the dawning of spirituality for civilized humanity. That is why it has also come about that this civilized humanity must work its way to the spirit, must work its way against all those powers that oppose the spirit, which, so to speak, would like to hold humanity back in the dullness of the old, instinctive life. What will happen to humanity if it continues to live only from the heritage of the old, the actually overcome, manifests itself in the most diverse ways. It manifests itself differently in the West, in the middle of Europe and in the East.

We must, however, first ask ourselves: What actually awaits humanity if it does not want to turn to a spiritual life, to an understanding of the spiritual life? And I have already mentioned in earlier lectures that something particularly characteristic in the development of humanity is that in ancient times, for example still in the time of pre-Christian cultures, people remained capable of development up to a much higher age than they are today. Today, as I have often indicated, a person is only capable of development up to about the age of twenty-seven. That is the furthest limit of his ability to develop. He then retains the forces that he has developed up to the age of twenty-seven, and lets them continue to flourish in his physical body. Just consider how capable of development man is in the first years of life. He goes through everything that leads him to the important epoch of the change of teeth, around the age of seven. People just become dull to what is going on inside them; they don't pay attention to it. But inner revolutions take place in a person as he approaches the change of teeth around the age of seven. Inner revolutions take place in a person again as he approaches sexual maturity around the age of fourteen or fifteen. The external history does not speak of such an inner revolution of man. The completely Catholicized external history of Europe does not speak of it, and it knows why. Such revolutions took place in ancient humanity, in pre-Christian humanity, up to a much higher age. Man was capable of development for a long time, and so he was able to use the developed powers of his age to penetrate into regions of the world, where he cannot penetrate today if he wants to remain in the ordinary method of education, in the ordinary outer life, because he is only capable of development up to the age of twenty-seven, and then lets that which has developed in him become distorted and ossified. So that actually people become old in their inner soul earlier and continue to vegetate. What has been taken from man by natural forces, clearly taken since the middle of the fifteenth century, must be replaced by conscious work on his soul. And if it is not replaced, man can only rush towards a state that ossifies, mechanizes and so on his later life again and again. These are inner laws of development exactly the same as the laws of development in outer nature, only today man is afraid to develop such strong thinking and cognition that he penetrates to these inner laws of human development. But he must penetrate, if certain things are not to occur in the development of humanity, which will otherwise certainly occur.

Through this law of development, humanity, if it remains as it has developed, faces continuous catastrophes, such continuous catastrophes for which the present catastrophe that has been unfolding since 1914 is only the beginning. These catastrophes cannot be averted by the means that humanity has developed as an old heritage. For man is approaching a development that would, in the future, make his entire soul useless for the later years of his life. Gradually, people would come over the civilized world who, in their youth, show all kinds of spiritual and soul enthusiasm, but who then fade away, and who would vegetate into old age, without soul. Mankind would become soulless, mechanized.

Anyone who has embarked on observing life, especially in our time, could also make observations in this direction in the outer life. I can tell you, especially in the decades of the last third of the nineteenth century, I was always able to observe the emerging talents and even geniuses as they developed. No phenomenon was more common than that people developed as poets, as artists, and also as scientists in their younger years, only to fade away in their twenties and then produce nothing of note. You don't observe such things, but they are there; you just don't train yourself to make such observations. But such observations show what threatens humanity in our time if it does not grasp what can only come from spiritual and soul development itself. And this is evident in the most diverse ways across the geographical territories inhabited today by civilized humanity.

The peoples of the West, in a sense, have strong instincts. These strong instincts of the peoples of the West will protect them from this withering away of the soul and spirit for a long time to come. I would like to say that instincts still arise from the animality of the peoples of the West that protect them from soullessness and ossification. Therefore, these peoples of the West need to cultivate spiritual-mental life less than the peoples of Central Europe and the East. These peoples of Central Europe and the East can do nothing worse than imitate Western culture in any field. Because when they want to imitate, they imitate something for which they have no instincts, something that can never flourish in them. And it was basically our misfortune, our self-inflicted misfortune, that we got so involved in imitating the West in the most diverse areas of life. And in certain circles of the West, which are privy to these things, they know all that I have told you now very well. Therefore, they attach great importance to forcibly de-animating and de-spiritualizing the East, which naturally, through its spiritual qualities, strongly resists de-animation and de-spiritualization. Hence England's efforts in India to work towards the greatest possible de-animation and de-spiritualization.

You see, this is the course of civilization if humanity does not take itself spiritually and mentally into its own hands. Then we will experience that certain democratic-social ideals will instinctively flourish in the West, while in the East that which has already begun will continue. This development in the East must indeed inspire us to special thoughts. We, who for decades have always emphasized that the future of Europe has its source in the Russian national spirit, in the national spirit of the East - we, who have always pointed to all the fruitful forces that must arise in the East of Europe, we must today take special care to consider this East. We can only look at it correctly if we look at ourselves correctly.

We in Central Europe have emerged from the developments that took place during the Thirty Years' War into a certain idealism of spirit, which flourished in Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, in the German philosophers, and which also had its reflection in German music. With that, what is usually called German idealism flourished. This German idealism reached its zenith in the philosophy of Flegel. What, then, is this philosophy of Hegel, which developed out of Goetheanism in Central Europe as the most inwardly sound system of thought? Well, this philosophy of Hegel only carries to its highest point what already lived in Lessing, Herder, but especially in Goethe. And this must be clearly recognized, especially today, in this time of crisis. What lived in this German idealism? Yes, it lived for the last time, in a magnificent way it lived for the last time, what in the form in which it lived at that time must not remain in humanity. German idealism must be regarded in a certain respect as a very beautiful, magnificent, mighty afterglow. And anyone who regards it as anything but a magnificent and mighty sunset regards it wrongly and commits an offense against the spirit of human progress. This is especially evident in Hegel.

It is difficult for people to delve into Hegel's thought-structure, which has been driven to the highest level of abstraction. But anyone who does so as a human being – not as a university professor, but as a human being – can form an opinion of where the human spirit has actually been driven by developing Hegelianism out of Goetheanism. Hegel explains human reason, which reigns in phenomena, as the actual divine-spiritual out of Goetheanism. Hegel places human reason on the highest throne; the reason that reigns in reality places Hegel on the highest throne. Basically, he only carries out what Goethe has already done. Now the peculiar thing is – if you really immerse yourself in Goethe and Hegel as a human being, you notice this – now the peculiar thing is that spirit reigns in Lessing, in Herder, in Schiller and Goethe, in Hegel, but that this spirit that reigns in them knows nothing of the spirit. This is something that people will have to understand, that today still sounds so familiar to people that they understand absolutely nothing of it. It is spirit that prevailed in this German idealism, it is spirit, but it knows nothing of the spirit, it does not deal with the spirit, it does not speak of the spirit.

Hegelian reason is first developed in logic, that is, in ordinary human thinking, which becomes world thinking; it is developed in natural philosophy, where all natural phenomena are administered according to reason; it is developed in the human soul, in human historical characteristics, in what man has produced as religion, as art, as science - but then it is over. This philosophy does not speak of the spirit as spirit. It is spirit itself, it speaks of everything that is not spirit in a spiritual way; but it speaks nothing of the spirit. It is the last sunset, the last beautiful, glorious sunset of that which actually set as the sunshine for all mankind in the middle of the fifteenth century. Therefore, it is necessary to take up a very special position precisely towards German Idealism. He who wants to conserve it, who simply wants to take up what Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller thought, or what Hegel then brought into magnificent abstract world formulas - whoever wants to do that merely in reflection, whoever wants to be a disciple in the ordinary sense of the word in this time, that person sins against the progress of humanity. We cannot take over into the culture of the present day, into the development of the newer times, that which has shone forth as the evening light of humanity, that which still contains within itself the last elements of the light of Greek and Roman antiquity, we cannot do this without it having a killing effect, simply as knowledge, as something absorbed and digested. This was already on my mind as a very young person. That is why, in the 1980s, I did not pursue Goetheanism as much as the others, that I wrote about Goethe, that I historically processed what Goethe researchers, for example, historically processed, but I tried to merely absorb Goetheanism and develop it further. I wrote my theory of cognition of Goethe's world view with the aim of showing how one can think and feel about the world in the spirit of Goethe. Yes, it is based on everything I have just said. It is based on the fact that we can learn from the dawn of German idealism how we can develop further, but that we do not have to continue this dawn in the form in which it has been handed down historically. We have to develop something different spiritually and mentally from this German idealism than it directly presents to us. We must learn from it, gather strength to move forward. Therefore, today Goetheanism is not a cult of Goethe, not a worship of what Goethe directly created, but Goetheanism is the transformed, the converted continuation of what one can develop inwardly, by studying Goethe, by penetrating oneself.

To an even greater degree, this is the case with Hegel. Whoever today would be a Hegelian, whoever would bring Hegelianism to humanity in this or that form, would appear as a withering influence on the progress of our culture. But whoever makes the nature of Hegel's subtle thought-formation his innermost soul-property and from there takes the step that Hegel could not take: into the spirit, he does the right thing, he does what lies in the sense of human progress. You see, our difficult position in the world is that we are least of all Goetheanists when we parrot Goethe, and we are most of all Goetheanists when we can rise to the challenge of saying we must do everything differently from the way Goethe did it if we want to work in Goethe's spirit; we must do everything differently from the way Hegel did and said it if we want to work best in Hegel's spirit. History already shows us the way in a certain sense. For Hegel, the Prussian state was the most reasonable institution in the world, because reason is sought in all things. “The real is the reasonable.” Therefore, the state in which he himself had found a place as a person was the most reasonable of all. All universities were good for him, the Central European universities the centers of the world, and the Berlin University the center of the center. These things are in fact mysteriously connected with those forces in the evolution of humanity, which I have often described as such that one cannot devote oneself to them if one wants to live comfortably in soul, because these forces lead one inwardly to all kinds of pitfalls and abysses, to transitions and inner upheavals. Those who today measure the right by the wrong kind of Hegelianism and false kind of Goetheanism are ignorant of this. And there are truly not a few such people today. And we must realize how these people hinder real human progress.

A book has been published that is truly written in the spirit of the present, written by an inwardly astute and artistically sensitive person, Ernst Michel. The book is called “The Way to Myth.” There is even goodwill to return to a spiritual and psychological understanding of life. But how does Ernst Michel judge the path of Goetheanism? You see, there is one passage I must show you because it is inwardly connected with our present consideration. He says on page 38: “The highest knowledge that, according to Goethe, is granted to man is the intuitive penetration to the archetypal phenomena, i.e., to the seeing comprehension of the created, the appeared as a moving, flooding effect of divine powers. But these themselves remain hidden from us in their metaphysical essence. Man can add nothing and take away nothing; he cannot influence the spiritual, he can only enter its sphere of activity by beholding it or not. Not even the greatest man can transcend this fundamental law of human existence. Theosophy, even in its form as anthroposophy, would have been unreservedly rejected by him (Goethe). “

So you see, this is how a person views Goethe's way of thinking. He points out the instinctive element, the penetration into the archetypal phenomena, and then says: Theosophy, even in its form as anthroposophy, would have been unreservedly rejected by Goethe. What thoughts does one have in the present about something like this, if one really thinks in terms of progress? One has to say: certainly, Theosophy, also in its form as Anthroposophy, would have been rejected by Goethe. But to present it to humanity in the way it is presented here in this book is to sin against the progress of humanity. For it is not a matter of what Goethe would have rejected in his time and until his death in 1832, but of what must have an effect today and what Goethe, in his living spirituality, wants to make of himself. Those, then, who only look back in this way sin against the real progress of humanity.

This is the fear and hatred of today for the living spiritual life into which we must enter if we really want to strive for the development of humanity. It is therefore no wonder that people who look at world development in this way fall into error after error. This is how this author views today's expressionist art, and he finds something about this expressionist art – he speaks very unclearly – but he does not find out how this expressionist art, in all its awkwardness, is nevertheless a beginning of something new, a beginning above all of something that Ernst Michel could not even dream of. That is why Ernst Michel says: “Expressionism followed Symbolism as the second movement, consciously wanting to lead artistic creation back to its highest task: to be shaped confession, expression of a spiritual world view.”

Expressionism is very difficult to understand today, sometimes anti-artistic, not just inartistic, but it is the clumsy way to seek artistic embodiment of the inner spiritual. In this context, Ernst Michel considers the following judgment to be justified: 'Transcendentalism, as the new world view is emerging, does not, however, refer to a new religious revelation, but to the philosophical teachings of Henri Bergson and the new gnosis of Rudolf Steiner, which proclaim intuition as a latent spiritual power in man that is called to replace religious revelation. In the power of intuition, of the seeing consciousness, man is said to be able to overcome the intellect and its illusory knowledge and to penetrate directly to the spiritual essence of things.

At such a point, one must, so to speak, immediately catch the person who is growing out of the present in an oblique way. For here that which is our anthroposophy is thrown together with that which is a phraseology of Henri Bergson brought into the last phases of a development, which stirs up everything that is a world view and which seems to be the well-known personality who always revolves around himself to catch his own braid, who points everywhere to intuitions but never arrives at an intuition, who always talks about how one should penetrate to the soul, but never takes a step to penetrate to a real spiritual knowledge. It is becoming so difficult for people of the present time to distinguish the fruitful from the unfruitful. We in Central Europe have the possibility of making this distinction if we adhere to the great distinction: Goethe as he was until 1832, and Goethe as he must work in us. And the same applies to Hegel. For when they work in us in a transformed form, their spirituality is fruitful for us, helping us to find our way into the spiritual world.

What I have now explained to you is at the same time the key to understanding a very, very important phenomenon of the nineteenth century, which has not caused people to reflect more thoroughly because people in the present are averse to thorough reflection. But is it not strange that the dialectician Hegel, who only spoke from the air of the spirit, should have as his most brilliant disciple the completely materialistic Karl Marx, who only thought of the material and economic? In the mid-nineteenth century, extreme idealism suddenly turns into the most mindless materialism, and not Hegel, but Karl Marx becomes the spirit to which the most forward-looking people of the present adhere. We have not yet been able to really examine this underlying fact in its foundations because we have slept the sleep of Scelenz in the center of Europe. It can only be examined by asking: If the spirit of Karl Marx were to spread throughout Europe, what would become of Europe?

We must begin in the East. From there, the real inspiration of modern civilization would emerge from the national soul, and this East would face a fate that can be described as follows: The mechanization of the spirit, in an economic papacy the complete mechanization of the spirit, the killing of all productivity and freedom of the spirit in a large, extensive accounting over a large territory. Furthermore, the vegetarianization of the human soul. In particular, this vegetarianization of the soul would assert itself in the field of legal opinion and state life. Oh, it is interesting how in our age the unclear but genuinely Russian doctrine of 7o/stoi, the penetration of Dostoyevsky's soul, but also what was less observed in Central Europe and what I would like to call the Russian heroism of the legal idea, has emerged from the spirit of the East, which wants to move forward. This Russian heroism of the legal idea was widespread among many people before this world war catastrophe broke out. These Russian heroes no longer thought of the individual person, they only thought of the human being as such, of what should be right from person to person. And they would have gone not only through fire but also through physical death for the realization, and to a large extent they also died for the realization of the legal idea. And so, in other areas of this Russian life, too, before the outbreak of the world war catastrophe, weighed down by the terrible things the world has experienced through tsarism and imperialism, one finds a certain heroism of the Russian soul. And now it is flooded by that which wants to mechanize the spirit, which wants to vegetate the soul; so that if it continues like this, the Russian East would live through the development of humanity with a sleeping, numbed soul for centuries to come. It would also oversleep what it could have given to the world itself. Furthermore, in this European East, the animalization of the body and the birth of animal instincts in the body are being hastened. |

The old spirit of humanity would be imposed on this unhappy Europe, first in the East, if one did not agree to steer into the spirit of progress. For it is not progress that is now to be carried to the East, it is the most reactionary current, which is born entirely out of what was already destined for humanity to perish around the middle of the fifteenth century. What lives today in Russian Leninism is the continuation of the spirit that dogmatically abolished the spirit at the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in the year 869. This must be seen through. And what rises up against it out of a truly democratic-social spirit is what counts on the real progress of humanity. For this most reactionary thing wants, even if it is not aware of it, the mechanization of the spirit, the vegetarianization of the soul, the animalization of the bodily instincts, which would express themselves more and more in the views of blood. It is no use closing one's eyes to these things. He who wishes to speak out of the spirit of truth must look facts in the face, whatever the consequences may be; and he must also look unsparingly in the face those facts in which a great number of people are foolishly seeking their salvation. And I would say: only in the most extreme case does this Russian East show where humanity wants to rush. It wants to steer with the old spirit into the mechanization of the spiritual life by absorbing the school completely into the state. It wants to rush into the deadening, into the vegetarianization of the soul, by dulling the real sense of right and wanting to replace it with the bookkeeping of a seemingly, but not really socialized state. And it thinks it is leading people to a natural human life by unleashing the most savage animalistic, bodily instincts that man carries within himself.

This is the task that we, born out of the deepest distress in Central Europe, should see clearly in this respect as well. We must clearly see how we have to absorb the great age of German idealism, how we have to transform and reshape it, so that people will not, as would happen in Russia, go around like living corpses when they reach a certain age. In the future, individual abilities would flare up in people at a young age, and all the old people would walk around like living corpses. And culture would die out, because the earth has not been able to give man anything in the way it did since the fifteenth century; he must seek it for himself if he wants to thrive on earth. We in Central Europe have the task of showing humanity how to develop through body, soul and spirit. We have to rebuild that kingdom of the spirit that was undermined by dogmatic Catholicism in 869 at the eighth ecumenical council in Constantinople. Otherwise, along with the spirit of humanity, the soul will also be lost, and it will become a living corpse on this earth, since the earth will no longer be able to give any more vitality. Hence the constant search for the spirit, hence the necessity for a real world view of freedom. Not of that freedom which can be connected with the blackest reactionaryism, but of that freedom which is born out of the spirit of modern man.

In the extreme rarity of its occurrence, Central European humanity was predisposed to bestow on Hegel and Goethe just enough spirit to enable it to function as spirit, but no longer able to grasp spirit , at most, could only hint at it symbolically in Goethe's Fairy Tale and in the second part of Faust. In Hegel's case, he described the world spiritually, but in such a way that this spiritual description of the world remained spiritless. If we see Hegel as a person who can speak about the world entirely from the standpoint of the spirit, but at the same time as the most spiritless person who has ever been born, then we see Hegel correctly. But this legacy of spiritlessness is precisely what is inherent in the Central European development. That is why we have come to the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century in an absolutely spiritless way. We have come to a reign that no longer reflects on life at all. And from not reflecting on life, from the fact that one has unlearned all thoughts about life, it then followed in 1914, which one could express like this: in July 1914, at the end of the month, it was the case that in demonic spirits had confiscated all thoughts in Central Europe, so that these confiscated thoughts would not work in the souls of people, and out of the chaotic subconscious could arise that which then arose. For Central Europe, with its two empires, really gave the impression in July 1914 of people who act in such a way that all thoughts have been confiscated from them. Today, it is not enough to be naive about these things. Today, these things must be seen in the Spirit of Truth, and this Spirit of Truth must at the same time be allowed to be fertilized by what is necessary for the further development of humanity.

Therefore, one must also realize what kind of attitude would bring about humanity, which only comes from the scientific world view, from that scientific world view that wants to understand the whole world and which has then produced its idiotic, feeble-minded blossoms in the monistic associations, where only phrases and phrases were spoken because otherwise nothing could be spoken. Let us assume that this scientific world view, which has crept into all social thinking and feeling, would take hold of humanity. What would be the result? Yes, one must know what the peculiarity of the scientific world view is. You see, Flaeckel was a splendid man, really full of life, a brilliant fellow. I may have already told you the story I experienced myself: We were once sitting in Weimar, I with the old publisher Hertz von Berlin at one end of the table and Haeckel at the other. Now, Hertz, who was a man of the old school, said something like this in the conversation: Yes, what Haeckel teaches leads humanity to its downfall, it is a misfortune for humanity. — Haeckel was sitting, as I said, at the other end of the table. Hertz continued speaking, then this so pleasant, beautiful apparition of Haeckel caught his eye, and he asked: Who is that down there? No, he exclaimed, that cannot be, bad people cannot laugh like that! - You see, in such symptoms those things that came from the old were confronted with those that wanted to go towards the new. But a peculiar phenomenon must be observed: those people who first study natural science in the cabinet or with the nets in the sea, examining Medusa, as Haeckel has done so frequently, who do the research first hand in the laboratory, they can be inwardly active people, they can be there with their soul and even with their spirit. But the pupils, and this is already the third generation, show themselves to be absolutely spiritless and soulless. That is the peculiarity of the scientific world view: it drains people of their spirit and soul, and numbs them. But because it cannot yet drive the emaciation so far in those who do the research at first hand, that is why the original naturalists are often highly likeable guys. The next student, who still has the teacher's image before him, is not entirely without spirit; the third, who is the student's student, is usually already a spiritless and soulless fellow, a monist.

But there is something else connected with this monism. If you become imbued in soul with this monism, if you become imbued in soul with the spirit of modern natural science, then you become alien to man as man, and antisocial instincts develop in you. Sympathies between people fade, while antipathies increase more and more. That is why I have often had to say it here: however great the triumphs of natural science on the ground of nature, human nature, the human essence, is ruined by them from the foundations up, for they produce antisocial instincts and create abysses between human beings. Today we are already standing at such abysses between man and man, which is shown by the fact that only to the slightest degree can man understand man today, can man really empathize with man.

What must take the place of what has just been described? It must be replaced by the development of the soul, which makes its way by absorbing what you, perhaps with weak powers, will find described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. This is at the same time a book on the education of humanity. This is what should be begun with at the beginning of the twentieth century: to speak to people about how they should rely on themselves, on their own strength. Such a thing must also be made fruitful pedagogically. Such a thing is the foundation for Central European pedagogy.

Now, it is impossible for the forces that are to be revealed in “How to Know Higher Worlds” to be cultivated in any state school.

Establish state schools in any form, and people are driven away from what is to be developed in their souls and minds. This can only flourish if spiritual life is placed on its very own free basis, if spiritual life is placed in self-government. Therefore, this shift of spiritual life into self-government is the fundamental question of humanity in the present time. For through this movement of spiritual life into self-government, that which has been most lost under the scientific education of mankind will in turn be generated: the rule of an artistic understanding of the world, from which the imaginative understanding of the world will then arise. For the development of mankind has reached a certain point: when man encounters man today, they can no longer recognize each other at all, because the physicality for this has already been too much dried up. They can only recognize people if they can form a picture, an imagination of them. And more and more, direct personal contact, and everything that should be there for people, will have to be based on images, on imaginations that people can form of each other, on looking at the soul and spirit in people. The actual developmental impulses of people must be thoroughly changed. And there too, it must already be stated: suppose the way of thinking that dominates all of humanity today, the materialistic way of thinking, were to triumph – now we are at the fork in the road of culture – this materialistic view were to triumph: then, starting from Russia, all of humanity would mechanize in spirit, vegetarize in soul, animalize in body, because the evolution of the earth itself is pushing for it. The evolution of the earth gave off the invigorating forces of man, you can follow this into the fifteenth century, where even the prices in Central Europe were the normal prices of the individual economic goods. This is only obscured by history, which is a fable convenante. The earth could only give man what he could find within himself without consciousness until the fifteenth century; only until then could it be the unfolding of man. Since then, man has had to work his way into grasping a pictorial, spiritual view of the world and of other people, in order to come to a right relationship from person to person. If the materialistic world view were to prevail, what I have just characterized would happen, then desolation would flood the earth and the war of all against all would be accelerated.

There is only one way out of this situation: if people turn to spirituality, that is, to pictorial vision, to the imaginative; if they are able to replace that which comes from Greek culture and was beautiful about it, the birth of the spirit, with the realization of the spirit in the world ; if they replace what was alive in Romanism and what, proceeding from Romanism, wreaked havoc in Europe, the officialdom, if they know how to replace that with free legal intercourse, and if they know how to replace that which has particularly flourished in the West through instincts with an organized economic life.

But for this it is necessary that what is recognized scientifically on the one hand is also recognized spiritually. The world could not progress if there were no free spiritual workers in it. Imagine how the world would progress if nothing spiritual were produced. Things must be invented, people must live in art, in a free world view, otherwise humanity would become ossified. Humanity would become ossified under the mechanization of the spirit. But what is the basis of free spiritual creativity? Free spiritual creativity is based on the fact that we preserve for life certain qualities that we otherwise only develop normally in childhood. When someone is as old as Goethe was when he completed Faust, he does so with the soul forces that he acquired in the first third of his life; they must remain, they must be preserved. In the normal course of development, they die out today. In Goethe and in German Idealism, they were still there as inheritance, as the red afterglow of the day, a last stroke of luck in the development of humanity. Now it must be cultivated, cultivated in a spiritual life that really looks at people's individual abilities and develops them appropriately through spiritual pedagogy.

And what, then, is the spiritual and psychological basis of all economic life? This may still sound strange today, but all economic life is based only on economic experience and on having been immersed in economic life, and it is therefore best developed by those soul forces that have been immersed in life for the longest time, namely by the soul forces of the last third of life. Just as one develops a true art only through the very first soul forces, so one develops a true economic life through the last soul forces. If people cannot plunge into an age through the so-called normal development, in which we all break down and can no longer be young, we will not be able to manage, no matter how socialist a state or socialization is. For this it is necessary that we consciously immerse ourselves in the cultivation of the characteristics of old age in human beings; so that we do not grow old ourselves with them, but that we can put them on like a garment. To do this, we must grasp them in our imagination, we must grasp them in pictures. We are instructed to grasp the forces of youth in pictures, in our imagination, on the one hand, and to grasp the forces of old age in pictures, on the other. Humanity is compelled to educate itself towards such a goal. And it cannot educate itself if it does not take the whole of life seriously. Today people take this life so much for granted, as if it were basically already over when a person reaches their late twenties. By this time they are terribly clever, they can no longer become cleverer, they can do everything, can judge everything, and they could not judge better. That later life also has possibilities and absorbs forces is something that humanity knows nothing about because it does not want to develop these forces, because it renounces them. But we will all have to know how to manage our youthful energies, how to manage the energies of middle age, of old age. But we shall only learn this in the threefold social organism, when we lay the things apart, and not when we mix and melt everything together, as the most reactionary development of modern times has done, and as it is often intended to do to the detriment of humanity, to the sin against the spirit of human progress. Our education must arise entirely from a true understanding of the soul's life. For example, we must come to completely eliminate snap judgment, especially in relation to life. Quick-wittedness is nice, it can be there, but it should only be there so that we can make jokes, be amusing. One must be aware that the purpose and goal of quick-wittedness is to live out the phrase. Irony and humor can be beautiful, but they must be phrases, of course. We do not want to disparage the phrase in the place where it is justified. We should appreciate artistically designed phrases, but they must not appear in the wrong place, they must not appear where the word should be imbued with life. We can only get used to this if, for example, we look seriously at the following: there is a person who says something to me that does not suit me or that suits me. A certain revelation occurs from person to person. We quickly judge it. If people could get into the habit of doing it again the next day, after twenty-four hours, when they have slept in the meantime, when their spiritual and mental state has changed completely, then people could get into the habit of visualizing the whole situation again: The person said this and that, you are facing him - and then judging, then something important would happen. In the first place it is not the judging that is valuable, but the power of the soul, which always allows that to be involved which happens to the human being between falling asleep and waking up. This power is cultivated, and it is the gradual development of this power that is particularly necessary for the formation of the imagination. This conscious work of working one's way into an unconscious life will develop the imaginative world and the world that can actually underlie a social life in humanity.

It is equally necessary to understand certain things that have to be understood at some point. You see, as strange as it may sound today, one does not usually see what is for the good or ill of humanity when it occurs in humanity. If I tell someone today the law of corresponding boiling temperatures in physics, he believes me because he is used to it, not because it is logical, but because he has been used to believing in scientific laws for a few centuries. But if I speak today of a spiritual law that is just as well founded as a scientific law, he does not believe it, because it must first be known for a few centuries. But we do not have time to wait that long. People must consciously familiarize themselves with the upheavals of living life. 'People need discoveries and inventions, that is a natural law. When such discoveries, but especially inventions, especially technical inventions, are made by people who are not yet in their forties, then these inventions have a retarding effect on the overall context of humanity, actually holding something back in humanity, especially against the moral progress of humanity. The most beautiful inventions can be made by young people: it is not for the progress of humanity. If a person reaches their forties and retains their inventive spirit for what is to be done for the physical world, then they also give moral content to their invention, and this has a moral effect in the progress of humanity. When something like this is expressed, it is madness for humanity, since humanity does not recognize spiritual laws at all. But it is a spiritual law that man only reaches the point, through his inventive talent, of being able to work for the progress of humanity in the spiritual and especially in the technical field when he is forty years old. We have to take this into account in the laws of human development. Only when humanity decides not just to think: How do you set up these or those economic offices? but when it decides to think: What must be cultivated spiritually and emotionally among people? What must be considered? — then salvation for humanity can be expected.

The church has worked long enough for the sake of human selfishness. They have worked together quietly, this church and this state. I have already said recently that a person can only truly develop freely when he is a very young child, because he is still too unclean for the state. But as soon as he is clean, he is accepted by the state and prepared, not for a human being, but for a state official. But the human being is consoled by playing with his egoism to the highest degree. He is guaranteed a pension until death if he is no longer able to work. This is a very strong incentive for the souls of civil servants. And then, when the state no longer provides, the church takes care of the person by making his soul immortal without his intervention. First of all, the person is insured during retirement, and then, after death, the soul is insured. All of this is built on selfishness. In the future, it will not be built on selfishness. Why did Aristotelian Catholicism keep secret from people that their spiritual self is also there before it enters into existence through birth? Aristotelian Catholicism only wanted to take into account people's egoism, their fear of death and their desire for assurance of an immortal soul after death. But people find it too difficult to accept the idea that I have descended from the spiritual world and that I have to carry out here on earth what I have received as a spirit. This is the most radical thought that must strike present-day humanity: that man must not regard his physical life merely as a preparation for life after death, but that he must also regard it as a continuation of a spiritual life before birth. Then he will change from being a lazy person who does not want to do anything to a person who is aware that he has something to accomplish on earth, that he has a mission. Until this thought can penetrate people, there is no way to avoid their sinking into materialism.

With these considerations, I ask you to consider what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should actually be for people today, what it should give them, and how it should work as an ingredient in the present soul for the whole of human cultural development. In the first part of my talk today, I wanted to present to you the picture that would arise if humanity were to continue to live in the traditional way: the picture of the mechanized mind, the vegetarized soul, the animalized body. This was the picture I wanted to present first. And in the second part, I wanted to present to you what must happen in order to achieve a spiritual life that the old earth can no longer provide, that man must seek out of inner freedom. Those who consider this path of our spiritual life will have the basis for reflecting on the important and essential aspects of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

The words of the ancient Greeks, addressed to man, sound like a deep spiritual admonition: “Know thyself!” These words can be applied to general knowledge of human nature, not so much to personal knowledge. In this way, knowledge of human nature is, as it were, designated as the summit of all human knowledge and striving. And we can also feel from the way this word sounds to us that it is not meant merely in a scientific-theoretical sense, but that it is meant as a spiritual admonition in a moral-religious sense. And one would like to say: After the expiration of a many-sided, self-contained spiritual development epoch of humanity, today a kind of counter-word stands before our soul. This counter-word was pronounced almost fifty years ago and has today, in a certain way, even been forgotten, disappeared from the consciousness of mankind. Nevertheless, the whole modern state of mind, what one carries within oneself today as the great soul conflicts, lives under the influence of this newer word. It is the word that Du Bois-Reymond pronounced, the word: “We cannot recognize,” the word: “Ignoramus, ignorabimus.” Even if many today believe themselves to be beyond the confession of this word, in the way we relate to the world as humans, this word is still deeply involved. It is, so to speak, the confession, expressed or unexpressed, of the results of scientific research in their significance for a general knowledge of the world and view of life.

But anyone who has been involved in intellectual life for decades and has observed how this intellectual life has developed over the last three to four centuries can do no other than justify, as it were, what is regarded as knowledge today in relation to science. Natural science has indeed achieved so much in terms of exploring the external world of the senses; it has achieved so much in terms of applying instruments and experimental methods to research into this external world and its great laws, and it has confirmed and corroborated what it has discovered through the manifold empirical, technical and practical applications, without which we could no longer imagine our modern life. This natural science assumes that it can gain knowledge of the world that is as independent as possible of what man, out of his desires and his prejudices and preconceptions, can bring to the knowledge of the nature of things and world processes. And it is precisely by excluding all personal factors that science has achieved all its successes. But now, precisely the person who stands quite honestly on the ground of natural science, who sees through how beneficially this natural science has worked precisely for the knowledge of external nature, must say more and more to himself, out of the handling of the applied methods: to those regions in which the human soul-spiritual reigns, precisely natural science, as it has developed today, cannot penetrate. One might say, not because of its shortcomings, but precisely because of its merits.

If we survey what has been achieved in the various fields of natural science, we will see that this science naturally also strives to return to the human being. It strives to apply its methods to the nature of the human being. But it can only research the external, bodily, physical nature of the human being. We see this most clearly when the scientific method is applied to the human being, when experimental psychology is used, and when truly magnificent scientific research methods are employed. We see how the expressions of the soul in the human constitution are examined. But we become aware that through all these investigations we cannot get at what can be called the eternal in human nature, what must be called that in human nature, in the face of which man carries the deep longing to recognize it in its true essence, and from which he at least initially has hope that it will arise for him as something beyond the limits of earthly life, as something beyond birth and death and having an effect beyond it. Nothing should be said here against such experimental methods as those of experimental psychology. The very field of research from which I take the liberty of speaking to you this evening recognizes the full validity of these methods. But precisely because they can be seen through from this point of view, even within their limitations, it must be said that these methods cannot approach the actual essence of the soul and spirit. And this was what compelled a few insightful researchers to admit that natural science cannot reach what, on the one hand, is the nature of matter itself and, on the other, the nature of human consciousness. But if man cannot explore how his consciousness, that is, the soul-life at work within him, takes hold of matter, then he must bid farewell to that great challenge: “Know thyself!” Then we would have concluded that period of human spiritual development since ancient Greece with the admonition “Know thyself!” as a beautiful, powerful — but nevertheless only one illusion of humanity. Then we must confess: this demand cannot be fulfilled. The deeper one penetrates into the spirit of nature research, the more one must admit from the point of view of anthroposophy that those who speak of the “ignorabimus” of natural science are right, who speak of the fact that there are limits to natural science that it cannot exceed. But the question arises as to whether the human mind can be easily consoled by the mere recognition of such limitations, and whether it does not seek from the outset to disregard what the human heart desires in this respect, as something particularly prejudicial.

The aim of what I would like to characterize to you this evening as anthroposophical research is to provide an answer to this. It seeks to recognize the extent to which this demand of the soul is somehow justified. Many people today see what science has achieved on the one hand, and on the other hand they feel that science cannot get to the actual soul-spiritual. And so many of those who do not want to stop at the confession of the limits of human knowledge turn to one or other kind of mysticism, that mystical way of looking at things that attempts to reach that which relates to the eternal in the human being by immersing oneself in one's own inner self. And through such mystical contemplation many beautiful things have been brought up from the depths of the human soul, from the depths of life that otherwise remain in the subconscious or unconscious. Through such mystical contemplation many people have come to believe that what is brought up from the depths of the soul, what is present in man, is directly rooted in the divine-spiritual existence, so that by brings the divine-spiritual to revelation in the recognition of the human being himself, and thereby advances to the exploration of the eternal character of man and to the connection of man with the divine.

Thus anyone who raises the big questions of human existence today finds themselves, I would say, between two cliffs that seem to set insurmountable limits to knowledge: on the one hand, natural science, and on the other, mysticism. However much mysticism promises, however beautiful and magnificent it draws from the human soul, most mystical attempts cannot stand up to truly scientific and disciplined knowledge. For anyone who has been accustomed to judging all things, including those within himself, by the conscientious methods of natural science, will soon find that what the mystic often brings up from the depths of his soul is nevertheless nothing other than what he may have received or acquired in the outer world in the form of ideas or feelings from some distant period in the past feelings, which then, perhaps through a beautifully working imagination, have grown into powerful images, but which ideas and feelings, by descending into the depths of the human being, have been changed by the human organism, which for external knowledge has such a secret and meaningful connection with the soul. And it is precisely to the deep soul-searcher that it reveals itself, how that which one, in a mystical way, has gained, one holds for eternal, is nothing more than a modified, even modified by the human organism itself, result of memory.

And so, in the end, if one wants to approach deeper experiences, the great questions of human existence, one must admit: natural science offers no possibility of penetrating into these questions. It closes its insights in one area, so that with its insights one can only recognize the external aspects of the human being, and one cannot get close to the human being with them. This is the necessary conclusion that one must come to. Especially serious and honestly meant natural science does not come close to the human being. And mysticism, as it usually appears at first, does not come from within the human being. By penetrating into the world, natural science does not come from the world to the human being; by penetrating into the human being, mysticism does not come out into the world from the human being. If we allow ourselves to be deeply affected by what the soul receives from these two perspectives, we cannot but ask ourselves once more: Is it not perhaps possible to go even further than what mysticism gives on the one hand and what knowledge of nature gives on the other?

Now, in the lecture I was privileged to give at the Urania a few days ago, I took the liberty of pointing out how anthroposophy, as spiritual research, strives to take a close look at what a person acquires in memory. And so, in the end, memory turns out to be what can be deepened. Today, as a few days ago, I do not wish to delve into deep philosophical or epistemological discussions, but to remain with popular consciousness. Such discussions could be made, but what is meant from the point of view under discussion here will be best understood if I stick to the popular.

What lives in our memory, what makes our personality complete, so that we are able at any moment to conjure up before our eyes what we have been through, is indeed brought into the human soul through impressions from the outside world. They are sensory impressions that we absorb and process with our ideas, and which change in the human being in an unknown way and then come up again; they come up of their own accord or with effort, when the person needs them, and are brought up by the person from the soul. And if we want to visualize what actually lives in the memory for the human soul, we can come to no other conclusion than to say to ourselves: It is like something that is reflected from the mirror of the soul, which lies deep and forever in our human being, even if it is after a long time. The external world is reflected in our soul because we have memory, because we have the ability to remember. And as I said, even if I am not immediately able to explain the nature of this mirror of the soul due to the limited time and circumstances, the image will suffice for our understanding. We do not get to the bottom of the essence of our soul with our memory. Just as when we have a mirror before us, we see what is in front of the mirror, so memory, in the mystically evoked images, offers us nothing other than the reflection of the outer world. If one wants to see what is behind the mirror, then the mirror must either be removed or the mirror must be smashed. In a sense, we have to break through this inner mirror, this power of memory within us, in order to look deeper into our being. And we break through this soul mirror, that is, we go even deeper into the human being through that which this mirror allows us to see as mysticism, when we inwardly bring our thinking, which we otherwise allow to be stimulated by experiments, into activity, when we meditate and concentrate on a particular thought content, repeatedly strengthening the soul forces.

I described it in detail in my Urania lecture and discussed it in my books: how, through a special activity of thinking, we can go below the memory level and look more deeply into our being. One might assume that we would then see what our physical organization is. For there is no doubt that, for ordinary consciousness, we only penetrate to the memory mirror in our soul, and in doing so, the processes of the physical organization change the image from the outside, which we see in the soul mirror, into a distorted image. But if we create an ever more activated thinking, with which we live inwardly as with our blood and our breath, so that our whole being participates in this inwardly living thinking, we penetrate deeper into our human nature, then not a physical human being is revealed to us, but a spiritual-soul being, which can only be revealed to us through this strengthened thinking. Then that in man reveals itself to us which is entirely of a spiritual-soul nature, which remains unconscious to consciousness, but which, by its own nature, shows that it was present before man, through birth, even through conception, entered upon his earthly existence.

That this can be the case can be understood when we consider how memory, through its own content, indicates to us that we are not dealing with the presentation of a present event, but with a past one. We have the same certainty about the character of our experience when we approach the event that characterizes us, which leads us deeper than mystical contemplation. Then we gain a mental picture of all that is actually creative in that first epoch of man's life, in which such a wonderful plastic activity is carried out on the sensory nervous system, on the brain and on the rest of the human organization. But through such contemplation we follow the human soul-spiritual being beyond birth and death; we look into a spiritual world in which we were as spiritual-soul human beings with our core being before we descended into this earthly world and clothed ourselves with what our ancestors gave us, with a physical human body.

It is certainly the case that one comes to this view not only through that nebulous gift of man that is today called “clairvoyance”. Even if one uses the word “clairvoyance” for what I have just spoken of, one must address this as exact clairvoyance. For the one who sets out on the path of spiritual research like an exact scientist activates thinking in such a way that this thinking brings forth from the human being not only the memory images, but also things that lie below the ability to remember, that were creatively in the human being before the ability to remember had developed, before the human being began his earthly existence.

This is one side of the coin that anthroposophical research turns to when faced with the two principles characterized. It seeks to deepen the spiritual through exact thought processing and, on one side, goes beyond birth to the realization of the eternal essence of the human being. But just as one must recognize how the mystic develops what he so beautifully calls his contemplation, which leads him to illusions, how one must recognize this if one wants to arrive at a scientific knowledge and not stop at the points where the mystic , how one must strive for knowledge of the prenatal human being in the continuation of the mystical, and on the other hand, one must try to take a further step in spiritual knowledge by deepening scientific research. And that arises in the following way.

Yes, we come up against limits, especially when we honestly apply scientific methods to the world; we come up against limits when we apply them to natural processes in a real way. We come up against limits that we formulate in the concept of “material consciousness” and so on. But it is one thing to recognize these limitations and to say, “The human being cannot go beyond these limits”, and to have to reassure oneself, or to begin to struggle with all of one's humanity precisely at these limits, saying, “Perhaps these limits arise from the fact that one limiting the abilities one has within oneself here in order to perfect natural science – but then, if one continues to struggle, using one's full human abilities to struggle with these ideas, which will then gain boundaries; perhaps then one will go beyond these boundaries. I know that an objection can easily be raised; people will say: Yes, it is so good, so beneficial that science has understood how to exclude the human element from scientific methods, to stick to measuring, counting, the results of the scales, and so on, in other words, to separate what is known as research methods, what is recognized, from the human being. It is dangerous to mix people back in.

If you do this in the way that anthroposophical research wants, namely that you first stand on the point of view of science, that you have fully mastered the objective detachment of research methods from the human being and have introduced personal struggle into the detached, then something else comes out. Then you respect the demands of natural science and at the same time you introduce the human element into the objectivity of natural science. And here one must say: if you have absorbed yourself in the knowledge of the natural sciences of the last few centuries, especially the nineteenth century, so that you have, so to speak, completely imbued yourself with the spirit of the natural sciences, and can one still give oneself with one's whole personality, precisely to the things that science describes, then a gift of human nature, which is otherwise not at all regarded as a power of knowledge, becomes a power of knowledge. This devotion to something that is attained as something objective ultimately also becomes an objective expression of human love. When one can express this way of thinking with full respect for the scientific way of thinking, after having surveyed the phenomena of the world from a scientific point of view as far as possible, when one musters enough heroism in research to immerse oneself in what is scientifically given with such devotion, as one otherwise only immerses oneself when one develops love in the world, especially human love, then love itself becomes knowledge, and then, with the love that has undergone the metamorphosis to become the power of knowledge, one penetrates behind what science is able to give.

This is the work not of a day, but of long epochs of human life, to penetrate to those entities that lie beyond the boundaries of science. But what then emerges is the following: At the moment when one breaks through those boundaries, as it were, and looks behind the scenes that are erected by scientific knowledge, something about the human being himself becomes strangely transparent, which previously always remained opaque: we wake up in the morning, spend our day with a waking consciousness out of the forces of our earthly feelings and our soul, we fall asleep in the evening. What happens to the soul and spirit in the physical and bodily is beyond human consciousness. What plays into human life are confused dreams without cognitive value. So that we can say: the entire development of human life consists of what we live through while awake and what we spend while sleeping. And we do not pay attention to the fact that when we look back, we always piece together the morning and the evening, and let that fall out of consciousness that we cannot reach with it, that withdraws from consciousness, that we switch off the stretches that we have slept through. Now the question arises as to whether what sleep gives us spiritually and mentally is not just as important as what being awake gives us.

Of course, only being awake can be considered for our outer life, and the more civilization has turned to mere observation of the outer life, the more it relies on observing the waking state. But for the life of the human being itself – something that even level-headed philosophers have already conceded – what happens in the abundant third of life on earth that we sleep through is no less essential than what we experience while awake. But it only becomes vividly apparent when we have broken through the boundaries defining things through the struggle with nature through ultimate perceptions. Then it happens that the empty space of experience, which we otherwise sleep through, which otherwise contains nothing for us except dreaming, that this empty space of knowledge is filled with content, that we learn to look at that which otherwise shrouds itself in the darkness of sleep. Just as we can look back on what presents itself in waking life as the knowledge that we, as physical-sensory human beings, have experienced with the earth and its phenomena, so now knowledge of a spiritual-soul nature arises from the state in which the human being finds himself from falling asleep to waking up. The darkness between falling asleep and waking up is illuminated, this third of our life becomes transparent to us, and what we see is then our true self, the form of thinking, feeling and willing. We see that which, without our consciousness knowing it, is constantly at work within us, shaping our spiritual and psychological being. We see through to the content as that which is separated from us by the gate of death when we lay down the physical body. As sleep becomes transparent to us, we learn to recognize the true nature of human immortality. When we look beyond the mystical, when we go further than ordinary mysticism, we get to know the prenatal nature of the human being when we take natural science seriously, but when we begin to struggle at the boundary, we get to know what immortal existence the human being carries within. And so, for us, the human being comes together in its development, in that we see, so to speak, how a prenatal human being enters into the physical human organization, I would even say becomes more and more absorbed in this physical human organization, how the physical human organization becomes more and more becomes mightier and mightier, how that which has entered into the human being through birth, in the physical human existence, fades more and more in the further development of the human being, how, so to speak, the human being from this side becomes more and more a physical-bodily being. But in the same measure as this development proceeds, in the same measure as the spirit and soul that are innate in us submerge in the physical body, so that which appears to us, when we observe sleep, as the future being of the human being emerges.

As we look more and more towards the end of the normal human life, we see how, on the other hand, the spiritual-soul being of the spiritual post-mortal human existence emerges in contrast to the dying spiritual human life of prenatal existence. In every moment of earthly life we see a measure of what the human being has brought with them from the eternal worlds into earthly existence, what they are forging in order to carry it through the gateway of death into a spiritual world; cognitively we advance to immortality. The path I am describing to you, in order to arrive at an understanding of the human being by going beyond mysticism and natural science, is not one that can be dismissed by casually labeling it “clairvoyant.” This is a path in which one knows how each step follows the previous one, just as the mathematician knows how one mathematical derivation follows another. The path that I have been able to sketch for you – with reference to the books mentioned – is the path of anthroposophy, the path that leads to the unborn and immortal nature of the human soul in a way that could be explained to a strict mathematician, and which shows how one does not have to stop at the world in order to penetrate into the human being, as one does not have to stop at the human being in mysticism in order to penetrate into the world, but how one can connect the knowledge of the world with the knowledge of the human being. If enough natural science and enough mysticism is pursued in this way, then the possibility will arise for the future spiritual civilization of humanity to fulfill the word that approaches man so powerfully admonishing, the word “know thyself!”

Such knowledge as I have just described, however, differs from the knowledge that is bound to the nervous system, which is essentially knowledge of the head. And allow me to make a personal remark, which is, however, completely factual. As a spiritual researcher trying to penetrate this realm, which I call the realms that one has to pass through before birth and after death, one is aware that you cannot get by with the thinking that otherwise serves you in life. You have to develop a strengthened thinking that engages the whole person. One does not become a medium through this, but the whole human being must be taken up by such thinking. Such thinking penetrates into feeling, into emotion, and even demands that the human being surrender himself to it with the whole content of his will. At the same time, thinking about spiritual content is such that it cannot be incorporated into the memory in the usual way, like any other. Here too I would like to make a personal comment: You see, when a spiritual researcher gives a lecture like the one I am giving here, he cannot prepare it in the same way as other scientific lectures. In that case he would only appeal to memory. But what has come about through such a deepening cannot be assimilated by memory, it must be experienced again and again in every moment. It can be brought down into those regions where we put our knowledge into words, but one must endeavor to do so with one's whole being. And that is why I have a profound experience of only being able to incorporate into human language that which I succeed in researching in the spiritual world. And by incorporating it into human language, it also becomes incorporated into memory; I only succeed when I draw or write down a few lines, so that not only the head but also all the other organ systems are involved. You have to feel the need to take one or the other to help you, because you can't manage it, it fluctuates when you want to grasp it with your head. The important thing is that I express the thought with lines and thus fix it. So you can find whole truckloads of old notebooks of mine that I never look at again. They are not there for that either, but so that what I have laboriously extracted from my mind can be developed to the point where it can be clothed in words and thus brought to the memory. Once it has been written, one has participated in the spiritual production with something else in one's organism than merely with the head, with thoughts, then one is able to hold on to that which wants to escape. The rest of the human organization is initially uninvolved, unconsciously more dormant than the mental processes, and when we incorporate something into our will, we make use of those organs that are in a state that we describe as dormant when we are awake. We are actually only awake in our thoughts and imagination, for the way in which our mental images penetrate into our organism as a volitional decision, to become a movement of the hand or fingers, remains completely shrouded in darkness in ordinary consciousness. Only the spiritual researcher will recognize what happens between the process in the brain and the movement. And so spiritual knowledge, which is not ordinary head knowledge, is entrusted to the whole human organization. By acquiring knowledge of the human being from within the whole human being, one is able to apply this knowledge of the human being, which can take the prenatal and the after-death as a tangible reality, to practical life in a completely different way than one would be able to without this true knowledge of the human being.

Now those who are grounded in anthroposophical research dare, I would say, through a twist of fate that also extends to the other areas of human education, pedagogy and didactics, to introduce human education into practical life. Those who imbibe the knowledge of the human being that has been brought forth from such research as I have mentioned acquire a more refined instinct, a spiritualized instinct, for everything that develops in the human being through the different ages from birth to death. We must then only have the courage to look at human development, the knowledge of which we need, at a higher level, in the same way as we otherwise look at anything with strict scientific methods that lies within the scientific world.

For example, the following arises: We are always thinking about what the effect of the soul and spirit on the physical body of the human being might actually be. But we do not consider that we should not apply the methods of speculation to such questions, but should also apply the methods of observation to such questions. When real observation of human beings is developed humanely, then we see – I am speaking from a popular point of view – how in the first age of the child, from birth to the change of teeth, in a wonderful way the most significant abilities of the human being emerge from the indeterminate depths of his being. We see how the dynamic develops through which the human being, as an upright creature, places himself in the world in his balance, how speech and thought emerge from the depths of the soul and are physically realized. But what we see culminates organically in the change of teeth. This has the peculiarity of being a unique event in human life. What happens during the change of teeth does not repeat itself. In a sense, a conclusion is made with a sum of forces in the human organization. Only someone who does not know this human organization can believe that the change of teeth stands alone. No, it does not stand alone, it stands as the outwardly perceptible expression of what is going on in the whole human organism. The human being is going through something that he will no longer go through in later life, otherwise he would always change his teeth in a periodic sequence. But those who observe the human being are aware of this significant transformation of the spiritual and psychological nature of the human being But this change, which takes place during this epoch of the human being's life, is not observed. If I were to present what educators and didacticians should know, what underlies the human knowledge I want to talk about here, it would go far beyond the scope of a lecture, and so I will just sketch it out.

Take memory, for example. On superficial examination, we say that memory behaves in a certain way up to the change of teeth, then it changes somewhat. But it is something different, the memory before the change of teeth and the memory after the change of teeth. Today, due to our scientific attitude, we do not have the right talent for observation for such intimate expressions of human nature. For a correct observation, it can be seen that the wonderful memory before the change of teeth is nothing more than the completion of habits expressed from within. From the forces of habit, memory is built up until the teeth change. If it is a memory that can be compared to a habitual movement, then one can say that for memory one image follows another.

In short, what we call memory undergoes a metamorphosis when children change teeth around the age of seven. It undergoes a metamorphosis from more physical-bodily experience to spiritual-soul experience. Once one begins with such an observation, further ones arise that are tremendously characteristic of the further development of the human being. For example, when one has acquired the instinct of observation, when one has assimilated the knowledge of spiritual research, one sees that the child, up to the change of teeth, is an imitative being. Of course, one must not take such things crudely, but the child in the first period of life is, so to speak, one single large sense organ. We can compare the whole life of the child in the first period with a single sense organ, we can compare it with the internal organization of the eye. Just as the eye takes in the external world and, through the application of willpower, builds up the image of what is impressed upon the eye organ through the agency of the organic within, so the child is constantly striving to reproduce what is present in its environment through imitation, which emerges from the inner being. The child is entirely sensory organ, entirely active sensory organ. Because the whole being of the child functions as a sense organ, the child not only imitates and inwardly experiences, in a dreamy state, quite unconsciously, what is external movement, gesture, what is speech sound, what is thought in speech sound, but it always arises - and this is the peculiar thing - from this starting point: the imitative child observes the moral significance of the gestures of father and mother. The moral significance of facial expression, for example, finds its counterpart in the child's sense of it; it becomes ingrained in the child, in its physical organization. The child organizes itself right down to the cellular level by empathizing with what is happening in its environment. Only when we consider the implications of this will we be able to distinguish between what is inherited and what is acquired in this way during the first childhood epoch through imitation from the environment. Then we will see the wonderful interaction between the environment and the child, and the real, for the sober-minded observer mystical, concept of the science of heredity will be able to be placed on a completely different footing. But it also shows the special nature that the human being brings with them, in that they enter earthly existence as spiritual-soul beings with an etheric body, which is something that is unfamiliar to today's way of thinking. What characterizes the child is a bodily-religious being. It is actually the case that the child is given over with its body to the physical outer world and its moral content, just as we can be given over in a religious mood to something that reveals itself to us as divine. It is in a bodily-religious mood; because this mood is purely bodily-religious, it does not, of course, have the mood of piety and similar states that later become mental religiosity. But if we follow the development of the human being, we see how what remains in the body until the teeth change then appears differently, how what is completely contained in the bodily-physical in the first epoch moves into impulses of feeling and will. And when we send our children to primary school, we must realize that the inner life of the child undergoes a metamorphosis. After the final point mentioned, which is the change of teeth, what was physical experience is partially left behind in the physical development and appears in a different form as soul and feeling. That which was first in the growth forces, in the plastic formative forces, that which has worked in the body as spiritual-soul during the change of teeth, part of this detaches itself and transforms into the free soul-spiritual after the change of teeth. And what we call growth, what has been working in the body, gradually transforms into the spiritual-soul. If we pay attention to this and are equipped with this knowledge, then we as teachers and educators face the child to be educated with our whole attitude and all our knowledge in the right way. Then we know that in this physical, bodily, sensual being, which is in a religious mood of devotion to its environment, as it grows into a bodily-religious being, the spiritual-soul being that was there in the pre-earthly existence. Let us put ourselves in the shoes of an educator who is confronted with the child in this way. He will be aware of his responsibility, he knows that the spiritual worlds have sent him to guide a being that he has to guess at and unravel through its physical expressions. He will stand before the being in such a way that he devotes himself to helping everything that the child has brought with it from the spiritual and soul worlds to truly come to manifestation. And with reverence for his calling, the educator will stand before the child, seeing with each month, with each year, that all that it has brought with it from the spiritual and soul world is transformed into the physical and bodily. And he will observe the way in which he can influence the child, and he will be able to perceive what was bodily-physical before the transformation, in the first epoch until the change of teeth; in the second epoch, from the change of teeth until sexual maturity, it transforms itself as a transition into the soul, and only with sexual maturity does it transform itself into the spiritual. The human being then presents himself to us in such a way that what has been experienced in his organization in the first years of childhood now comes to expression in his spiritual grasp of the world: the bodily-religious becomes spiritual-religious. Now we can see the connection between what is physical and what becomes soul and spirit. Now we no longer speculate about the physical and bodily, about spirit and soul; now we see how, in the different ages of life in human development, the spiritual and soul-like is directly revealed. Now we gain an understanding of the human being based on the interaction between body and soul, on the basis of observing human beings, which becomes the basis for proper human education.

By the will of fate, the opportunity arose to apply what results from such observation in a practical, didactic and pedagogical way in the years when one is able to guide the destiny of the child. In Stuttgart, Mr. Emil Molt founded the Waldorf School as a free elementary school, to which the lower classes of the middle school were later added. The leadership was given to me. I was now able to apply the methods that result from the human knowledge described above. The aim is to initially leave aside what is otherwise called the “teaching goal”, and to read this from the human development itself.

What I have described is only a rough sketch, but it can be observed from day to day in a new form in the child through the pedagogical instinct that arises from working with the child. Through this, one can see how the child's life unfolds; one can see what dictates what you, as an educator, should bring to the child each week, each month, and that you let the human being's inner being dictate what you, as an educator, should bring to the child. For example, when you first send your child to primary school, it is only natural that he or she should have an aversion to learning to read and write. And that is understandable. Consider that these strange signs, which we call letters and by which we read and write, which are something completely foreign to the human being, have emerged from the original characters in a long cultural development. The original writing emerged from the images and signs of what it represented; it was even closer in expression to what it meant; it was still similar to what one perceived directly. The child who comes to school and is supposed to learn the derived characters feels no affinity with the characters that are foreign to his or her perception. This understanding only awakens with sexual maturity and is quite different from that between the sixth and eighth years and between the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth years of life. The child, because it is only there emotionally, relies on the pictorial, which presents itself to it in the same way as sensory perception and sensory vision. If we recognize this, then we will introduce the right educational impulses for this age; but then we must move on to those things that we have introduced in our school in Stuttgart. The aim is to bring the child to a stage where they can draw by painting and paint by drawing. They should not be engaged only with their heads and eyes, but with their whole being. It is amazing what emerges in terms of pictorial quality when children draw and paint. If this is properly directed, it is possible to develop the letters, writing and reading from what is close to the children. We learn to read after learning to write because reading only involves the head, whereas writing involves the whole person.

This is an example of how we try to achieve, through practical pedagogy and didactics, what human education should achieve, based on knowledge of the human being. The person who looks at how the human being is predisposed in terms of their religious life will also find the opportunity to bring in the moral-religious impulses. In this way, the following is revealed: It is remarkable how children between the ages of nine and ten, in the first third of the second stage of life, go through something like this in this stage of life. All this takes place unconsciously. We see how the child, having changed teeth, makes the transition from being an imitative being to one who, in response to the authority of the educator and teacher, acquires everything. You will believe the person who wrote the “Philosophy of Freedom” thirty years ago when he says that he does not approach you as an advocate for authority, but precisely when you have recognized from that “Philosophy of Freedom” what freedom means , then one can also appreciate that it is out of the lawfulness of the human being that the child, from the change of teeth to the time of sexual maturity, is a being that completely imitates what it sees in its teacher or educator. We see that the child not only wants to model itself on the teacher or educator through language, in accordance with its own inner laws, but that it wants to model itself on the whole of human life. When the child has become immersed in this necessary, self-evident sense of authority, we see how it undergoes a kind of crisis between the ages of nine and ten. Everything happens emotionally and intuitively, the child does not give it any thought, but it approaches the teacher and wants something special. And if we want to put it into words, the child thinks: Until now, the beautiful was beautiful because the teacher and educator thought it was beautiful, until now the true was true because the teacher and educator thought it was true. But from this point on, the child feels: Who justifies this authority before the whole world, where did it get the true and the beautiful as true and beautiful? The child is going through a crisis, it knows nothing of what I have formulated here, it only senses something. And we, as teachers and educators, must observe this moment so that the right word can be spoken from the educator to the child, over and over again, if necessary. For it is a matter of the fact that our actions in this moment of crisis determine the whole of later life, whether it is full of joie de vivre and security or is alienated and inwardly paralyzed.

An educational method of this kind shows us that we, as educators, must do what is beneficial for life as a whole. If we enter into such a study of life, we will see how something that is properly introduced into a child at an early age only comes to fruition in later life. I will give you an example here. We know people who, when they get older, perhaps when they are very old and enter into some society, they do not need to say much, they are something that brings calm, peace, something that blesses into society. These are people who, often only through the nuance of their words, through the way they speak, can have a magnificent effect on their fellow world, with moral impulses, dispensing grace. If we are not satisfied with observing life in shorter periods, and if we make the effort and are able to observe the whole of human life, then we know that such people, who bring such blessings, had the good fortune as children to look up in adoration to other people or to something that was shown to them. From this veneration between the ages of ten and fourteen develops that which makes us benefactors in later life, which, figuratively speaking, I want to say: No hand can rise in blessing in later life that has not learned to fold in prayer in childhood. This is just a pictorial way of indicating how a true knowledge of the human being brings such things to the child that the feeling for moral good and the antipathy for evil grow and live, that they grow as the human body itself grows. One has the feeling that if one brings sharp contours into definitions to the child, it would be as if one were to shackle the child's organism. We must give the child concepts and impulses that can grow like the organism, that can grow spiritually and soulfully, that spiritually carry within them the inner possibility of becoming ever richer and richer, so that later one can look back with joy in one's memory that the child's life has sprouted in the aged human body. I would like to show you with a few pictures how a real knowledge of the human being, gained in the way I described at the beginning of my lecture, can be applied to the education and development of the child. You will see in the Stuttgart School how it will have to prove to you what I have described to you here, how it provides, so to speak, the practical proof of life that exists to a certain degree, even if we want to be modest about the results.

It could now be objected that only those who have undergone what qualifies them to look into the spiritual world can have an interest in such knowledge of man. But it is not so. Although anyone who has gone through the path of knowledge, as described for example in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” can verify for themselves what spiritual research says, this is not even necessary for judgment, just as anyone who is not a painter themselves can judge the beauty of a picture. Although only the researcher can describe the spiritual world, those who have retained a healthy sense of judgment can certainly see through the truth or untruth of what is being researched from the spiritual world. Therefore, those who profess this spiritual research should not be portrayed as a sect or as blind.

Anthroposophy does not want to be a sect; it wants to be a continuation of scientific research, which has developed over centuries to its culmination in the nineteenth century, and we are still in the process of developing it today. Only by following these guidelines can it become a true knowledge of the human being and thus the basis for an education that is appropriate for humanity and in keeping with human dignity. For it is not only through knowledge of the world that we can cope in life, since neither science nor mysticism can lead the human being to a full knowledge of his or her own humanity. For it is like breathing: there must be an interaction, a kind of inhalation and exhalation, between knowledge of the world and knowledge of the human being. But such knowledge alone can only be the basis for an education that pursues the spiritual and soul aspects of the human being until they are transformed into the physical and bodily aspects. It is the basis for that aspect of the state of human culture that needs to be transformed. For anyone who looks at today's life will be able to say to himself: This state cannot be transformed by external transformation, it cannot be brought about by it alone, what we desire for the continuation of our civilization, which is threatened, but only by that which comes from the spirit, and only those human deeds and actions that are borne by the spirit will fit in with social progress.

Let me summarize briefly: spiritual knowledge gives man, immersed in spirit, the ideas that can fill his whole being, that can lead to spirit-filled deeds, to spirit-filled actions and to a spirit-filled social, to a spiritual human coexistence steeped in love. And that is what we will most urgently need in the near future.

Dear attendees! From a sensitive, unprejudiced assessment of present events, I believe it will be quite natural today to talk about the coming day.

If I may refer to what I took the liberty of saying here the day before yesterday, it may perhaps be said that such descriptions, as given here, of the spiritual state of present-day civilized humanity express very much an evening mood. The results of the development of humanity over the last three to four centuries up to the present had to be described, and it had to be described how, despite the enormous progress and triumphs in the most diverse areas of life – which, as has been emphasized, are also present – the horrific events of the last four to five years have befallen humanity. It is not only possible that these terrible events have befallen humanity, but it has also become possible that today we are in a certain way faced with perplexity, with the question: What should happen? Yes, in many respects we have to admit: If we continue to build only on the results of the emerging developmental forces for our knowledge and our will, then we would have to reckon with hopelessness. There is something of a twilight mood. And this twilight mood suggests that we also speak, so to speak, from the other side of the matter: from the dawn, to speak of the coming day.

But when one speaks today of the coming day, it seems that one thing is not allowed: simply to look at the events as they have unfolded, as they have developed up to the present moment, in order to derive from them reasons for any things that one need only hope for. From the perplexity of the present, few reasons for such hopes can be found. Therefore, anyone who wants to speak of the coming day must start from something other than a description of the possible effects of past events, from a description of what could arise from the general cultural and civilizational conditions and which man can only observe.

No, my dear audience, anyone who wants to speak today of the coming day must speak of what man must do to hasten the coming of that day. Merely pointing to some fate lying outside of humanity will not awaken any hopes today. Attention must be called to man himself, to his possibilities of action, to that which can ignite the deed in him, so that he may be the one who, however the world may be aflame, can bring about the coming day. But the cause for this is not only an observation of the perplexity and hopelessness of the fate of the outer world; it is also caused by a somewhat deeper consideration of the historical development of humanity itself – the historical development of humanity, which one must then, however, consider from the point of view of the spiritual science meant here. Most people today are accustomed, when the historical development of man is mentioned, to follow it only, I might say, by the thread of cause and effect, as if everything that occurs in the subsequent period could be explained by the preceding events, which one then calls causes.

This is no more the case in the historical development of humanity than it is in the case of the individual human being. We cannot possibly be satisfied with a pursuit of human individual development in such a way that we say: Now, we look at the person when he is thirty years old, and we explain what he presents to us as a thirty-year-old as a consequence of what he was as a twenty-nine-year-old, as a twenty-eight-year-old, as a twenty-seven-year-old. Such an explanation would be superficial and abstract, and would not be able to do justice to the real essence of the human being. For if we want to grasp the real essence of the individual human being, then we must look at the individual epochs of his development. We must be clear about how the human being, when he is a child, is subject to certain laws of development, which initially apply until the period when the teeth change. Then we must realize how, after this change of teeth, something lawful takes place in the whole human organism, something that arises from the inner being and cannot be explained by simply tracing the outer facts of human development in about the ninth year back to the outer facts of human development in the fifth or sixth year. Again, we must look at the time when human sexual maturity occurs, at the fourteenth or fifteenth year. Then something arises again from the depths of the human being that must be called upon for help if one is to arrive at an understanding of the human being as a whole. And so it is in the following epochs of the development of the individual human being, even if the changes in human nature are less distinct for these following epochs, but still quite clearly evident to the discerning person.

And just as it is with the development of the individual human being, so it is with the historical development, the historical evolution of all mankind. For its understanding it is not enough to explain the subsequent from the previous, as has become customary. It must be realized that great upheavals also occur in the historical development of humanity, that epochs occur in which laws of development emerge from the depths of humanity, so that the essential way in which this humanity expresses itself changes from that in the previous age.

If we now look at what, I would say, has been working its way up for three to four centuries from below the surface of what was described the day before yesterday – for it initially only wants to work its way up from the depths of the human being – then we have to say that everything, absolutely everything, tends towards and aims at the individual members of humanity developing to full consciousness, to full consciousness in all areas of life. For the student of historical development who does not merely consider external history, as it is taught today, which is basically only a fable convenante, but who delves into the inner workings of human development — as one must delve into the inner being of the individual must enter into the inner life of the individual if we want to understand him. For such a person, the first germ of this new way of being human begins to show up in the 15th century, to grasp in full consciousness what surrounds us in the world. However, there is a fact in the development of humanity that masks, covers up what I have just characterized. From the old epochs, developmental forces always remained behind, which, as a conservative element, intervene in the entire development of humanity – forces that continue to have an effect and that actually not only push into the background what wants to develop from a part of the human being as the actual task of the epoch, but also, so to speak, fight it. And so from the preceding epoch, extending beyond the 15th century into our own age, there remains what I would call unconsciousness in all fields, first and foremost in the field of intellectual life itself.

So strong has this unconsciousness remained in the field of intellectual life that today we have broad intellectual currents that see in the unconscious that which is the deeper, more essential part of the human being. In America, for example, we see the rise of the spiritual movement associated with the name William James, which, in various forms, has many followers precisely among Europe's intellectuals. This spiritual movement says: only part of what man holds in his soul comes fully to his consciousness. From the subconscious, all that is the content of artistic creation rises up; from the unconscious, even ideas rise up, which are then only subjected to the judgment of science. From the subconscious, all that inspires man religiously also rises.

That which spreads as an educated spiritual current, sometimes taking on grotesque forms, as for example in psychoanalysis, has its counter-image in something else. How often do we not still hear today that someone is well-meaning with regard to a supersensible, spiritual world, which he presupposes, but his good opinion comes to an end the moment spiritual science appears, which, with full awareness, wants to penetrate the spiritual world by looking at the signs of the time. A well-meaning person like this often says: There must be something beyond what can be consciously absorbed into the soul from nature and from people. But then he is glad when he can say: That which exists in this way is an unknown, is something that cannot be investigated; it is something that does not enter into full human consciousness. Artists are almost frightened, even afraid, of raising the impulses of their artistry into consciousness. They fear that in so doing they would lose their most elementary powers, their naivete, which they consider necessary for artistic creation. And there are some who do not want to make that which can be brought to full consciousness the driving force of social life, because they would like to point to something unconscious and unknown that should assert itself in the interaction between people. Man should draw the impulses for his social behavior from the unconscious, and that would be destroyed in a certain way if it were raised to full consciousness, as if the dew that refreshes it were taken away.

So in a certain way one offers the unconscious, the unknown, in the most diverse forms, as one does today in enlightened circles. And it is only to be expected that the spiritual science referred to here should be repeatedly criticized for presuming to make definite statements about the spiritual world and its contents, instead of merely pointing to an unknown supersensible realm that lies beyond the bounds of humanity. Instead, it is content to point to spiritual life out of a certain general feeling, out of the most primitive human nature. This belief, which today refuses to listen to the signs of the times, which rejects the specific content of spiritual life that spiritual science strives for, this belief is only the remaining residue of what used to prevail in human development as the unconscious. But what is this unconscious? It was different in earlier epochs of human development than it can be today. This unconscious was an elementary, living force in earlier epochs of human development. The further back we go in this development of humanity, the more we find, as it rises in man - though not by the path of consciousness, which must be ours today, but by the path of unconscious vision - not only the contents of his spiritual life, but also that by which he makes sense of the nature around him.

Just look, dear audience, at the last outposts of this ancient looking of humanity out of the unconscious, and you will find the magnificent myths, the magnificent mythologies, through which the earlier man enlightened himself about himself and the surrounding nature out of his unconscious. We find the source of artistic creation rising from this unconsciousness. And if we really want to educate ourselves and not just educate ourselves according to conventional prejudices, we also find evidence that early man sought the impulses for his social will and social behavior in the circle of his fellow human beings, emerging from the unconscious. Even if not everything, a good part of what connects people socially from the unconscious does lie in human language – in this human language through which we become sister and brother to the other person in whose vicinity we live. We acquire this human language in earliest childhood, at the time when we are still dreaming ourselves into life, when there can be no question of full consciousness. What does that which is born out of the child's life-dream carry into later life?

We are influenced by the genius of language. This language gives us a great deal. It connects us socially with our fellow human beings, but what permeates this language, acting as a social driving force, is hidden in earliest childhood; it is born not out of consciousness but out of the unconscious. And so we can say: the old social life has arisen in many cases out of the unconscious. The unconscious has given the human being something quite different from what it gives him today, up to the time that has occurred for the whole development of humanity around the 15th century. But just as the developmental forces of the individual human being that lie before his or her sexual maturity cannot be present in the same way in man after sexual maturity, and just as completely different abilities and forces must come to the fore, so in human development, in this present age, consciousness must take the place of the earlier unconsciousness. But the element that I had to draw attention to the day before yesterday, which permeates our present civilization, the phrase, is what intensively prevents full consciousness from developing out of the depths of the human being. What used to permeate the human being in all its liveliness from the unconscious is no longer alive today; it has been killed to the point of being a mere phrase.

And I had to point out the day before yesterday that the glorious scientific world view has not found the possibility to educate man about anything other than the non-human, about what is present in inanimate nature. I had to point this out, because anyone who comprehended all the knowledge that science gives him would be at a loss when faced with the question: What is man actually? The science that is still in use today does not provide any information on this question. Why is that? That is because this science has not yet been born out of full consciousness, but that this science, despite its glorious successes, is the continuation of what came to people from very different sources than today's in the age of unconsciousness. Therefore, we see this science in a strange position.

Recently, I came across a brochure about general social concepts and ideas that was by no means worthless. I would like to make it clear that it contains many valuable ideas. But at the end there is something that is extremely characteristic of such a consideration as the one today. It says that the author has considered social conditions purely scientifically, that is, as the scientific customs of the present demand. But because he wants to be scientific, he cannot draw any conclusions from his scientific ideas for moral, artistic, political or cultural life, because science does not have the task of drawing any conclusions for these different branches of life. Whether what he describes in purely scientific terms - so the author believes - whether it heals ulcers or destroys suns, is of no concern to science - that is not what matters to science.

Do we not see, when we consider the expression of such an attitude – which, however, is not an isolated one, but is actually typical of what is often called “science” or “scientific knowledge” today – do we not see how we are confronted with the continuation of a certain asceticism of life that only fails to recognize itself as a continuation. Do we not see there again that asceticism of life which in earlier centuries was connected with a certain disdain for the outer life, which has withdrawn into the human soul, which is unconcerned with what is going on in the outer world of ethical, moral, or social facts, but looks only at the affairs of the soul's interior? This ascetic striving has taken on other forms, but it reappears in this scientific attitude – in this scientific attitude, which, in its kind, is admirably strict and conscientious in its methodology, but which sees its greatness precisely in the fact that it admits: I have nothing to offer from my own resources as an impulse or stimulus for the moral, artistic, political or cultural life. Against this mood, which, however, does not only occur in scientific life but, because scientific life dominates education today, is spreading to all of our public life, against this mood, what wants to present itself here as spiritual science is the most profound protest. At the moment when the great questions for the future arose out of the sad circumstances of our present civilization, it was only natural that an inner vision of social life, of the progress of social life, should arise out of what spiritual science, what real spiritual science, as it is meant here, kindles within the human being. It is not by the whim or arbitrariness of individual personalities that the impulse of the threefold social organism has been added to what has been advocated here for decades as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science – it has arisen as a matter of course. It has turned out that one had to feel that it was inwardly untrue and dishonest of the one who, with his soul, purports to strive for this spiritual science and has no heart for the social question that is shaking and convulsing all of humanity, or at least should be shaking and convulsing it.

I might also mention the other areas of life, but I will mention only this one more thing: in our building in Dornach we have created something that does not rely on any old architectural style, but that deals with the forms of building and the artistic down to the last detail, arising out of the forces that arise out of our spiritual knowledge, out of our spiritual vision. This spiritual science, as it is meant here, protests against the idea that what is effective as art should be left in the unconscious and not raised into the consciousness. Just as spiritual science itself wants to enter the spiritual worlds with full consciousness, so it also wants to bring out of the spiritual worlds that which can lead to new architectural styles, to new artistic creation, here and now. Since spiritual science wants to behold the spirit itself, to which the human being is related in his innermost being, it encounters this innermost human being in such a way that it comes to the core of humanity - where moral will sprouts, where moral will arises. Spiritual science cannot say that it does not concern itself with what takes place in the moral will, but it can claim that by permeating itself with knowledge of the breadth and depth of the human soul, it simultaneously gives birth to the moral impulses from which the human being shapes his will and his actions. This spiritual science cannot say that it is not important to it to do something to heal ulcers or to prevent the suns from going out. It must say that it is important to it that, out of its knowledge, people draw strength to act in a healing way wherever the course of world events has harmful effects. It is important to it to present something that can be a sun for people and that can contribute to the beneficial forces in the development of humanity. Participation and co-action, co-will and co-intention in the whole course of human historical, social development, that is what this spiritual science strives for, not as an abstract goal, but what arises for it through its own nature and essence. It cannot appear otherwise than by continuing in full consciousness that which arose out of unconsciousness in a certain way in an earlier humanity.

From this unconsciousness, in earlier times, one had a very definite perception of the progress of human development. That was that the evolution of humanity, of all humanity, if left to itself, would continually degenerate, would continually be seized by harmfulness, would continually incline towards a kind of dying, would continually fall ill. But there was also an awareness that if man intervenes in this development of humanity, he will become the healer of illnesses and damage by relying on precisely that which, out of the nature of the unconscious, enlightens him. In the times of the unconscious development of humanity, all knowledge, all insight, was felt to be a healing force of human culture, because one did not stop at wanting something in just one corner and not participating in the outer cultural process – on the contrary, one wanted to participate in this cultural process precisely as a healer.

And the word that comes to us from Greek knowledge, characterizing one of the deepest artistic creations, the tragedy, the word “catharsis”, that comes to us from Greek culture and wants to say what the effect of the tragedy is actually based on. This is the basis of this effect: to create images of passions in people, so that these passions can be healed emotionally in the face of the tragic action of the tragedy. The fact that this expression “catharsis” resounds from Greek culture as the dominant element in tragedy suggests to us how the artistic in the Greek way of life, which is so close to life, was also regarded as a healing process of life. For “catharsis” is a word - we can only translate it with the abstract word “cleansing” - which is also used for that phenomenon that leads to a crisis in a person during an illness; and when this crisis leads to the elimination of the harmful, then healing occurs. From the individual human healing process, the Greeks derived the task for tragedy. They did not imagine art to be separate from the rest of culture; they conceived of it as being fully within it.

This is how the humanities, which have been discussed here for a long time and which, in the face of the perplexity that has arisen from the glorious science of modern times in other fields, must now stand as the most serious spiritual challenge of the coming day, want to be in life, in the living will and action. However, in order for it to be recognized as such, many a harsh prejudice still has to be dispelled. As long as people believe that serious science is only that which describes what can be seen through the microscope and telescope, what is stated in the physics cabinet, what happens in clinics, as long as this prejudice will be brought to this spiritual science. But when it is recognized that nothing can be learned about the innermost nature of man himself through all that can be investigated in this external way, however valuable it may be for mankind in other respects, then man will be driven by an inner urge to this spiritual knowledge because he cannot help it if he wants to gain enlightenment about himself. Just as we pay attention to what is stated in the physics cabinet and in the clinics today, we will pay attention to what the spiritual researcher does in his soul by strengthening his thinking to such an extent that this strengthened thinking is no longer dependent on the body, as is ordinary thinking, but makes itself independent of the body.

What most people still sneer at today, what they regard as fantasy, will in the future be seen as a strictly exact method that takes place entirely within the soul itself. It will be recognized that through the so-called meditative life - but now not through the old, mystical meditative life, which only alienates man from the world, but through the inwardly active meditative life - thinking can be strengthened in this way, especially when the strict willpower described in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” is added. Then one is indeed dealing with thinking of which one knows: You are thinking, but you no longer use your brain to help you in your thinking, which has now become a purely spiritual-soul process. - Then one ascends to supersensible knowledge through this inner strengthening of thinking. And just as, from a certain point in time, what was seen through the magnification of the microscope was recognized, so too will it be recognized through the strengthening of thinking and the acknowledgment of the results of research from the supersensible that nature, in which we live, cannot be fully understood through our intellectual soul content, through intellectualism.

This is something that still sounds paradoxical to people today, but which, when the serious demands of the coming day are recognized, will no longer sound paradoxical. For it will be recognized that nature is inwardly infinitely richer in its effectiveness than that which can be grasped by natural laws, which only the human mind can derive from experiment. From our own human inclination, we might say that only that which the human mind can grasp with an intellectual judgment can be seen as something experienced inwardly. But if we want to stop at that, if we want to accept only that as natural law — and everything we are taught today as natural laws is only obtained in this intellectualistic way through experimentation — then we must renounce the real knowledge of nature. For what use is it to keep declaiming: “Clear is only that which comes from the judgment of the intellect, from the intellectualistic judgment” – if all that is the essence of nature cannot be grasped through these natural laws. Nature is such that it does not surrender to natural laws, but only to the images that we recognize in the imaginative when we strengthen our thinking so that it becomes independent of the body and we make it the content of our soul.

However, what is presented in this way as the actual driving force and core of spiritual scientific research, it is not enough to recognize it theoretically. It is not enough to be interested in the results, in the ideas and thoughts of this kind of world view, for the sake of one's own inner soul egoism, but it is necessary that the inner attitude and human soul disposition that can follow from such a view can follow from such a vision, must penetrate our entire public and social life just as the horrors of the last four to five years have gradually - but in preparation - penetrated the merely scientific, intellectualistic way of thinking.

We must begin with the schooling of the human being. This schooling of the human being must finally break with what is still regarded as one of the main purposes of all schooling: that this schooling is dependent on, and supervised by, the state. The state authorities, having the task of organizing the state, will always want to shape the goals of the school system in such a way that the human being becomes an instrument within the state organization. In the future, it will not be a matter of preparing the human being for this or that, but rather of developing in oneself the sense of observing through looking at the spiritual and soul life of the human being, what wants to develop as a spiritual being through the human being's corporeality from the earliest childhood on. It will be essential that the school be founded solely and exclusively on the requirements of spiritual life itself, from the lowest to the highest level.

Today, our public circumstances are such that one can only attempt to implement such an education system in isolated cases, as has been done here under the aegis of Mr. Molt with the Waldorf School. In the Waldorf School, the principle is assumed from the outset that something hidden within the human being is working its way out from childhood on, but that this can be observed through spiritual insight as it develops from week to week, from year to year. The teaching method is designed to help the human being become a whole human being, to develop in the human being from the earliest childhood those powers that will then endure throughout life, that make it possible for the human being at the latest age to bring out of himself what has been developed in him. In many ways, this must be approached differently from the way in which the aims of education have been viewed, due to scientific and materialistic prejudice, especially in recent times. Above all, it must be based on the awareness that If I bring forth from a person everything that is latent in him, he will later integrate himself into social life in such a way that he will make the institutions, not, as is the case today, be made by the institutions, so that he will become only a machine in his occupation, an imprint of the being that his occupation imprints on him. The human being of the future, who is to be

this school is to be aimed at, must stamp his seal on all outer life, but outer life must not stamp its seal on him. When this is stated, it may at first glance seem to be one of those phrases that are often used today to describe educational goals. But they remain empty phrases, like so much of modern life, if they are not linked to the real spiritual insight. This must first be driven out of the depths of the human soul through a strengthening of the thinking, through a self-discipline of the will, until the method of supersensible seeing is attained.

It is an earnest demand of the coming day that, alongside of what is investigated outwardly in laboratories and clinics, there should also be recognized that which can be found through strict inner soul-searching as the revelation of one's own true and real human nature, which at the same time is the supersensible, eternal nature of man. And it is a failure to recognize the signs of the times when religious prejudices dismiss such striving in such a way that what man wants to bring forth out of man's own power is belittled. It is a serious matter that especially from some religious quarters it is repeatedly said that it is a mistake or dangerous when man wants to develop inwardly so that he comes to the contemplation of the supersensible; this supersensible one should accept out of instinctive faith given to the simplest mind. - That sounds very nice to many because it accommodates man's inner egoistic comfort. And it sounds burdensome to many when spiritual science appears to speak about the individual facts of the supersensible world in the same way that external natural science speaks about the external-sensory facts of life. It is burdensome when the claim is made to describe the individual with which the human being is connected as a spiritual-soul being in the same way as one describes this external, sensual world. Out of a very vague feeling, people want to grasp everything possible as “the divine” in the twinkling of an eye; they do not want to embark on the laborious inner path of conquering this divine within themselves. But by not wanting to engage in the laborious process of conquering this divine within himself, by wanting to hold on to it in the abstract of a feeling, the human being will increasingly distance himself from real life. What he will express about nature will be powerless to intervene in social life, in political life, in cultus, even in the moral life. In the end, it will even be powerless to maintain religion itself, because in the present age man is accustomed to striving for the concrete, because man is accustomed to watching natural science cognitively and not merely believing. The education he acquires there will also apply its powers to this area. If man is not given this spiritual science, if he is not told of this spiritual vision, if it is opposed, then he will lose the old traditional religious beliefs that come from the age of unconsciousness. His soul will become desolate. Those religious beliefs that today stand in the way of a living grasp of the spiritual world are the ones that work against the true religiousness of humanity.

And this realization itself is an earnest spiritual demand of the coming day. It is quite out of date to say, as they do today, that religion must arise from the darkest depths of the human soul, that it must remain in the realm of the unconscious, and must not aspire to full consciousness. What I have described to you today as a characteristic of true spiritual striving in this field is intended to reveal how humanity must strive for a conscious experience of the spiritual world. This conscious experience of the spiritual world cannot be achieved for public life other than by making all spiritual striving independent and thus mainly by training all human spiritual forces that are independent of the state-legal forces, that are independent of all economic powers – one can read about this in my book 'The Key Points of the Social Question'. A spiritual life that is self-contained, that works purely from what the innermost soul says about the human spirit, that is independent of all authorities, such a spiritual life alone will awaken in humanity an awareness of the spirit. Man needs this consciousness in order to become aware of the connection between his own spirit within and the spirit that encompasses the whole world. Thus, in the field of knowledge, mankind has actually recognized the necessity of finding the transition from the old unconscious demands to the newer, ever more conscious and aware demands, which must arise ever stronger and stronger.

But in other areas of life, too, serious demands of the coming day arise. If we consider a second area of human life, public human life – that area that arises from the coexistence of person to person, as it develops in the mature adult, as it develops at the same time as a support for the growing up childhood and youth, which is to grow into the following age - when we consider this life and look at earlier epochs of human development, this too goes back to the unconscious; but this life also demands the transition into consciousness.

From what did all right develop? From what has all that developed that has, so to speak, crystallized in state legislation, in legal systems? I can only briefly hint at it here. It has developed from that which arose in older times, in the times of unconscious human development, from the habit that human being developed in relation to human being. Unconsciously, the human being developed a way of looking up to another human being; from this a behavior arose. Unconsciously, man has developed a feeling through the fact that the other person has behaved towards him in a certain way. From this, habits of right and wrong have arisen. Out of unconsciousness, custom and right have arisen. In this area, too, what only had its justification in the age of unconsciousness has survived into the age of consciousness. Into the age of consciousness, clinging to remnants of the old habits has been preserved. Until today, little has been shown of a transition to a different view of the legal and political system, of a transition to the view that, in full consciousness, grasps what the relationship between human beings is in the outer, social life. Just as in pure knowledge the transition from unconsciousness to consciousness must be achieved, so too in the sphere of legal or state life this transition from unconsciousness to consciousness must be found. This must be born out of what man experiences as he inwardly gets to know the spirit through spiritual insight. Out of this knowledge of the supersensible must come the way in which man stands in relation to man in the legal and political order of the social order. Out of man's consciousness of the supersensible must come the earthly consciousness — the consciousness that By standing as a human being and facing another human being, we are both not only what stands as a human body opposite the human body; we are both the bearers of a spiritual-soul. A spiritual-soul is exchanged with a spiritual-soul. This cannot be acquired as soul content through theoretical contemplation. It can only arise as soul content if it is enlivened from earliest childhood by a schooling that links everything natural to the spiritual, that also permeates everything natural from the spiritual. When a person is inwardly grounded in the truth of the spiritual with his innermost feeling, then he will also develop in his dealings with other people those feelings that place him as a spiritual being in relation to another spiritual being. Then, in the state-legal order, he will initially see a result of people's behavior, but he will recognize in it, as a deeper meaning, that which permeates all of humanity as a supersensible reality. Because the remnants of the unconscious from ancient times still extend into our time in this area, what used to be fully animated by the unconscious in people's sense of right and wrong, their sense of state, has been transformed into a mere convention. The convention must in turn absorb into itself that which is living, that which can work elementarily from person to person. But this can only happen if man finds a soil in which - independently of all other human life - only that which develops from human soul to human soul as right takes place. But because the old unconscious, which in a certain respect was justified for our past epoch, has been preserved into our epoch, it has lost its meaning. Right has been preserved according to the outward wording, the outward custom; the inner meaning has been lost. It could therefore not be exercised out of the inner life of the soul; it could only be exercised out of physical power.

And so we see how today, still half unconscious at first, the appeal rises from humanity – but an appeal that today is raised too much from the phrase, that must be stripped of the phrase and clothed with reality – the appeal rises to replace what exists merely under the influence of external power commands with a real right, to transform it into a real right. What lives as power in our external institutions on the legal or state level has come about simply because what previously arose from the unconscious has held on without meaning, so that it cannot now be held on to from the human soul, but is held on to by external power. It must transform itself - on a path that can only be found in the transition from unconscious feeling from person to person to conscious feeling of the individual human being for the real spiritual-soul nature of the other human being.

And just as knowledge developed in the epoch of unconsciousness, just as what was custom and what was right developed out of the elementary, out of what could not be counted among the known and manageable, so too did the customs and rules of conduct for outer life develop. They have developed through man's adaptation to his dealings, through his dealings with external things, through trial and error, through scratching, scraping, grinding in external life; in other words, this is how the skills of economic life have developed. These skills of economic life have developed out of the unconscious. And in the age in which the old, unconscious residue has remained, which has not filled with new, inner soul experience what used to be filled with the soul-unconscious in the treatment of the external world by man, that has become empty, that has become mere routine. But the spirit must seize the human being. The supersensible must enter into consciousness, then the human being will in turn permeate the economic world with what fires him from within. Then he will give meaning to the outer world again. Then he will not do the job, he will do the job. Then it will also be necessary that the human being is not simply placed in some profession and has to adapt to it, but it will be necessary that he is educated out of the demands and forces of human nature. He will place himself in the structure of economic life, in which there will be manageable associations, associations between people of the same and similar professions or related professions, and between those who produce and those who consume. Such associations will attain only such a size that the whole circumstances in them can be overseen by human power, that these overseeable associations can stand in free intercourse of economic exchange with others. There that will develop, what is won in economic life from contemplation, from experience. There it will be impossible - because the

— people are united in manageable associations, it will be impossible for one to offer the other anything that the other does not know about its origin and provenance. In such a case it will be possible to build on what has been formed by the power of the organizations and associations. Then one will know with whom one is dealing, because one will see how the individual comes into being through the economic and social context in associations. Then the spirit will truly prevail in economic life instead of the unspiritual. Thus it may be said that through the associations, and as people get to know each other commercially and economically through these associations, consciousness also enters into economic life. In this way, simply by being part of these associations, conscious economic life will develop.

The transition from unconsciousness to consciousness: this is what people must take hold of in the individual, narrowly defined circles of public, external life, and what people must take hold of on a large scale. We see how the unconscious is working today in one area of the great life of the world. But one could also ask: How few see it there?

We have seen how, under the influence of the events of the last four to five years, a world coalition has risen up against Central Europe, and how the sad events of these years have highlighted the hegemony of the English-speaking population over the earth. And in this respect, humanity still has much to experience. For those who can look at these matters with an unprejudiced mind, a very bitter future lies ahead. If one is able to look straight at the great world events, one must also ask the question from this point of view: What is the character of the public political life of the power that today, as the English-speaking power, is striving for world domination? What is the fundamental character of Anglo-American policy in particular? It is hardly ever stated. This policy is followed almost everywhere in the world today, and it is hardly ever stated. We see how certain phenomena recur again and again in this policy, but we cannot characterize these phenomena correctly. One could have listened to how, in the last third of the 19th century, people in England who were familiar with what was actually being striven for there basically predicted, for example, the fate of today's European East, and predicted, for example, that a great world war would have to come. But this policy has been acted upon under the influence of these impulses.

This is what is so little understood. But it is what must be understood if one is at all to proceed to a practical shaping of life, if one is to gain a practical position in today's public life. But then one must also ask: does this English policy not proceed in such a way that it often seems to take steps forward, then withdraw them again, and so on? We can follow this in English policy towards Egypt and Russia to this day, when we see how Lloyd George behaved a few months ago, how he is behaving today, how he takes steps forward and then withdraws them again. But what is the meaning of all this? One specific goal is to do with the national egoism of the English-speaking population of the earth. This goal is contained in it, as in the earlier epochs of human development, man set himself goals out of the unconscious. Then, in the external, for example in economic life, he began to experiment, to adapt to his surroundings.

If we look at the English political ideal of world domination, which was born out of the unconscious, and observe these steps forward and back, observe what is tried and done in detail, then we find the only really correct description for politics: it has its great goals out of the unconscious, and in relation to the individual actions it is experimental politics. It is so strongly experimental politics, trial politics, politics determined from unconscious goals, that one should not be discouraged if one or the other does not succeed. One then tries another way. One has the unconscious goals, and in consciousness one experiments, one tries, and if one does not get far enough in one way, one tries to get far enough in the other way. In the realm of the great cosmic being and cosmic activity, we have the emergence of the unconscious, which merely tries and experiments. This, too, must be overcome by the demands of the coming day.

Here, my dear audience, you see through and recognize that what is happening today as the main thing in the world, I would like to say, thank God, is not the coming day, but is the dusk of the evening. But the real coming day will arise out of the demand that can only arise out of an inner development of the human soul itself. This development aims to raise to consciousness that which previously ruled in humanity as the unconscious, and rightly so. However, this development must go right to the most intimate, innermost powers of the human soul.

You have been told today that leaflets were distributed after my last lecture. These leaflets contain all sorts of things. Among other things, they reheat the old myth that this spiritual science is an outlook that mocks Christianity and, above all, mocks Christ Himself. Well, my dear audience, that which has come into the evolution of mankind on earth through Christ Jesus is a fact – a fact that is part of the whole evolution of mankind. Each successive age in which humanity progresses must grasp this fact anew in its own way. He is weak-minded who believes that he can only stand on Christian ground if he can accept only the old conceptions and rejects that which arises from a new stage of development of the life of the human soul as a perception of Christianity.

Such people, who condemn precisely what spiritual science has to say about the Christ and about the mystery of Golgotha, do not follow the beautiful Pauline saying: Not I, but the Christ in me. Spiritual science is clear about the fact that the Christ is drawn into this earthly development from transcendental heights and that He is so connected with this earthly development that the human being of today cannot live from passive hope into the coming day, but that he must develop in his own inner being the power as a human being that will bring about this coming day. But because the power of Christ has entered into human evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha, the one who unites with this power of Christ will not merely have the Christ as the “Saviour of sinful man”, passively counting on his Redeemer. They will be able to say in truth: Not I, but the Christ in me — but the Christ not only as the Redeemer of sins, but the Christ as the inspirer and awakener of all the powers that will be able to emerge in the period to come as the powers of human progress. And those who believe that they have to rebel against something like this out of their beliefs perhaps misunderstand the very serious demands of the coming day, because they understand nothing of the real meaning of this Pauline word. “The Christ in me” is not merely something passively believed, but an active force that moves me forward as a human being. Not I, but the Christ in me – so says spiritual science. But the others, who fight against this spiritual science, they do not say at all: Not I, but the Christ in me – but they say: Not I, but the old opinions that I want to have about the Christ in me. – They do not say: The Christ in me, but: my old accustomed opinions in me; my old accustomed ideas about the Christ in me. — The correct understanding of St. Paul's words, that is what will fulfill a most serious demand of Christian progress.

In this way I have tried to characterize for you today some of the demands of the coming day, and I believe that I may conclude these serious reflections by saying: If humanity is to draw strength from the spirit, then there must also come from the spiritual a new grasp of the true, the genuine Christian essence. And that is truly not the last, not the least serious demand of the coming day.

When people see the present distress and misery, they ask what has caused it, and usually they look for the causes in external circumstances. They will first look back at the painful years that have passed, four to five years. Perhaps he will also gradually become aware that what has been so painfully experienced in the last four to five years has been preparing itself over a long period of time, through decades, indeed through centuries of recent human development, just as a thunderstorm prepares itself through the sultriness of the whole day, without its formation being noticed, and then discharges itself. But even those people who look further back in this way to the causes and reasons for our present plight and our misery in this age, they will look more or less at external circumstances. They will also think of appearances when it comes to getting out of the confusion and chaos of this age, of external measures and institutions.

To a great extent, this view is correct. I myself have tried to express the extent to which this is the case, in accordance with my own convictions, in the lecture I was allowed to give here in Ulm a few weeks ago on social issues. But there is another side to this way of looking at things. We need only be attentive to what is a significant contemporary phenomenon in our present time with regard to the inner human life, the human soul life. In line with what I just mentioned, we are rightly striving for a more social organization of the external conditions of life than has been granted to humanity in the last three to four centuries. But is it not noticeable that we are striving towards this social organization from a very strange human state of mind? Do we not notice that basically human souls in the present are permeated with antisocial drives, with antisocial instincts, with little possibility of mutual understanding? And it is out of these antisocial states of mind, and all the more so because they are present, that we must strive for a more social organization of external life than that which the antisocial instincts of our present human life had developed during the last three to four centuries. If we consider the question from this point of view, we find that these antisocial tendencies of the present time are actually connected with the fact that we have lost the way to the innermost core of man's being, the way to that innermost core of being that every human being actually senses within himself, even if more or less brightly or only instinctively and obscurely: the supersensible human being. However strange it may sound, people today do not know exactly what their deeper, darker soul craves. It longs for a realization of the supersensible essence of the human being. And in the difficulties that our age in particular is experiencing in advancing to a satisfactory realization of this innermost human nature - in these difficulties lies much of what then expresses itself externally in confusion and chaos, as little as people want to admit this even today. Many people, however, think that the question I am talking about should be answered in a completely different way from the one I will give you tonight.

Since I have to discuss this question from the point of view of anthroposophical spiritual science, I will not be able to answer it in the convenient way that is sought by many people today, and which is popular in the broadest circles of humanity. When people today are told about the Mountains of the Moon and how one informs oneself about them through physical instruments and physical measures, they believe that acquiring knowledge about the Mountains of the Moon is a complicated matter. The human being overcomes himself and admits that one cannot penetrate to knowledge of, say, the Moon Mountains or the moons of Jupiter or the like in a completely comfortable way. But when it comes to the supersensible world, when it comes to the spiritual existence of the human being himself, the broadest circles today still behave quite differently. They find it too difficult to speak in the way I will have to speak to you today. Even today the widest circles say: Better than this apparent science is childlike confession or childlike belief in the Bible to enter the supersensible worlds. They insist on that which they find comfortable, on the childlike simplicity of the belief in confession or in the Bible, when it is a matter of the highest thing to which man can aspire on the path of the soul, and they reject that which does not lead man along this path in such a comfortable way. But even today people do not see certain inner connections that exist between this striving for comfortable spiritual paths and between our anti-social instincts and the difficulties of getting out of these anti-social instincts. If people realized the connection between what they have been told and believed from certain quarters: that you can seek the paths to the supersensible through childlike, simple creeds, and if they realized the connection between this assertion and this belief and between what is expressed today in terms of anti-social impulses, then one would certainly learn to think differently about what the widest circles today find to be a 'convenient way into the supersensible worlds'. 'But it is not out of some kind of intellectual quirk that spiritual science shows modern man other ways today, but it shows these ways because it feels it has an obligation to do so in view of the needs and tasks of present-day humanity. If present-day humanity were to recognize itself in its very depths, it would say to itself: With regard to supersensible striving, we can no longer be satisfied with the old ways. This lives today as a longing in many souls, and anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to meet this longing.

As already mentioned, people today do ask more or less clearly or more or less unconsciously about the relationship between soul and body; if they have not already come so far as to deny everything of a soul nature, because doubt has always arisen in response to this question, doubt that has wearied them. But what does the modern person fundamentally know about soul and body? He observes the body in such a way that he applies his senses, his external physical mind, or, for that which he cannot directly learn through the senses and the mind, he resorts to natural science, which, through its investigations, is supposed to tell him what the laws are, what the inner nature of this human physical body is. On the other hand, man inwardly perceives that which he calls thinking, feeling and willing. This becomes an inner experience for him. To this thinking, feeling and willing he also attaches certain inner longings, desires and hopes, he attaches the belief that this inner life, living in thinking, feeling and willing, has not only the temporary significance for the world that the life of the physical body has. But then the question arises for the human being that gives rise to the great doubts: What is the relationship between what I perceive inwardly as soul in me, as thinking, feeling and willing, and what I see outwardly in myself and in others as the outer physical body, the laws and essence of which science seeks to explain to me? And if the human being cannot explain this relationship between the soul and the body to himself, then he may well turn to those who, based on certain scientific foundations, have the opportunity to investigate this relationship more deeply. And lo and behold, today's man, who is so eager to have everything explained to him by scientific authority, must then realize that in this question he can be helped little by the scientists he so seeks. If he takes anything at hand in which the researchers in this field have expressed themselves, he will usually find that they say about this question just as uncertainly as he carries within himself. All kinds of hypotheses and conjectures can be found. But something that seizes the human being in such a way that, if only they can truly take a position on it without prejudice, they might get a sense of the truth, is rarely found today. The task of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is to find this.

But we cannot advance along the same paths by which we arrive at external science to that which I must now speak of as a spiritual science, as a real spiritual science. Imagine someone telling you about the paths of research they have taken in the chemical or physical laboratory, in the clinic, to research external nature. You would usually hear from such a researcher, who can justifiably believe that he has become an expert in his field, that he has gone his research ways with a certain calm, with a certain inner equanimous soul mood. There is not much excitement to be found on today's research paths.

But anyone who wants to tell you about the path he took to his insights into the supersensible human being cannot speak of such calmness, of such an inner, equanimous mood of the soul. If he is to tell you about what he went through to arrive at these insights, he will have to speak of inner struggles, of inner soul-searching, of difficult efforts, of repeatedly standing at the precipice of doubt. He will have to tell you about what he had to overcome in abundance, what he had to go through to arrive at what provides information about the actual supersensible human core of being. For one only really enters upon the path to knowledge of the supersensible human being when one has familiarized oneself with everything I have already indicated: when doubts arise when considering the question of the relationship between body and soul, so that one that can only arise from a certain intellectual modesty – while most people today, in such matters, have not at all intellectual modesty, but on the contrary, terrible intellectual arrogance.

But if one really makes an effort with ordinary thinking, with all the ordinary powers of the soul that one otherwise has in life, to approach these questions about the nature of soul and body, then one gradually realizes that one must be modest, that one cannot approach these questions with ordinary human thinking. And gradually, through inner experience, through inner discovery, one comes to realize that with this ordinary human thinking and feeling, one's approach to the supersensible is comparable to the abilities of a five-year-old child when, for example, it is presented with a volume of lyric poetry. This child cannot do anything with the volume of poetry that corresponds to the essence of this volume of poetry. We must first develop his abilities further, then he can do something with the volume of poetry that corresponds to the essence of this volume of poetry. So we must say to ourselves with regard to the thinking abilities that we have for our ordinary lives, with regard to the powers of knowledge that we have for our ordinary lives: you cannot use them to recognize the actual essence of the world and your own existence; you are initially confronted with this essence of the world and this essence of your own existence in such a way that you can do with it as little as a five-year-old child can with a book of poetry.

Only when one has developed this mood in one's soul, when one has conquered intellectual modesty so that one says to oneself: You must not remain with the way you can think now, feel and will now - only then does one stand at the starting point of the path into the supersensible worlds. For anyone who has something to say about the supersensible worlds must not only speak about something different from the ordinary external sense world, but must speak in a different way. This means, however, that one can only become a spiritual researcher if one first takes into one's own hands the faculties of thinking and cognition that one has for ordinary, everyday life and for ordinary science. Just as a child is educated by others, and its abilities developed by others, so must one take one's own inner soul abilities, first of all one's thinking ability, into one's own hands and develop them further, from the point of view at which thinking comes naturally in life.

In my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” I have described in detail the systematic structure of the thinking process by which man can take his thinking ability into his own hands and develop it further than it has been developed by ordinary life and ordinary science.

This evening, due to the limited time, I will only be able to present the fundamentals of the matter. I will only be able to show you how to further develop this thinking, how to take it into your own hands and how to advance it further and further. The following is a prerequisite for this: If you want to educate yourself about the external physical being of a person, as I said earlier, you should turn to natural science. Now, this natural science is not to be disparaged. The spiritual researcher fully recognizes the great triumphs of natural science in modern times, just as the natural scientist can only recognize them himself. He recognizes this natural science as justified; he is all the better a spiritual researcher the better he is able to appreciate the value and significance of natural science. But precisely for this reason the other side must also be stated: if one asks this natural science, it initially presents one with the limits of knowledge. You are all well aware that it is precisely the level-headed natural scientists who speak of such limits of knowledge. Certain concepts, certain ideas are presented to the person who asks about the nature of things, about power, matter, etc. These concepts change from time to time, but certain limits always remain, beyond which the natural scientist says: You cannot go. The natural scientist is right in his field if he stops at these limits. The spiritual researcher cannot do this. But he must not want to go beyond these limits through mere speculation or mere fantasy.

When the spiritual researcher approaches that which science cannot recognize and where it has driven the boundary posts for knowledge, there the great inner soul struggles begin for him, for the spiritual researcher. The spiritual researcher must fight inwardly with what the natural scientist presents as fixed boundary concepts. And here this struggle becomes a first great experience. He overcomes these limitations in his inner experience by struggling, and by overcoming them, a realization dawns on him with the experiences, which is important, fundamentally important for everything that is to lead to the knowledge of supersensible human nature. By devoting himself to this struggle with the limitations of natural knowledge, he realizes how peculiarly the human being is adapted to life. For the spiritual researcher must ask himself, from his experience, what prevents him from looking into the inner nature of things in a purely scientific way? There he discovers something most remarkable, I might say, something most distressing. If nature were transparent, if it did not set limits for us, then we human beings would not possess a quality in our life between birth and death that we absolutely need for our social existence in this life. If man could see into the inner nature of nature, he would have to do without the soul power of love! Everything we call love from person to person, what we call love and brotherly feelings from person to person, what glows in the soul when we approach another person socially, we could not have if nature did not set limits for our knowledge of nature.

This is a truth that cannot be proven logically. Just as little as one can logically prove that there is a whale or that there is no whale – one can only be convinced by seeing it with one's own eyes – so one cannot prove that one would have to do without love if knowledge of nature had no limits. But as an experience it presents itself to him who really struggles into spiritual knowledge. There you see what secrets our human existence holds. It is such a secret that man must pay for limited knowledge of nature by developing love. And vice versa: he must pay for his ability to love by initially having no unlimited knowledge of nature.

But this also shows us what the one who really wants to penetrate into the spiritual world, to which man himself with his innermost core of being belongs, has to overcome. One of the basic principles for the paths up to the supersensible human being and to the supersensible world in general is that one's ability to love, one's devotion to all beings in the world, must be greater than it is in ordinary life between birth and death, so that one does not lose love when one now tries to shape one's thinking more and more so that it becomes different from the way one thinks in ordinary life. It must be a preparation for the spiritual path of knowledge, to make oneself much, much more capable of love than one has to be for the ordinary social life. One gradually realizes that one actually only gets to know the world in one's full human nature as long as one is in the physical body, through love, through no other method of research.

But if you want to penetrate into the spiritual world, you must at the same time develop your thinking higher than it develops naturally in human nature. This is achieved by systematically applying certain inner soul activities, which in life are otherwise only applied incidentally, by forcing yourself to do so. Today I can only give you a small excerpt of what you will find described in detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” But I can at least hint at what this higher development of human thinking is based on.

You know that when something from outside stimulates us in some way, we become aware of it. We hear a sound and we are interested in what is happening in the direction of that sound. So being interested in something and turning our attention to it are inner soul activities that are usually stimulated in people from the outside world. What is important when entering the spiritual path of knowledge is that we apply such forces as the forces that lead to attention and interest in us, for example, by meditating on an idea for a very, very long time, as they say, by putting our soul completely into this idea. In the ordinary, natural course of life, attention and interest in this idea are lost. But if you deliberately immerse yourself in such an idea with all your soul, and remain in it, so that you maintain from within the attention that is in danger of fading, that you maintain from within the interest when it is in danger of fading, through the length with which you devote yourself to the idea - and if you keep doing this, then you invigorate your thinking; your thinking becomes something quite different from what it used to be. Then one comes indeed to a thinking that is full of inner activity, but in which one must also exert oneself, as one must exert oneself in an external manual labor. One comes to a thinking that relates to ordinary thinking as ordinary thinking relates to the thinking of a five-year-old child, for example, in relation to lyrical poems. But one comes to a kind of thinking of which one says to oneself: if one has achieved it, then one had to exert an inner strength in order to achieve it, which really took the physical, which also cooperates, so that one feels it like a fatigue from hard external work, to which one has devoted oneself for years. If one learns to recognize that one can work at something in one's soul that costs as much effort as chopping wood costs for me, then one comes to grasp the living thinking in one's soul, while ordinary thinking only accompanies external phenomena, external experiences. Think about how you actually think in ordinary life: you do your work in ordinary life, and your thinking runs along dreamily alongside this outer life. Try to make this thinking more strenuous by reading a difficult book, and you will notice that just when thinking wants to be inwardly active, it must tire, like any other activity. But what is developed from within through this activity must be pushed further and further with the thinking. When it is pushed further and further, one notices that a great change is taking place in thinking. Then one learns to recognize something of which one had no idea before: one learns to recognize that one lives in a thinking of which ordinary thinking is only a reflection, an image: one learns to know a thinking that lives inwardly, a thinking that is completely independent of the tool of the brain, of the tool of the body. However grotesque, however paradoxical, however insane it may appear to present-day humanity, in this way, which you will find described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, the human being can come to know very precisely: by thinking, by developing the soul activity of thinking, you live outside the body with your thinking, while ordinary thinking is tied to the instrument of the body, to the nervous system. But one also learns to recognize exactly how little the inner soul being, which one grasps in one's thinking, is bound to the instrument of the brain. For one does not develop this inner soul being in the first place, but one only gets to know it. I am not talking to you about something that is being developed anew today, but about the knowledge of the supersensible human being. One learns to recognize the great error to which ordinary natural science and external popular opinion about thinking succumb, especially in our materialistic age.

Natural scientific thinking says: the brain is the instrument of thinking. But that is an error, just as it would be an error if you were to see wagon tracks or the marks of human footsteps in a muddy country lane and then to reflect – let us assume for the moment – on the forces at work from below, from the earth, that have produced the wagon tracks or the marks of human footsteps. That would, of course, be foolish. You cannot see from the structure of the earth itself how the furrows were formed. You have to realize that a cart has driven there, that people have walked over it with their feet, that this has left an impression. In this way you come to see the error of science with regard to the human soul life when you really get to know thinking that is independent of the body. There you learn that what is in the brain as nerve furrows does not have the forces in the brain itself that produce the soul; rather, you learn that all these furrows are driven in — like furrows in soft earth driven in by carts and footsteps — that these furrows are dug in by soul activity independent of the body. And now you also understand the error that can arise in science. Such traces arise in the brain for everything that is engraved there; you can follow them all; but this did not arise from the body, it is engraved into the body.

But it is not always easy to grasp this active being. In order to get even a brief glimpse into this human thinking, which is independent of the body, one needs what could be called presence of mind, because it does not last long, such a glimpse of the spiritual into our ordinary perception. One can prepare oneself well – you will also find something about this in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' – by developing in everyday life what can be called presence of mind, rapid orientation in situations and the ability to act quickly in a situation. If we develop this quality more and more, we prepare ourselves to see what can appear out of the spiritual, the supersensible world, and what we otherwise do not see because we do not have time to muster the necessary presence of mind while it occurs; because we do not have time to look at it before it is over. But if you really learn to look into the spiritual world in this way, if you learn to recognize what lives in the human being and can be grasped in this way through developed thinking, then you see not only into the ordinary human life of everyday life, but then a completely different perspective arises.

There is one thing that this spiritual knowledge does not have: it is not memorable in the ordinary sense. The one who wants to tell you something from the spiritual world must always create the conditions to see it. He cannot just develop a memory for his earlier spiritual vision. But even if that spiritual insight, I would like to say, passes quickly like a fleeting dream that is soon forgotten, it contains within itself a meaningful memory. And at this point something must be said that will naturally strike the people of the present time as highly peculiar. But it certainly did strike people as peculiar when they were told that there are not just glowing points up there, but countless worlds spread throughout space! Just as men centuries ago were slow to believe it, but became so accustomed to it that today it is a matter of course for them, so what the spiritual researcher presents as his experience through his developed thinking will still seem unusual today, but it will have to be a matter of course for the coming centuries. And one of the tasks of our time will be to develop people's understanding for such an expansion of human knowledge and human perception. In the moment when man has an inwardly living thinking and knows that with this thinking he is independent of the body, he looks back - while he cannot have the ordinary memory in this moment - to the spiritual-soul that he has gone through in a purely spiritual world before he united with the physical human body through birth or conception and thereby descended from a spiritual world into the sensual world. The view expands beyond the life one has been living since birth; life expands into the contemplation of the spiritual world from which we have descended to our physical existence.

This also gives a new meaning to our entire social life. In our social life, we relate to this or that person. We quickly develop an affinity for one person, while with another we do not find ourselves so quickly united in sympathy. The most diverse relationships arise with other people here in this life between birth and death. If, as a spiritual researcher, you learn to recognize life as I have just indicated, then you will find that what attracts you to one person and what more or less alienates you to another person – in short, what arises in your relationships with others – is the result of what we have lived through with other souls in another world before we descended to this physical existence. Everything we experience in the physical world is a reflection of experiences in the spiritual world. In this way, human spiritual endeavor in our time will be able to give rise to insight into the spiritual world from this physical world.

There may still be many people today who cannot relate to such a view. But one can still think about such people. When the first railroad was built in Germany, a council of physicians and other scholars were called together to decide whether or not to build railroads. These learned gentlemen delivered the verdict that railways should not be built because traveling would be harmful to health and only fools would want to travel in them. In any case, a high board wall would have to be erected so that those along whom the railroad passes would not get concussions. Today there are people who, figuratively speaking, believe that one gets a concussion when the spiritual researcher speaks of the insights of the supersensible world. But the development of time will overcome these prejudices as it has overcome other prejudices.

What I have described to you is one way of crossing over from the physical world into the superphysical world. One must struggle with the limitations of knowledge of nature. But one must also come to terms with another limitation if one is to enter the spiritual world and gain insights into the supersensible nature of the human being. Just as one must come to terms with the limitations of knowledge of external nature, one must also come to terms with the limitations of knowledge of one's own being.

A great many people despair of finding satisfaction for their inner soul life in their old religious traditions and turn to so-called mysticism, believing that if they delve deeper and deeper into their souls, their inner soul life, their human nature, will become clear to them. Many people believe that what they truly are as human beings can arise mystically. The spiritual researcher must also learn this limit. He must be able to be a mystic, just as he must develop knowledge of nature. But he must not stop with mysticism, just as he must not stop with knowledge of nature. He must learn that mere mysticism leads to nothing but illusions about the supersensible human being, but not to a real knowledge of this supersensible human being. A true spiritual researcher is truly not an illusionist. He does not succumb to any illusions about what he has to recognize as reality. Therefore, unlike the ordinary mystic, he does not set out to conjure up all kinds of fantasies from within himself. No, there he knows one thing again: by struggling with his own inner being, by going through his own personal struggle, he knows that what mystics find is basically nothing other than what has made an impression on their souls since birth. They may have only grasped it dimly, it may not have come to their perception quite clearly, but it has remained in their memory.

Scientific research has already made some very interesting observations in this regard. I will briefly share one with you that is recorded in scientific literature, but which could be multiplied a hundredfold, a thousandfold. A natural scientist passes a bookstore window. His eye falls on a book. And as he looks at the title of the book, he has to laugh. Just imagine, a naturalist has to laugh when he sees a serious book title! He cannot explain to himself why he has to laugh. Now he closes his eyes because he thinks he will be able to figure it out more quickly if he is not distracted by the external impression. By closing his eyes, he hears in the distance what he had not heard before, as long as he was distracted: a barrel organ. And by continuing his investigation, he realizes that the organ is playing a melody to which he once danced. At the time, it made no strong impression on him; he was more interested in the dancer, or even in the dance steps. The impression of the melody itself was weak at the time, but still strong enough to resurface in later life when the researcher hears the same melody from the organ!

The spiritual researcher is very familiar with such things and their essence, for he has no illusions. He knows that when some mystic speaks of experiencing the divine human within himself, of experiencing something that brings him together with his eternal self, then it is the 'sounds of the barrel organ': he has once taken something in, that has transformed itself – for such things transform themselves – that rises as reminiscence. In the path of ordinary mysticism you find nothing but what you have once absorbed, and you can give yourself up to the most terrible illusions by wanting to be a mere mystic.

It is precisely this limitation that the spiritual researcher must overcome. Through experience one comes to know that what cannot be proved “logically” can be attained by the spiritual researcher through direct experience: one learns to recognize that one may not learn to know oneself by looking inwardly. For if one could see through oneself inwardly, one would in turn lack a human soul power that one must have for ordinary life if one could see through oneself inwardly. If one could see through oneself inwardly, one would not have the power of memory in ordinary life. And that this power of memory, the power of memory, is healthy, depends on whether we are healthy at all in our soul life. If our memory, our recollection, is disturbed, the ego is disturbed, a terrible mental illness occurs. So that we have to say: just as man, in order to have love, must have limits in his knowledge of nature, so too, in order to have memory, he must be placed in the impossibility of coming to the higher human being through mere inner contemplation.

But one can also ensure that this ability to remember is more firmly rooted in human nature than in ordinary life, which can also be done through exercises such as those I have described in the book mentioned.

In the same way that you can move towards consciously elevating your thinking, as I have described, you can also move towards conscious self-discipline by always noticing: You are doing this or that badly, you have to learn from life. In this way, you can take your will development into your own hands, just as you took your thought development into your own hands. When you take your will development into your own hands, something develops that, so to speak, illuminates the otherwise dark will in which you find yourself in ordinary life: you feel everything that you feel as will, interspersed with thoughts. In a sense, you are the spectator of your own will and action. When one comes to be the observer of one's own will and actions in such a tangible, spiritual and soul-like way, then what one receives as a higher willpower coincides with what developed earlier as thought activity. And now another faculty comes into play: one now beholds in one's own human nature something that appears so independent of all physical activity that one knows: What you carry within you, you carry out through death into the spiritual world. Through the culture of the will, one comes to know the spiritual life that a person lives after death, just as one comes to know, through the culture of thought, the spiritual life that a person has experienced before birth or conception. As you can see, spiritual research cannot speak in the usual way about the supersensible human being, but must relate how one experiences being able to look at the life of a person before and after death.

By penetrating into the world of one's own human existence in this way, one encounters social life in a new form. One observes how one experiences this or that together with other people, how one enters into relationships with other people, how one becomes friends with other people or is connected or disconnected again through other circumstances in the world. One learns to recognize that everything that takes place in the physical-sensual world is only the beginning of something that develops further as we pass through the gate of death. The relationships of the soul that are formed here between human and human find their continuation when the human being passes through the gate of death. The life that joins death becomes a very concrete reality in that we know that we are connected to those people here through our relationships in the sensual life, even beyond death.

These are things that still seem strange to people today, but they must be mastered by the tasks of our time. If they are, then something quite different will come to the fore. Then man will recognize in a completely different light what he today calls his own human development, what he today calls history. If one develops abilities such as those of which I have spoken, then one also looks differently into the historical of humanity than the fable convenue indicates, which is called history today and which must become something completely different in the future. I will give you an example at the end of my discussion to show you how the human being of the future must penetrate into the historical development of humanity itself.

We do not usually notice it, but at a certain historical point in recent times, a major turning point occurred in the development of humanity. That was in the middle of the 15th century. We usually say that nature does not make any leaps. It is a saying that is generally believed, although it is false. Nature is constantly making leaps. Consider the development of a plant, how a flower with stamens and pistils develops from a leaf, and finally the fruit! In the same way, historical life also makes leaps. And such a leap occurred in the middle of the 15th century, which we only fail to recognize because we look at history so superficially. The expanded human gaze, which overcomes, as it overcomes the experiences between birth and death, also that which is only presented in external history, in external facts, and it looks into the spirit of historical activity. And so this view shows that we have been living since the middle of the 15th century in the age that will last for a long time, which replaced another age that began in the 8th century BC and lasted until the middle of the 15th century. century. This era, from the 8th century BC to the 15th century AD, encompasses everything that was the magnificent Greek culture, what was Roman culture, and the after-effects of Greek and Roman civilization. And since the middle of the 15th century, we have, as I will characterize it in a moment, our modern culture with modern humanity.

How do these two cultures differ? They differ in something that people in the present time do not yet want to see and acknowledge. Before the 15th century, going back to the 8th century BC, man was capable of development in a completely different way than today. I can make this clear to you in the following way. Think about what the human being is like in the years before he changes his teeth around the seventh year, and how that marks a turning point in his life! You can read more about this in the small booklet on 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science'. You will see what it actually means for the more precise observer of human nature, what the child goes through with the change of teeth. There is a parallelism between the outer development of the body and the inner development of the soul. Then, in turn, there is a next point of development at the time of sexual maturity, in the fourteenth or fifteenth year. Then the parallelism between body and soul becomes less clear, but for present humanity it continues until about the twenty-seventh year. In the twenty-seventh year, one ceases to feel this connection between spiritual-soul development and bodily development strongly. This remarkable fact that the human being completes his physical development at the age of twenty-seven has only emerged since the middle of the 15th century. It was different in the previous period. What can be recognized here through spiritual research is an infinitely significant human developmental truth. In Greek and Roman times, human beings were at such a stage of development that until the age of thirty-three or thirty-five, there was a parallelism between their physical and spiritual-soul development. The Greeks developed qualities such as these, although not to the same extent, until well into their thirties, as evidenced by the change of teeth and sexual maturity. This is what constituted the remarkable harmony of soul and body in the Greeks. The progression that human history shows is that we have less and less of the years of youth, less and less of what emancipated us from the physical and bodily in our earlier years. But this also requires a completely different position of the soul-spiritual to the world being in the human being. In the long period from the 8th century BC to the 15th century AD, human beings developed more of an instinctive mind and an instinctive emotional life. Everything that lives in this period is permeated by this instinctive life of mind and soul. But since the middle of the 15th century, man has developed a more conscious mental and emotional life and with it the demand to place himself on the level of the free personality. This demand of human nature to place itself on the level of the free personality is only developing in history since the middle of the 15th century.

This also explains how the great events in human development fall differently depending on whether they occur in one or the other epoch. In the epoch that preceded our own, in which man remained capable of physical development well into his thirties, the greatest event in the development of the earth occurred in the first third of this epoch: the event that actually gives the development of the earth its true meaning, the event of the Mystery of Golgotha, the founding of Christianity. In the first third of the Greco-Latin era, what is like the central event of the whole human development on earth took place. The way it took place in the human race at that time, it could only be grasped naively by humanity in the age in which instinctive powers of mind and instinctive powers of the soul were present. It was only through these instinctive powers that people were able to relate to the great event in the right way during that period, because they did not yet behave consciously, but naively. They said to themselves: This is not just something that is done by human beings, something superhuman has broken into earthly development. The Christ, the superhuman being, has united with the body of Jesus of Nazareth. What happened at Golgotha is, in its physical facts, only the outer expression of something supersensible that has taken place in the development of the earth.

In those days, therefore, it could be grasped instinctively. This has changed since the middle of the 15th century. Since the middle of the 15th century, the instinctive mind, the instinctive power of mind, has been transformed into conscious mind, into conscious powers of mind. This made it possible to develop natural science to the high level it has reached, but also to develop industry, and to develop the materialism of the age, which had to be there as an adjunct to place the free personality at the top. But this materialism must be transcended by seeking the path to the spiritual world in a new way, as I have described it today. The age became materialistic in the epoch in which the consciousness soul of man developed from the earlier instinctive soul. Then, in addition to external materialism, the materialism of theology also emerged. Consider how, in wide circles, even theology, the religious view, has been grasped by materialism; how man of the age of consciousness became incapable of recognizing the supersensible in the event of Golgotha, how he came more and more to drag it down into the sensual; how he finally became proud of it, how even numerous theologians became proud of no longer seeing in the Christ the supersensible entity that descended to earth in the body of a human being, but only seeing the “simple man from Nazareth,” who is indeed somewhat greater than other people, but is nevertheless merely a human being. That in the Mystery of Golgotha, in the death and resurrection of Christ, the greatest fact in the evolution of the world and of humanity is presented to us, has not yet dawned upon the materialistic age. Religion itself has become materialized. Simple religious belief will not be able to stop this materialization of religion. It can only be stopped by the conscious knowledge of the spirit, of which I have spoken today. It will in turn arise from the realization that in Jesus of Nazareth there lived a supermundane, a supersensible being, which since that time has united itself with the evolution of mankind. The Mystery of Golgotha will be placed in the sphere of human contemplation through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science; but now it will be placed in such a way that it will be freed from the narrow-mindedness of the individual denominations.

What will develop as the spiritual outlook of the supersensible human being, as I have described it today, will make it possible for it to live in every human being across the whole earth, without distinction of race or nationality. From there, however, the path to the mystery of Golgotha will also be found, and all people across the whole earth will understand this Christ event, learn to comprehend it. In our time people enthuse about the so-called League of Nations; one enthuses about this League of Nations in the utopian way in which it originated in the abstract thinking of Woodrow Wilson. It will not be able to arise in this way. It needs a foundation of reality, and this must proceed from the innermost part of the human soul. That is the task of the present time. Only in this ability of the soul, which leads to the path of knowledge of the supersensible human being and unites people of the whole earth, only through such knowledge, which can look at the Christ event as a supersensible event, only in such an impulse, which works across nations, which works across all borders through nations, lies the real power for a future true League of Nations across the earth. In this way, Christianity must strike its new roots into human culture.

This shows you the other side to what I was allowed to say here in the previous lecture. This shows you the side that corresponds to the human inner soul life, which in turn will ignite social instincts in the human being when it fills him. To receive this spiritual science, one does not need to believe in authority as one does to receive the other scientific knowledge that is conveyed, say, from the observatory about astronomy, from medicine about the nature of the physical human being. That must be accepted on authority if one does not want to become an astronomer or a physiologist and so on oneself. But you do not have to believe what the spiritual researcher tells you on authority. You do not have to be a spiritual researcher yourself, just as you do not have to be a painter to find the beauty in a picture. You can absorb spiritual science through your common sense without being a spiritual researcher yourself, if you just sweep away the prejudices that have developed from today's materialism. Because everything in spiritual science is stored in the depths of the human soul, it can be understood without belief in authority. And this understanding, this trust in the revelations of spiritual science, is something that must be lived into the tasks of our age. Then this age will experience a renewal. Then this age will be given the ferment for what, as an external institution of a new structure, will have to play a corresponding role.

For what do we see when we really try to understand the nature of the present time? I would say: We see two paths, one on the left and one on the right. One of these offers us the possibility of stopping at the views that mere natural science has brought, and from this view, which natural science has brought, to now also proceed to social views; thus to start from the belief that one can understand social life with the same faculty of thought with which one understands nature. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels did that, and so do Lenin and Trotsky. That is why they arrive at their conclusions. People today do not yet realize that natural science stands on one side, and that its ultimate consequences find expression in social chaos and social decline. The terrible faith that now seeks to destroy all truly human culture in Eastern Europe, this terrible faith of Lenin and Trotsky, arises from the other faith, that the paths of scientific knowledge must also be followed in social life. What has happened under the influence of this newer materialistic-scientific faith? Our entire spiritual life has been mechanized. But because our spiritual life no longer rises to thoughts about the supersensible human being, because it mechanizes itself on the external mechanistic view of nature, at the same time the souls are vegetarianized, made plant-like, sleepy. Thus we see that in addition to the mechanized mind, we have a vegetarianized soul in modern cultural life. But if the soul is not warmed through by the spirit, if the spirit is not suffused with supersensible knowledge, then animal qualities develop in the body. Today these animal qualities live in anti-social instincts and want to become the executioners of culture in Eastern Europe. Then, under the guise of wanting to socialize, the most anti-social thing develops; then the bodily life becomes animalized alongside the mechanized spirit and the vegetated soul. The wildest instincts and drives arise as historical demands. That is the path that leads left.

The other way, the right way, is to enter into the view of the supersensible human being, the supersensible world, as presented in today's message. This view also sees the development of the human being in the supersensible light, and penetrates to the truly free spirit.

In my book “The Philosophy of Freedom”, I wanted to describe freedom as the basis for human progress, and to show how man can experience his true inner freedom by grasping the spiritual life. Only the spirit that permeates man can truly become free. The spirit that only permeates nature and seeks to shape all social life according to the pattern of modern natural science becomes mechanistically unfree. And the soul, permeated only by this spirit, sleeps like the plant. The soul that is warmed through by the true, pulsating will of spiritual knowledge of supersensible human nature steps forward in social life. It learns to recognize the supersensible human being in the other person. It learns to see the divine in the archetype in every person. It learns social feeling towards every person. It learns how, with regard to this innermost soul, all people here on earth are equal. And in this soul, warmed by the spirit, equality can develop in the other way on the right. And when the bodies are imbued and spiritualized by the supersensible consciousness, when they are warmed through, when they are ennobled by what the soul absorbs, by being awakened by the spirit, not remaining vegetated, then the bodies will not become animalized either; then the bodies become such that they develop what, in the broadest sense, can be called genuine love. Then, then the human being knows that he enters into his earthly body as a supersensible being, that he enters into this body to develop love in this body, to develop love towards the spirit. Then he knows that there must be brotherhood in the earthly body, otherwise the individual cannot be a whole, a full human being in unbrotherly humanity.

Thus the continuation of the old way leads us to the mechanization of the spirit, to the vegetarianization of the soul, to the animalization of the body. The path that is to be shown by spiritual science leads us to the true social virtues, but to the social virtues that are permeated by the spirit and warmed by the soul; that are carried out by the ennobled human body.

Thus spiritual knowledge of the supersensible human being leads us to found the future on a beautiful new building on earth: freedom in spiritual life. The spiritualized human being will be a free human being. Equality in the soul life warmed by the spirit: the soul that takes in the spirit will perceive and treat the other soul that it encounters in social life as truly equal, as if in a great secret. And the ennobled body, the body ennobled by spirit and soul, will become the vehicle of truest, most genuine human love, of true brotherhood. Thus the social order of man in freedom, equality and brotherhood will be able to take place through the correct understanding of body, soul and spirit.

Spiritual science that wants to live into the modern cultural current does not want to be something new and precisely in this way differs from the many world views and other schools of thought that come forward and believe that they can prove their right to exist by claiming to bring something new to this or that question of spiritual life. In contrast to this, the subject that is called spiritual science should emphasize that the sources of its knowledge and its life have been present in the same way at all times when people have thought and striven for the highest questions and riddles of existence. I have often been able to emphasize this, also in this city, when I had the honor of speaking in previous lectures.

It must now be particularly appealing to consider not only the various religious beliefs and world views that have emerged in the development of humanity from this point of view, but also to look at personalities who are close to us from this perspective. For if something is to be true in spiritual science, then at least a kernel of this truth must be found in all those who have honestly and energetically striven for knowledge and for a dignified human existence.

Now when spiritual science is discussed today, the most diverse judgments are asserted from one side or the other, and those who have not penetrated deeper into the corresponding field, who have gained a superficial knowledge from these or those lectures or pamphlets, will, depending on his point of view, regard this spiritual science as the fantasy or reverie of a few unworldly people who have strange ideas about life and its foundations. It must be fully admitted that, if one does not look more closely, such a judgment may seem understandable, because although today we are not talking about a specific topic, it should be pointed out that some of the main insights of this spiritual science are based on a special theme. And as soon as these are mentioned and characterized, our contemporaries may well feel, in all honesty, “What curious stuff is this?”

On the whole, spiritual science, if taken seriously, is based on the premise that what surrounds us in the sensual world, what we can perceive with our senses, what we can grasp with the mind that is bound to our senses, is not the whole world, but that behind everything that is sensual lies a spiritual world. And this spiritual world is not in an indefinite hereafter, but is always around us, just as the phenomena of color and light are also around the blind. But in order for us to know about something that is around us, we need to have an organ to perceive it. And just as the blind man cannot see color and light, so too, as a rule, people in our age with normal abilities cannot perceive the spiritual facts and beings that are around us. But when we have the good fortune to operate on a blind person, then there comes for him the moment of the awakening of the eye, and what was not there for him, light and colors, now floods into his inner being. From the moment of his operation, this is a perceptible world for him. In the spiritual realm, there is a higher awakening, the awakening through which a person becomes initiated into the spiritual world. To speak with Goethe, there are spiritual eyes and ears, but as a rule, human souls are not ready to use them. But when we apply the means and methods by which these powers come into existence, then something happens in us on a higher plane, as when a blind person is operated on and is then flooded with the world of colors and light. When a person's eyes and ears are opened, he becomes awakened. A new world is around him, a world that was always there, but which he can only perceive from the moment of awakening. But then, when a person is ready, he learns to make various insights his own, insights that brighten life, insights that can give us strength and security for our work, that enable us to see into the essence of human destiny and the secrets of fate.

And only one of these insights will be discussed here, one of those insights that, if not crazy, must often seem strange and dreamy to today's people. It is an insight that is nothing more than the revival of an ancient process of knowledge, its continuation in a higher realm, a truth that was only recently attained for a lower realm. In general, humanity has a short memory for great events in the spiritual world, and that is why so few people today remember that in the 17th century not only laymen but even scholars believed that lower animals, even worms and fish, would develop from river mud. It was the great naturalist Francesco Redi who first pointed out that no earthworm or fish grows out of dead river mud unless an earthworm or fish germ is present in it beforehand. He stated that life can only come from life, and from this it can be seen that it is only an inaccurate way of looking at things to believe that a fish or worm can grow out of lifeless river mud. A closer examination shows that we have to go back to the living germ, and that this living germ can only draw from its environment the forces that are there to bring to the greatest development what is alive in the germ.

What Redi said, that living things develop only from living things, is taken for granted by science today. When Redi uttered these words, he only just escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. Such is the way of the development of humanity. First, a truth must be so hard won that those who first express it are branded as heretics. Then it becomes a matter of course, the common property of humanity. What Redi did for natural science should be done for the spirit through spiritual science today, by transferring the sentence that Redi pronounced for natural science from the knowledge of the awakened spiritual eye and spiritual ear to the soul realm. And there this sentence means: The spiritual and soul can only arise from the spiritual and soul. This means that it is an inaccurate way of looking at it when we see a human being come into existence, to believe that everything that comes into life comes only from the father and mother and the ancestors. Just as we have to go back from the developing earthworm to the living earthworm germ, so we have to go back from the human being, who develops from the germ into a specific being, to an earlier spiritual existence, and we have to realize that this being, which comes into existence through birth, draws from its bodily ancestors only the strength for its development, just as the earthworm germ draws strength from its inanimate surroundings. And in a corresponding extension, this sentence: Living things can only come from living things, leads to the other sentence: The present life, which comes into existence through birth, not only leads back to physical ancestors, but through the centuries back to an earlier spiritual-soul. And if you delve deeper into it, you will see that it is scientifically shown that there is not just one, but repeated lives on earth, that what is in us now between birth and death is the repetition of a spiritual soul that was already there in earlier stages of existence, and that our present life is in turn the starting point for subsequent lives. Spiritual-soul-like comes from spiritual-soul-like, goes back to spiritual-soul-like, which was there before birth, which descends from the spiritual world and lives in physical embodiments. We now see something completely different when, for example, we as educators are confronted with a child who gradually develops his powers. At birth we see something indeterminate on his face, how something unfolds from within, ever more distinctly and distinctly, which does not come from heredity but from previous lives. We see how this center of the spiritual soul unfolds more and more from birth through talents.

Today, spiritual science has something to say about repeated lives on earth. Today it may be a mere reverie, as what Francesco Redi said in the 17th century was considered a mere reverie. But what is considered a mere reverie today will become a matter of course in the not too distant future, and the sentence: spiritual-mental comes from spiritual-mental, will become common knowledge for humanity.

Today, heretics are no longer treated as they were in the past. They are no longer burned at the stake, but they are considered fools and dreamers who speak out of random fantasy. They are ridiculed, and those in the know sit in the high chair of science and say that this is not compatible with real science, not knowing that it is true, genuine science that demands this truth. And now we can cite a hundred and a hundred such truths that would show us how spiritual science can illuminate life by showing that there is an immortal essence in man that passes through death into the spiritual world and, when it has fulfilled its destiny there, returns to physical existence to gain new experiences, which it then carries up through death into the spiritual worlds. We would see how the ties that are woven from person to person, from soul to soul in all areas of life, those traits of the heart that go from soul to soul and cannot otherwise be explained, can be explained by the fact that they were formed in previous life circumstances. And just as the spiritual bonds we weave today do not cease when death draws over existence, but just as what passes from soul to soul as bonds of life is immortal like the human soul itself, how it lives on through the spiritual world and will revive again in other, future earthly conditions and new embodiments. And it is only a matter of development that people will also remember their earlier experiences on earth, what they have gone through spiritually and soul-wise in earlier lives and states of existence.

Such truths will become established in human life in the not too distant future as necessary things, and people will gain strength and hope and confidence from such conditions. Today we can only see that a few individuals in the world are drawn by their healthy sense of truth to what spiritual researchers have to proclaim from their experiences in the spiritual world. But spiritual-scientific knowledge will become the common property of mankind and will be assimilated by those who earnestly seek the truth. And those who have trodden the paths of earnest seekers after truth have always, in all that they have offered to mankind, developed the great wisdom and knowledge that spiritual science brings again today.

An example should arise before our soul in a personality that is close to our modern life: the example of Goethe, and with him again that which occupied him as his most comprehensive and greatest work throughout his life: his “Faust”.

If we approach Goethe and try to illuminate his striving with what spiritual science can give, we can actually start quite early on. One can say that from his entire disposition, one recognizes in Goethe how there was soul and spirit in him. Everything that pushes one to seek a spiritual element behind the phenomena of the sensual world was an early predisposition in him. There we see the seven-year-old Goethe, who could have absorbed ordinary ideas from his surroundings, as a boy can absorb them, for his first soul perception. That does not satisfy him; he recounts it himself in 'Poetry and Truth'. There we see how the seven-year-old boy begins something quite remarkable to express his yearning for the divine. He takes a music stand from his father's collection and makes an altar out of it, placing all kinds of minerals and plants and other products of nature on it, from which the spirit of nature speaks. The boy's soul builds an altar, puts a little incense on it, takes a burning glass, waits for the morning sun to rise, collects the first rays of the rising sun with the burning glass, lets them fall on the little incense, so that the smoke rises. And in his later years, Goethe remembers how, as a boy, he wanted to send his pious feelings up to the great god of nature, who speaks through minerals and plants, who sends us his fire in the rays of the sun. This grows with Goethe. We see how, at a more mature stage – but still out of a yearning soul, as it lives in Goethe – after he comes to Weimar and is appointed by the duke as his advisor, how this feeling for the spirit that speaks through all of nature is expressed in the beautiful prose hymn. There he says: “Nature, we are surrounded and embraced by it, unable to step out of it and unable to get deeper into it. Unwarned and uninvited, it takes us into the cycle of its dance and carries on with us until we are tired and fall into its arms. We have not done what we do, she has done everything; she is constantly thinking and pondering, looking at the world with a thousand eyes.” And again later, in the beautiful book about Winckelmann, ‘Antiquities’: ”When man's healthy nature works as a whole, when he feels in the world as in a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole, when the harmony of pleasure gives him pure, free delight: then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult in reaching its goal and admire the summit of its own becoming and being. Thus Goethe felt, like everything that lives and moves outside in nature, a resurrection celebrating from the human soul, and like a higher nature, a spiritual nature is brought forth from the spirit and soul of man. But it took Goethe a long time to fully grasp the spiritual realization of nature. And there is no clearer or more obvious example of how Goethe was a lifelong seeker who never rested or paused, always striving to reshape his knowledge and reach higher levels, than his life's poem, “Faust.”

From his earliest youth, he had begun to put everything that filled his yearning and intuitive soul into his poem; and as an old man in his later years, shortly before his death, he completed this poem, on which he had worked for over fifty years and into which he had put the best of his life. The second part was sealed at his death, like the great testament he had to give to humanity. It is a momentous document. We can only understand this document if we follow Goethe a little, as he himself sought to struggle towards knowledge.

For example, there is the student Goethe at the University of Leipzig. He is supposed to become a lawyer, but that is of secondary concern to him. Even then, the young student was possessed by an invincible urge to fathom the secrets of the world, to seek the spiritual. He therefore immerses himself in everything Leipzig has to offer in the way of knowledge about nature. He seeks to eavesdrop on what nature has to say to us in its phenomena, to eavesdrop on the world's riddles of existence. But Goethe needed, in order to rework what natural science could offer him, to re-melt it in his soul to that all-powerful urge of his inner being, which does not seek abstract knowledge but warm hearted a great experience, an experience that really leads the human being to that knowledge which is the gate toward which we intuitively look, the gate that closes for today's normal human being, the invisible, the supersensible: the gate of death. At the end of his student days in Leipzig, he experienced death. A serious illness had prostrated him, brought him close to death. For hours and days he had to face the fact that at any moment he could pass through that mysterious portal. And the mysterious, impetuous urge to understand demanded the utmost seriousness in the pursuit of knowledge. With this newly formed attitude of knowledge, Goethe returned to his native city of Frankfurt. There he found a circle of people, headed by a woman of great and profound talent: Susanne von Klettenberg. Goethe created a wonderful monument to her in his “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul”. He showed how this personality, to whose spiritual world he had such close access at the time, contained something that can only be described as a soul. In Susanne von Klettenberg, there lived a soul that sought to grasp the divine within itself in order to find, through the divine within itself, the spiritual that lives through the world. Goethe was introduced at that time by the circle to which this lady belonged, to studies that, if you, as a truly modern person, let them have an effect on you today, seem crazy. Goethe immersed himself in medieval writings. Those who pick them up today cannot do anything with them. When you see the strange signs in them, you ask yourself: what is the point of this in the face of science's modern quest for truth? — There was a book called “Aurea catena Homeri”, “The Golden Chain of Homer”. When you open it, you find a strange symbolic illustration: a dragon at the top in a semicircle, a dragon full of life, bordering on another dragon, a withering dragon dying within itself. All kinds of signs are linked to it: symbolic keys, two interlocking triangles and the planetary signs. To our contemporaries this is fantasy, to today's science it is fantasy, because one does not know what to do with these signs. Goethe senses in his intuition that they express something, that one can do something with them when one looks at them. They do not immediately express something that can be found here or there in the world. But if you let these signs take effect on you, by memorizing them so that you become deaf and blind to your physical surroundings, only letting these signs take effect on you, then you experience something very peculiar, then you experience that the soul within itself senses something that was dormant before, like a spiritual eye that opens. And if you have enough stamina, you will grasp what you can call meditation, concentration, which will develop your soul to such an extent that you will actually undergo something like an operation of the spiritual eye, through which a new world will open up. At that time, a new world could not yet be opened up for Goethe; he was not yet that far. But what came to life in his soul was the inkling that there are keys to this spiritual world, that one can penetrate into this spiritual world. One must visualize this mood; the vivid sensation, the vivid feeling: something is being stirred in me, something is coming to life; there must be something that leads into the spiritual world. But at the same time he senses: he cannot yet enter it. If Goethe had ever been identical with Faust in his life, we would say: Goethe was in the same situation in which Faust appears at the beginning of the first part, when Faust, after having studied the most diverse fields of human science, opens books in which there are such signs and feels surrounded by a spiritual world, but cannot enter into the spiritual world. Goethe never felt identical with Faust. Faust was a part of him, but he outgrew what was only a part of himself. And so, what went beyond Faust in Goethe grew because he, fearing no discomfort, always strove further and further, saying to himself: “One does not get behind the secrets of existence in a flash , not by incantations and formulas, but by patiently and energetically penetrating, step by step, in a truly spiritual and soulful way, whatever comes our way in the physical world. — It is easy to say: “What is higher knowledge must be absorbed by the soul.” This higher knowledge must penetrate the soul, but it only takes on its true form when we strive with patience and perseverance to get to know the real phenomena of the physical world step by step and then to seek the spiritual behind these phenomena of the physical world. But with what Goethe took with him from his time in Frankfurt, he was able to summarize everything else, he was able to see everything in a different light.

Goethe came from Frankfurt to this city, Strasbourg. We could cite many things that led him higher here. But what is particularly characteristic is how that which has such great significance in this city came before his soul: the cathedral, the minster. At that time, the idea of this wonderful building presented itself before Goethe's soul, and he understood why every single line is as it is. He saw with spiritual vision, with the vision gained through his immersion in Frankfurt, every triangle, every single angle of this significant building as belonging to the whole, and in his soul the great idea of the master builder celebrated a resurrection, and Goethe believed he recognized what had flowed into this building as a thought, as an idea. And so we could cite many instances of what had entered this soul as an inner vision and what it had taken up from external world processes entering into a marriage in Goethe's soul. Therefore it is not surprising that when he later came to Weimar, he took up natural science from a new angle, botany, zoology, bone theory and so on, in order to consider everything like letters that together make up the book of nature, leading into the secrets of existence. This is how his studies of plant development and the animal world came about, which he later continued as a student, only that he sought the spirit behind the sensual phenomena of existence everywhere. Thus we see how, during his Italian journey, he regarded art on the one hand and natural objects on the other, and how he observed the world of plants in order to recognize the spirit that reigns in them. The words he wrote to his friends, while he was engaged in this kind of spiritual natural science, are great and beautiful. He said: Oh, here everything presents itself to me in a new way; I would like to travel to India to look at what has already been discovered in my own way. — That is to say, as his development demanded, according to the indications we were able to give. And so we see how he also looks at the works of art that come to him. He writes in a letter: “This much is certain: the ancient artists had just as great a knowledge of nature and an equally sure concept of what can be imagined and how it must be imagined as Homer. Unfortunately, the number of works of art in the first class is all too small. But if one also sees these, one has nothing to wish for but to recognize them correctly and then to go there in peace. These lofty works of art are at the same time the highest works of nature, produced by man according to true and natural laws. All that is arbitrary and imaginary collapses; there is necessity, there is God.” Just as the great spirit of nature spoke to the seven-year-old boy from the altar he had erected, so the great spirit of the existence of the spiritual world spoke to him from these works of art, which he regarded as a unity. Thus Goethe gradually arrived at the contemplation of the individual in energetic, devoted work. Then he could calmly await the moment when a real insight into the spiritual world leaped out of his observations, a true spiritual science, which then confronts us, artistically transformed and reworked, in his “Faust”.

Thus the first sections of Faust that were written have all the atmosphere of a man who senses the secrets of existence but is unable to penetrate these secrets. We see how Faust allows the signs to take effect that surround him with spiritual reality, but we also see how he is not yet mature enough to really feel this spiritual reality. These are the sentences where Faust, as the Nostradamus aura, allows the signs of the macrocosm and the earth spirit to take effect on him, where the spirit of the earth appears before him. Faust characterizes the earth spirit in wonderfully beautiful words. We see how he senses that what the planet Earth is, is not simply the physical sphere that natural science regards it as, but rather, just as the body contains a soul, so the Earth body contains a spirit.

In the tides of life, in the storm of action,
I surge up and down,
I weave to and fro!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
So I create at the whirling loom of time
And work the living garment of divinity.

That is what lives in the earth as the spirit of the earth, just as our spirit lives in us. But Goethe characterizes Faust as not yet mature, his spirit as still unfinished. He must turn away from the terrible sign like a timid worm curled up. The earth spirit answers him: “You resemble the spirit you comprehend, not me.” In Goethe's soul there lived the realization, even if at first only a presentiment, that we cannot declare ourselves satisfied at any stage, but must strive from each stage to higher and higher stages, that we cannot say at any stage that we have achieved something, but must always strive higher from each stage. Goethe was led into these secrets by his diligent studies from phenomenon to phenomenon. And now we see him grow.

The same spirit that he first summoned, and of whom he could only say, “Terrible face!” is addressed by Goethe through Faust, after Goethe himself had reached a higher level after his trip to Italy, after his journey, which I have characterized as one in which he wanted to permeate all of nature and art with his vision. Now Faust is attuned to the same spirit that Goethe himself was attuned to. Now Faust stands before the same spirit, which he thus addresses:

Eminent Spirit, thou gavest me, gave me everything,
Why I asked. Thou didst not in vain
Turn thy face to me in fire.
Gavest me the glorious Nature's kingdom,
Strength to feel it, to enjoy it. Not
You only allow cold, amazed visitors,
Grant me into their deep chests
To look as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
Before me, and teach me my brothers
In the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm roars and creaks in the forest,
The giant spruce topples, brushing neighboring branches
And squashing neighboring trunks,
And the hill thunders hollowly hollow;
Then you lead me to the secure cave,
Then you show me myself, and my own breast,
Secret, deep wonders open up.
And when the pure moon rises before my gaze,
Soothingly across: silver figures of primeval times,
and ease the strict desire of contemplation.

There Goethe has arrived, and with him Faust, to the heights, no longer turning away from the spirit that he had wanted to reach by leaping. Now the spirit presents itself as such that he no longer needs to turn away from it. Now he recognizes it in all living things, in all realms of nature: in forest and water, in the silent bush, in the giant spruce, in storm and thunder. And not only there. After it has appeared to him in the great outdoors, he also recognizes it in his own heart: its secret, deep wonders open up.

This is a step forward in Goethe's knowledge of the spirit, and Goethe did not rest on his laurels. We then see how, spurred on by Schiller, he sought to deepen his knowledge, particularly in the 1890s. This knowledge enabled him to go beyond the vague characterization of spiritual consciousness that a spirit lives in everything. He succeeded in grasping this spirit in a concrete way. But Goethe needed much preparation before he was able to depict the life of the human spirit in the sense that spiritual and psychological things can only come from spiritual and psychological things. However, the fact that Goethe never failed to attempt to get deeper is shown by some of the works he created before the second part of Faust was completed. The second part of Faust shows the heights to which he has risen. Some have already turned away from him when they got to know the introspective Goethe in Pandora. Even today we hear people say: the first part of Faust is full of life, it breathes direct naturalness, but the second part is a product of Goethe's old age, full of symbols and contrivances. Such people have no idea what is in it, what infinite wisdom is in this second part of “Faust”, which only the Goethe of his rich life could have produced in his old age, leaving it as a testament. Therefore, we also understand when Goethe writes the lines about some works that already breathe the spirit of “Faust”, and we know that he presents Faust as a struggling soul, a soul that has been overtaken by something new. We recognize it in the anger he poured out on those who called “Faust” an inferior work of old age. He says of them:

They praise Faust,
And what else
In my writings roars
In their favor;

The old Mick and Mack,
That pleases them very much;
They think the riffraff,
It would no longer be!

Goethe once put into words his feelings towards those who believe that only what Goethe achieved in his younger years has validity, who do not want to ascend to what he achieved in his more mature years.

After Goethe has introduced Faust into the life that directly surrounds us, and has allowed him to experience that wonderful tragedy of Gretchen, he leads him out into the world that is outwardly the great world, first of all into the world that is outwardly the great world: the world of the imperial court. There Goethe now wants to show that Faust should now really penetrate spiritually into the secrets of this world. But then Faust should be introduced to the real spiritual world, to the supersensible world.

Right at the beginning of the second part, we see how Goethe has Faust surrounded by all kinds of spiritual beings. This is to express that Faust is not only to be led into an external physical world, but that he is also to experience what can be experienced by someone whose spiritual eye is open, whose spiritual ear is learning to perceive. Therefore, in the second part, Goethe shows us step by step the nature of the human soul, human development. What is Faust to experience? He is to experience the knowledge of the supersensible world. He is to be initiated into the secrets of the supersensible world. Where is this supersensible world?

When we consider the spiritual content of “Faust”, we can only begin to address the question of Mephistopheles, the spirit that surrounds Faust from the very beginning and plays a part in everything Faust undertakes. But it is only in the second part, where Faust is to be led into the spiritual world, that we see what role Mephistopheles plays. After Faust has gone through the events at the “imperial court”, he begins to see what is no longer there in the sensual world: the spirit of Helen, who lived centuries and centuries ago. She is to be found for Faust. She cannot be found in the physical world. Faust must descend into the spiritual world. Mephistopheles has the key to this world, but he cannot enter this spiritual world himself; he can describe it intellectually. He can say: You will descend. One could also say: You will ascend. He then actually describes the spiritual world into which Faust is to descend in order to get to know it supersensibly, to find in it the spirit, the immortal, the eternal that has been left behind from Helena. A word is spoken, a wonderful word: Faust is to descend to the Mothers. What are the “Mothers”? One could talk for hours if one wanted to characterize exactly what the Mothers are. Here we need only say that the Mothers were for spiritual science at all times what man gets to know when his spiritual eye is opened. When he looks into the physical world, he sees all things limited. When he enters the spiritual world, he comes into something from which all physical things come out as ice comes out of a water pond. As one who could not see the water would say: Nothing is there but ice, it piles up out of nothing — so says he who knows not the spirit: Only physical things are there. He sees not the spirit that is between and behind physical things, out of which all physical things are formed as ice is formed out of water. There, where the source of physical things is, which is no longer visible to the physical eye, are the Mothers. Mephistopheles is the being that is to represent that intellect which only knows what is outwardly formed in space, which knows that there is a spiritual world but cannot penetrate into it. Mephistopheles stands there beside Faust, as the materialistic thinker stands today beside the spiritual researcher, and says: “Ah, you spiritual scientist, you theosophist, you want to see into a spiritual world? There is nothing in there, it is all a dream. It is all nothing. To the materialist, who wants to build firmly on what the microscope and the telescope reveal, but who wants to deny everything that lies behind physical phenomena, the spiritual researcher cries out: “In your nothingness I hope to find the All.” Thus the materialistic thinker stands opposed to the spiritual man, who hopes to find the spirit precisely where the other sees nothing. These two powers will confront each other forever. And from the very beginning, Mephisto confronts Faust as the spirit that can lead to the door, but cannot cross that threshold. The theosophist or spiritual scientist does not say: material science is nothing, is unnecessary. — He says: we must take this science seriously, study it, but it only has the key, it leads us to where the true spiritual life is to be found.

Faust then descends into the realm of the mothers, into the spiritual world; he succeeds in bringing up the spirit of Helen. But he is not yet mature enough to truly connect this spirit with his own soul. Hence the scene where passion stirs in Faust, where he wants to embrace the image of Helen with sensual passion. That is why he is repulsed. This is the fate of everyone who wants to approach the spiritual world from personal, selfish feelings. He is repulsed, as Faust is repulsed when he has brought up from the realm of the mothers the spirit of Helen. Faust must first mature, learn to recognize how the three members of human nature really come together: the immortal spirit that goes from life to life, from embodiment to embodiment; the body that lives between birth and death; and the soul that stands between the two. Faust is to learn how body, soul and spirit are connected and how they belong together. Faust has already sought the archetype of Helen, the immortal, the eternal that passes from embodiment to embodiment, from life to life, but in an immature state. Now he is to mature in order to become worthy of truly entering the spiritual world. To do this, Faust must learn how this immortality first approaches the human being when he can embody himself again in a new life between birth and death in his physical existence. Therefore, Goethe must show how the soul lives between spirit and body, how it places itself between the immortal spirit and the body that stands between birth and death. This is what Goethe shows us in the second part of “Faust”.

In Goethe, the soul is hidden in that wondrous structure about which Goethe researchers do not know much to say, in which spiritual researchers who are well-versed recognize the archetype of the soul. This is nothing other than the wonderful structure of the homunculus, the little human being. This is an image of the human soul. What does this soul do? It is the mediator between body and spirit; it must draw the elements of the body from all realms of nature in order to connect with them. Only then can it be united with the immortal spirit. Thus we see how Faust is led by this homunculus into the realm of the natural philosophers Anaxagoras and Thales, who have been reflecting on the origin of nature and life.

Therein is shown the true doctrine of evolution, which goes back to the fact that not only an animalistic element underlies human development, but also a soul that gathers the elements from nature to gradually build up the body. Hence the advice given to the homunculus: you must start from the lowest realm in order to ascend to higher and higher ones. The human soul is first referred to the mineral kingdom. Then it is told: “You have to go through the plant kingdom.” There is a wonderful expression here: “It grunts so” to describe the passage through the plant world, the juicy green. There the soul gathers all the elements of the natural kingdoms in order to ascend. It is explicitly said: “And you have time until you reach the human being.” Then we see how the spirit of love, Eros, approaches after the soul has formed the body out of all the realms of nature. There it unites with the spirit. Body, soul and spirit are united. Here that which is the soul of the homunculus, that which it organizes into the body, unites with the spirit of Helen. That is why Helen can appear to us in the third act of the second part in the flesh. We see the doctrine of re-embodiment poetically and artistically enshrined in the second part of Faust. One does not unite with Helena by drawing her to oneself in stormy passion, but by truly living through the secrets of existence, truly living through the re-embodiment.

Goethe was not yet able to express the idea of repeated lives on earth in the way we can today, but he did include it in the second part of his “Faust”. That is why he was able to say to Eckermann: “I have written my ‘Faust’ in such a way that it is suitable for the theater; that the images it presents are outwardly sensually interesting for those who only want to see outwardly sensually. But for those who are initiated, it will be evident that the deepest things have been woven into the second part of “Faust”. - Goethe expressly pointed out that one can find his view of life, his spiritual view, in this poetry. And so we now also understand that Goethe was able to illustrate to us in this reconnection of Faust with Helena what true mysticism is.

Faust unites with the spiritual world. Not an ordinary child is born, but Euphorion, who is as true as he is poetic. He represents for us what comes to life in our soul when it unites with the spiritual world. When the soul penetrates into the secrets of the spiritual world, there comes a moment of development in the soul that is of tremendously deep significance for that soul. Before the soul can go further, it must first, for brief moments, gain connection with the spiritual world, to know for a very short time what the spiritual world is. Then it is as if a spiritual child were born out of spiritual knowledge. But then come the moments of life again, when this spiritual child seems to have disappeared into the spiritual world. One must grasp this with the heart, full of life, then one feels, like Euphorion, the mystic's spiritual child, despite all the poetic truth of life, sinks down into the spiritual world, cannot yet fully enter Faust, but as he passes over, something else does. That is an experience of the spiritual researcher, the spiritual seeker, when our soul has the hour when it truly senses its relationship to the spiritual world, and when knowledge appears as a child of a marriage with the spiritual world. Then it experiences it deeply when it sinks into the everyday, and it is as if it takes with it the best that we have. It is as if our own soul were to escape and go with it into the spiritual world. When one has felt this, one feels the spiritual words of Euphorion, who has sunk down, and who cries out from the dark depths: “Let me not alone in the gloomy realm, mother, let me not alone.” The true mystic knows this voice, the voice that calls from the spiritual child to our soul as its mother.

But this soul must go further. It must break away from that which is only personal passion. We must be able to devote ourselves to the spiritual world impersonally. As long as there is still self-interest, self-will, we cannot grasp the spiritual world. Only then can we grasp this spiritual world when all that is personal has been erased before the higher things of the spiritual world; only then can we truly enter the spiritual world permanently. But there are still many moments when we have already experienced that moment that pushes us back into the physical world, moments that take away all mysticism for a long time. These are the moments when we have to say to ourselves: Yes, even if we have overcome all selfishness and self-will, there still remains this or that, as it is left behind in Faust, even after he has said: “I stand here in the open, I only want to work, to gain everything from nature, to do something only for others.” But he has not yet come that far. As he looks at the hut of Philemon and Baucis, something disturbs his view, he shows: he has not yet overcome the selfishness that wants to be pleased by the sight. He wanted to create a possession, selflessly, but he cannot yet bear what disfigures him: the hut of Philemon and Baucis. Then the spirit of evil approaches him once more. The hut is burnt down. Then that appears to him which appears to everyone who undergoes development: the worry that approaches everyone who still has selfish aspirations within them and which does not allow them to ascend into the spiritual world. Here it is, worry, and we learn to recognize it in its true form; then it is something that can lead us to the last of real spiritual knowledge. It is not intended to show that man should become unworldly, hostile to the world, but how man in the world should get to know that which does not let him go from the world. In wise self-knowledge, we should let worry take a back seat so that we can become free from the selfishness of worry, not from worry itself, which is illustrated by the fact that worry says it creeps in through a keyhole. When we get to know this worry, not just feel it, but learn to bear it, then we attain that degree of human development that opens the spiritual eye to us. This is illustrated by the fact that Faust goes blind in old age, can no longer see with his physical senses, but can look into the spiritual world. “The night seems to penetrate deeper and deeper.” It is dark on the outside, but inner bright light, the light that can illuminate the world, shines, the light in which the soul is between death and birth: the realm of the mothers. Only now can Faust begin his journey into the spiritual world, where his ascension is so beautifully described.

Then Goethe can summarize what has become of Faust, from the intuitive striving of that person who despairs of science and turns away, to what he has become from that stage to the highest spiritual knowledge. He can summarize it in the Chorus mysticus, which, as its name indicates, is intended to signify something deeper. In this Chorus mysticus, it is intended to summarize paradigmatically in a few words what holds the key to all the secrets of the world, how everything that is transitory is only a parable for the immortal. That which the physical eye can see is only a parable for the spiritual, the immortal, of which Goethe showed that he even attained the knowledge of re-embodiment when he entered into this spiritual. It shall finally be shown that when man enters into the spiritual kingdom, then all that is present in the physical world as presentiment, as hope, is there a truth. What is striven for in the physical world becomes a presentiment in the spiritual world.

It may appear pedantic when I state here something that one must know to understand the final words.

Goethe spoke somewhat unclearly in his old age because he was toothless. He dictated the second part of his “Faust” to a scribe. Since he still had some of the Frankfurt dialect, some words and sounds came out a bit unclear. So for some words, the scribe used g's where there should have been ch's. For example, “Erreichnis” was written as “Ereignis”. When dictating the final words of Faust, Goethe spoke “Erreichnis”. The inadequate becomes here something that can be achieved, an “Erreichnis”, that is, with two r's and two ch's. Everywhere, in all editions of Goethe's works, you will find “Ereignis” written. Goethe researchers know so little about penetrating into the sense. That which is inadequate in the physical world becomes “achievement” in the spiritual world. What cannot be described in the physical world is done in the spiritual world. There it becomes a living deed.

And finally, we experience the great thing that Goethe is allowed to express in the closing words of the second part of “Faust”: “The eternal feminine”. Oh, it is a sin against Goethe to say that Goethe means the female sex by this. Goethe means that depth which the human soul represents in relation to the mystery of the world, that which longs as the eternal in man: the eternal feminine, that draws the soul up to the eternal immortal, the eternal wisdom, and that gives itself to the eternal masculine. The eternal feminine draws us up to that which is the eternal masculine. It does not refer to something feminine in the ordinary sense. Therefore, we may well seek this eternal feminine in man and woman: the eternal feminine that strives towards the eternal masculine in the cosmos in order to unite, to become one with the divine-spiritual that permeates and interweaves the world, towards which Faust strives. This secret of men of all times, towards which Faust has been striving from the very beginning, this secret to which spiritual science in a modern sense is to lead us, is expressed by Goethe in a paradigmatic and monumental way in those beautiful words at the end of the second part of Faust, which he presents as a mystical spirit-choir, that all physical things which surround us in the world of sense, Maja, illusion, deception, are a parable of the spiritual. But we see this spiritual when we penetrate to what covers it like a veil. In this spiritual we see what cannot be achieved here on earth. We see that which is indescribable for the mind bound to the senses, transformed into real action when the spirit of man unites with the spiritual world. “The indescribable, here it is done.” And we see that which is significant, where the soul unites, lives together with the eternal masculine of the great world, which lives through and weaves through this world. That is the great secret that Goethe expresses with the words:

All that is transitory
Is but a parable;
The inadequate,
Here it becomes reality;
The indescribable,
Here it is done;
The eternal feminine
draws us on.

Goethe was able to say to himself: Now I have done my life's work. It does not really matter now what I accomplish on earth during the rest of the time I have left to live.

Goethe sealed up the second part of his “Faust”. And this second part was not given to mankind until after his death, and mankind will have to draw on all of its spiritual science to penetrate the secrets of this mighty work.

Today, only sketches could be given. One could spend hours and weeks using all the means of wisdom to illuminate what Goethe gave to mankind as a testament. May humanity open up this testament more and more! Seal after seal will fall, the more people will have the will to penetrate the secrets of the second part. The voices of those who say, “You are seeking to find something in there that Goethe never intended to put in his work,” will fall silent. Those who speak thus do not know the depths of Goethe's soul. Only those who see the highest in this work and in what Goethe condenses into the mystical chorus, which can conclude so many reflections that are intended to lead to the spirit, recognize this.

Dear attendees,

What arose out of anthroposophical spiritual science as the impulse for the threefold social order needs to be explained, not defended, time and again in the face of the view that the threefold social order is utopian. Anyone who really delves into my essay 'The Key Points of the Social Question' or into the wealth of literature that has since been written on it can see the fundamental difference between what is intended here, precisely on the basis of anthroposophy, and what is usually associated with utopias, utopian ideas in social, economic or other respects.

Otherwise, it is pointed out, and it is even taken for granted that it should be pointed out, how one or other institutions must be set up in order to lead to this or that satisfactory result or condition for humanity. The view of life that underlies the impulse for the threefold social order knows that, in the face of today's conditions, the assertion of any utopian ideas would be quite meaningless. Yes, I have stated in the new edition of my 'Key Points of the Social Question', which is just being published, in the rewritten preface, that I would not expect anything from any purely theoretical descriptions, however it should be in the future, even if these descriptions were to be written with the greatest of spirit. For today it is not at all a matter of expressing any ready-made, ingenious ideas about social institutions, but rather, today, in the face of humanity proud of its maturity, it is a matter of pointing out the opportunities under which, through social cooperation, people can bring about what is desirable. Thus, the impulse for the threefold social organism is not meant to characterize how the world should look, but how this social organism itself should bring people into certain mutual relationships so that people, according to their respective abilities and needs, create the conditions in which they can live in the future.

The idea is that the social organism should be structured not into three classes, but into three particular social entities, in each of which every person has a share. This structure should be into a free spiritual life, a state or political life and an independent economic life. And at the root of this lies the view that if people shape their circumstances through such a threefold social organism, then what is socially viable must come from the people themselves. So it is not a matter of presenting something utopian, but rather of characterizing opportunities under which people themselves, each individual, one might say, can gain influence over the social shaping of life that is commensurate with their abilities and needs and that must carry the necessary weight to bring about conditions that are conducive to life.

This is the fundamental difference between the impulse for the threefold social organism and, one might say, everything else that has understandably sprung up in our time out of the deep need of this time. But precisely this necessity, this basic principle, of peeling the social organism, which has become abstractly unified, into its three natural parts so that they can in turn work together all the more intimately, is still little understood in wider circles today. And that, my dear ladies and gentlemen, can on the one hand be found quite understandable, on the other hand it must be deeply regretted, because today we really do not have unlimited time to get out of the crisis and out of the decline, but because we need to get to the real spirit in spiritual, political and economic terms as soon as possible. But I said it is understandable. And one must consider the way in which it is understandable, in order to perhaps also find the way to improvement from it.

I would like to take as my starting point a judgment that has been made recently, not because it appears in a book by an economist, but because it is characteristic, despite being expressed by an individual here, of the way of thinking of the broadest circles - of the way of thinking that is precisely the sharpest obstacle to the intervention of such an impulse as that of threefolding.

It may be said that the economist and Jena professor Fritz Terhalle has written a very readable book about free and controlled price formation. The problem of price formation is, after all, the one that must be at the center of economic thinking. Terhalle sharply criticizes the price formation processes that took place during the war. It may be said that much of this writing is downright brilliantly illuminating what is actually present in current economic thinking. Terhalle asks what the benefits and effects were of the various price regulations that were issued by the state during the war. And I am allowed to share with you his four points, in which he summarizes his judgment. After he has presented in detail how the effects have shown, after again and again official bodies have issued price regulations, laws about prices – after he has examined these effects, carefully examined them, he summarizes his overall judgment in the following four points:

[First: Most of the time, the interested and relevant circles had a false conception of what should be striven for. Second: The uncertainty caused by this, as well as by the application to practice and by the practice of thoroughly opposing theoretical constructions, as well as, finally, by the most diverse jurisprudence, brought the participating circles of buyers into very undesirable confusion and agitation. Thirdly: The fight against price gouging was almost unsuccessful in some areas, particularly in primary production, and only partially successful in others, and often to an excessive extent, especially in some branches of retail trade.

And the fourth point, in which this economist sums up his judgment, is particularly characteristic. He says:

All these factors combined to damage the real business in favor of profiteering.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is how a man expresses himself who expressly wants to be scientific, who wants to scientifically examine the corresponding phenomena. And this is his scientific judgment of what the state did to regulate prices during the time of need.

But there is something else: the fact that this economist, from his scientific point of view, which he calls the national economic point of view – and one should believe that it is self-evident that economic demands must be judged from the national economic point of view – he states that from his scientific, national economic point of view, this way of the state influencing economic life is to be condemned. So he names these phenomena, which have come to light as a result of these state interventions, as those that he must fight from his scientific point of view. And then he says something quite extraordinarily characteristic. He says:

Yes, that is the [economic] judgment, but perhaps this [economic] judgment is one that must not be decisive, perhaps something more important, something more significant comes into question much, much more. And as such a more important, more significant factor, he cites the economic policy points of view, behind which what must be asserted from the economic point of view must recede.

So we are told that one can know that something is economically justified, but the economist must keep quiet, because anything that may come from one side or the other that is harmful from the point of view of economic policy must be put in its place.

Well, my dear attendees, one cannot resign more clearly from economic thinking than in this way. It cannot be stated more clearly that economic thinking cannot come into its own within the unified social organism of the state if those who feel professionally called to make this judgment say: This is our honest scientific conviction, but it must take a back seat to the state's economic policy measures. These are more important in the given case.

Do we not have a clear indication from the facts of life: economic life must be placed on its own ground; it is necessary that within the social organism this economic life be detached from that which it must damage when it places itself above it.

Those who today judge such things not from theoretical considerations but from full life practice, who in particular from life practice overlook the helplessness of people in these matters, can grasp with their hands how necessary it is to place economic life on its own healthy basis. And that this is only possible if, on the other hand, spiritual life is placed on its own basis, I have often stated here, and I will have to touch on it again in the further course of today's lecture. But I would still like to start from a remark that is made precisely by the side that I have characterized.

After the helplessness of economic thinking in the face of current social conditions has been admitted in this way, the emphasis is on what will actually matter in the future. And there Terhalle says:

In the future, it will be more important than ever to educate the masses about economic necessities so that they are able to think in economic terms.

It is remarkable that on the one hand the old unitary state is invoked as the higher authority, and then the demand is made not for some beautiful economic institutions – that is quite clever of Terhalle – but the demand is made that the people be taught about economic interrelations. And if you read on, this knowledge that the people should acquire about economic interrelationships extends even to the constitution of the market and market conditions. It is demanded that the people be enlightened in order to place themselves in the economic organism under the influence of this enlightenment in such a way that this economic organism can flourish. On the one hand, then, a remarkable judgment on economic policy, on the other hand, an appeal to the economic education of the people. And it is clearly recognized that it is precisely here, as a necessity, for the economic politician, the economist, that the economic actions themselves, that the whole economic behavior should change, so that people no longer how prices are determined, with a complete lack of knowledge about the structure of the market, about other economic relationships, but that each individual acts with economic enlightenment, and brings this economic enlightenment into the immediate economic activity itself. In abstracto, a very, very reasonable demand! But an important question arises from this whole context, my dear attendees, and that is this: where should this enlightenment about economic necessities come from in the future?

It is interesting that Terhalle quotes the socialist Richard Calwer with reference to a thought that the same expresses. He once said:

You need sufficient, well-founded knowledge of the goods in stock in order to be able to operate the economic supply in an appropriate manner; in other words, to arrive at appropriate economic pricing. You need knowledge of the goods in stock.

Yes, but how can this be applied? Where can it come from? And how can one educate the people with such knowledge of the supply of goods – and of course a lot of other things are necessary to educate the people about economic necessities – how can one educate the people with such knowledge?

You see, certain people, I might say, chew and chew on certain questions and get nowhere. These are the questions that the impulse for the threefold social order has envisaged in a concrete, appropriate, practical way. He started from the knowledge that a certain realization, a certain insight into economic conditions, into economic activity itself, must penetrate. But he does not declaim that such an enlightenment must be created, regardless of who is to create it. Nor does he declare that it should be created by the old unitary state. He also knows that this education must not be of a very specific kind, because an education of a certain kind, which such people probably always think of, would not be of any use at all. Because let us assume that the “clever” idea - I say “clever” in quotation marks, of course - of setting up state commissioners, state councils or whatever they are called, somehow expert councils, which, according to the known methods of today, by means of all kinds of statistics or the like, would gain knowledge of the constitution of economic conditions, and they would then, in the ways that are popular today, go among the people and create enlightenment, so that the people would then do business under the influence of this enlightenment - what would be achieved? Exactly the same would be achieved, my dear attendees, which in numerous places Terhalle criticizes with regard to the education that has always been created by the authorities during the war. There are many passages in his very interesting book in which he points out how all possible explanations, more as a sedative, were quickly thrown behind the people in rapid succession from all possible sources in the agitated times. But he states this not only for the reason, which was indeed also present, that people were so inundated with such explanations that they did not take them into account at all, but also for the other reason that such things have no effect at all when they are brought to the people in this way. Why don't they work? For the simple reason that such explanations only speak to the human mind, only speak to the human intellect, because such explanations have to be grasped with the head. And then, after what one has found reasonable, one would have to act accordingly. One would always have to say to oneself: “You must do what is reasonable!”

That is not the way to spread economic enlightenment. Oh no. This is how economic enlightenment is spread by abstract theorists who judge not by life but by their ideas about life; one could also say, by their illusions about life. Those who know what life is like have a different kind of enlightenment: an enlightenment built on the trust between the one who enlightens and the one who is to be enlightened. An enlightenment that does not speak in general terms, but in the individual, concrete terms that are currently present according to economic needs or economic circumstances, and that has an enlightening effect at the same time as action is taken. In other words, those who work together must be united in such a way that simply by meeting in economic action, one has an enlightening effect on the other. One is more familiar with the conditions of consumption in one area, the other with the conditions of production in another, depending on which branch of economic life he is more familiar with. If you know from life that he is in there, if you have other concrete connections with him in life, then you trust him and believe what he says. And in turn, he accommodates you with regard to what you yourself say, which he cannot know. And while you are communicating in this way, the economic actions are taking place. Economic enlightenment and economic activity do not fall apart, but by negotiating in a circle of trust, where producers and consumers, depending on the different circumstances, are drawn together, by negotiating in such a circle of trust, one clarifies oneself economically. One clarifies oneself within this circle. One clarifies oneself from the facts. Enlightenment is drawn into life. Enlightenment is not treated as something that is poured into the people from the outside. Because, my dear attendees, there can also be a social ethos in economic activity, because what is negotiated from person to person and is done in the negotiation is based on mutual trust, on such a trust that, in its potentization, may already be mentioned as real economic fraternity.

And this, my dear attendees, is the associative principle. The associative principle consists of nothing other than people who have some kind of economic interaction with each other joining together, associating, and the associations associating further. In this way, what is necessary for the maintenance of the economy comes about. In this way, what is effective in the economy itself comes about through direct knowledge of economic life.

Everywhere you can see that what underlies the threefold order is drawn from life itself. Only that this life is not looked at in terms of familiar illusions and illusionist theories, but in such a way that one looks at people, at people's perceptions and feelings, and above all, one asks oneself: how do people gain trust in each other? Imagine what it would mean if price regulations were to arise out of such a relationship of trust, instead of being dictated from outside. It should therefore not be said in any way that in order to arrive at a fair price, it must be done in such and such a way. Rather, it should be pointed out that if such associations exist and deal with pricing, then the corresponding prices will emerge from such a real economic life. It is not said that one should do it this way or that, but rather it is said: in this way people should join together, so that out of this union the things necessary arise, and so the other economic institutions, the other economic measures.

That is the reality of thinking about the threefold social organism. And I have often pointed this out, and I would just like to repeat it here briefly, that economic life has its own laws. The size of the associations arises automatically from the economic conditions of a territory. Associations that are too small would work too expensively, and associations that are too large would be unwieldy. I have explained this in more detail in the new preface to my “Key Points”. All the objections that are currently being raised against the associative principle disintegrate into nothing when one considers the real conditions. This associative principle alone will be able to meet the world-historical demands of social life in an appropriate way and to fulfill them. And how are these world-historical demands of social life expressed?

Now, my dear audience, the economic part of social life has actually only in the second half of the nineteenth century become what it is today. It is only from what became of the economic body of civilized humanity in the second half of the nineteenth century and has remained until our days, only from that could arise that which is nevertheless the main basis of our world war catastrophe, the economic confusion of the middle of the second decade of the twentieth century. How did it come about? We can say that if we take the immediately preceding signature of the economy of civilized humanity, then what we can call the world trade principle has gradually emerged from earlier forms of human coexistence. We can already speak of a world trade principle in the eighteenth century, and even more so in the first half of the nineteenth century. But what then emerged from the world trade principle in economic life is the world economy. And the world economy is something other than mere world trade and what it encompasses. A world economy is only present at the moment when different states exchange their production in such a way that what one obtains as raw products, the other processes in industry; that an economic production community arises between different state territories. Before that, it was essentially – always essentially, of course – the case that the states had closed national economies, that they traded their surpluses externally, and obtained from outside what they could not produce themselves. But the fact that a common working practice, as it was particularly brought about by the cotton industry – the characteristic example of what the world economy has created – spread across the whole of civilized humanity, is actually only a result of the very latest times. And one should not believe that what can be characterized as a world economy and what has established a far-reaching dependency of the individual national economies on each other, that this just hangs over humanity like a cloud.

No, dear attendees, what is happening in the world economy is affecting every single household. Every single person is finally under the influence of this world economy. But for this world economy, the earlier communities, which were aimed at something quite different, the unit states, were simply too small. They were also constituted in such a way that they were not geared to this mutual interdependence in the world economy. In short, the associations that existed in the past, which emerged from the household economy into the city economy, then into the state economy, became too small. Economic life went beyond what these associations could achieve. And finally, anyone who does not look at the surface of the phenomena, but who studies with all thoroughness the causes of the war between Central Europe and the western regions of the civilized world, knows that they arose from the breaking down of national borders by the world economy. And if you look at it that way, you have to seriously raise the question: How can we heal what the world economy, which is simply an historical necessity because of the spread of transport conditions and the possibilities it offers, has made unhealthy? The only way is to recognize that This economy and its institutions, which have arisen out of it, that one also asks about the state of mind, the whole ethos of the people who work within this world economy, how one can come out of this world economy itself to a shaping of economic life. The impulse for the threefold social order provides the answer: the kind of cooperation within the world economy that follows from it itself, not from the old institutions, is the associative principle in economic life. Now that the old associations, which came from something else and which coped with the old form of economic life, have been reduced to absurdity, the economy itself must give itself its associations. And these associations, as I have described them today more ethically, otherwise more economically, as they are also clearly characterized in my book “The Core Issues of the Social Question”, these associations, as they arise out of economic life itself, are demanded by the idea of the threefold social organism. And these associations can be created at any moment, without resorting to utopian dreams, if people in the economic sphere simply turn to themselves and thereby bring about the emancipation of economic life. When associations arise, they will initially only be able to do what the outside world allows them to do, but they will prove themselves in what they do, and then they will have to be allowed to exist, because they will prove fruitful for the economy.

But, my dear attendees, when you look at how the necessity for associations arises from the modern organization of the global economy, then on the other hand you have to ask yourself: how can that be brought about which must work in people who associate? Those people who want to work in associations that are built on trust must be able to inspire trust. This means that people must be able to place themselves in the world in such a way that this trust can work within the associations simply out of the whole human soul mood, out of the whole human soul condition. In other words, we need not only economically oriented associations; we need people in the associations who work socially, people whose social work is permeated by moral principles, by spiritual perspectives. That is why it is impossible to imagine any improvement in economic life without a simultaneous metamorphosis of intellectual life itself. For why, one might ask, do people today think, in a perfectly understandable way, that you can educate the people by simply pouring some kind of enlightenment from above down onto them? Why do people think this way? Because, under the spiritual development of the last few centuries, they have gradually become accustomed to the idea that everything that is reasonably thought must only have an effect on the intellect of the human being, must only take hold of the intellect of the human being. In order to show the right thing in this point, I have just pointed out in the lectures that preceded this one, in this week's lecture, but also in earlier lectures, what the most significant characteristic of spiritual science is.

The most significant characteristic of the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here is that it is drawn from such deep sources of human nature and being that, in turn, as it spreads, it must have an effect on the whole person, if this whole person is educated in such a way that he or she opens up to it. Spiritual science is characterized by its effect on the whole human being and its effect from the whole human being. And this is what we need on the other side. We cannot bring economic life up if we do not have people who stand firmly with both feet on this earth and who also receive the soul nourishment from spiritual life that allows them to stand with both feet on this earth. It is a commonly held opinion today that this spiritual nourishment can be obtained simply by spreading the kind of education that is cultivated under the roofs of our schools, in adult education associations, in public libraries and adult education colleges.

But let us look at an example – we must always look at things in concrete terms – of how today's intellectual education works precisely where it is supposed to have an effect on the human mind, where it seeks to take hold of the moral and spiritual content of the human being above all. Anthroposophy is thoroughly explored by the recently mentioned theologian Kurt Leese, who is a pastor; it says so on the title page. I don't know the man, I only know the book. So he is a pastor. He is one of those personalities of whom one would have to assume, within a healthy social organism, that when he speaks, something will resonate from his words that will pour into souls in such a way that the souls will feel within themselves the moral, spiritual and soul impulses that are within them. That people who receive this spiritual life become aware of what a human being actually is to them, what a human being is within the cosmic order that they see around them in the stars, the clouds, in lightning and thunder, in the succession of earthly and world-historical events. Just think what it means for human feeling, for the human soul, when one can say to oneself, from within the spiritual life, I am not only a forsaken child in a physical body, but I am something that has been born out of the whole physical and spiritual and spiritual universe. I belong to the universe in so far as this universe is eternal. Feel what happens in the soul when a person feels at home in the cosmos. This goes as far as the forces of the blood, which gives one the strength to act in life; this permeates and spiritualizes the will when one knows what one is as a human being in the universe. But this should come to him through the cultivation of spiritual life. Anthroposophy tries to give people such a spiritual life. But what does the pastor, licentiate of theology Kurt Leese, say? He says:

What is all this talk about the service of knowledge, about the riddles of life and their solution? What is all this surge of knowledge into the depths of the primeval world and into the distance when anthroposophy

- here it says: “theosophy” -

cannot say why it is better to be an ego than a non-ego. And why, in fact, are seven world ages necessary?

And then this pastor and licentiate in theology says: the anthroposophist knows just as little about this as we do, so he also adheres to mere facticity.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, here we have the representative of the present-day spiritual life, and it is not just one person speaking, the individual can only be cited as one example, thousands and thousands are speaking, and they speak in the name of the spiritual life. They say: one cannot arrive at this, at this why it is better to be an I than a non-I, that is, to be in the eternal unconsciousness of the external natural existence.

In contrast to this, anthroposophical spiritual science emphasizes – this may emerge as a result of many lectures I have given here – anthroposophical spiritual science emphasizes what it means to become aware of how one stands in this universe. Let us just take our starting point for comparison from everyday life. We human beings in our everyday lives have gone through certain experiences since the time when we can remember back to our earliest childhood. We feel connected to these experiences. These experiences emerge in our memory as either friendly or painful. But what we bring up here is basically ourselves. We feel merged with what we have gone through in suffering and joy and what we can remember. We are aware that we are what has passed through us as pain and joy and then, through this passing, has been drawn into our soul. In our ordinary lives, we only become aware of something as a small human being by connecting with that which we have been connected with since our birth, that which has approached us and, in a sense, belongs to us. What does anthroposophy do? It expands, as it were, this sense of belonging together of the human being with the environment to the whole world, which can enter into his consciousness. As otherwise the human being only feels as one with his personal experiences, anthroposophy draws his attention to how he is connected in his being with the whole being of the world that can be perceived and experienced by him. The small consciousness of the personality expands into world consciousness. Together we grow with all the historical development of humanity, in that we recognize how we are always and again involved in it. We become one with the world. And in the same measure in which this consciousness of the world expands, this consciousness, which we otherwise have through our natural development with our experiences in suffering and joy, this consciousness, through which we also become participants in the suffering and joy of the whole world, by feeling ourselves as a human being as a member of the whole world, in the same measure in which this consciousness expands, in the same measure our consciousness of our humanity grows, and to the same extent we become stronger in this consciousness, our inner moral strength grows, because we know - although, and this is right, our sense of responsibility also grows - something grows in us through which we know that we are human within the world; through which we know what it means to be an I and not a non-I.

This awareness of what the human being is, of what he is in relation to the world and to all existence, this awareness, which, as we see and as we have tangible examples of, has been lost to the world in present-day spiritual life, this awareness is what spiritual science wants to bring back to people. And in the same measure that this consciousness, arising out of the knowledge of the spirit, which is to be imparted not as abstract knowledge but as knowledge that has been experienced, wells up out of the whole human being, in the same measure will our moral and spiritual strength grow. And what grows in us will find its way into the economic associations and assert itself as the basis for human interaction and the trust we need.

This, my dear audience, must be said if one is to describe how spiritual knowledge must take its place alongside economic demands. For the spiritual knowledge that we have today is expressed in such a way that it is indifferent whether one knows why one is an ego or a non-ego. We need a renewal in the field of spiritual knowledge. And this renewal will lead us to something quite different, which has already been hinted at in these or those lectures that I have given, which always seems bold when it is spoken out loud, but which is absolutely a result of this spiritual science, as surely as any scientific result can be.

Let us take what follows from the world view that is customary today. We look back into the distant past of our world system, when something arose out of some cosmic nebula and became what the world is in which we live. The sun and planets emerged from this nebula in a certain way, according to external natural forces. We live on this earth as lonely human beings, who feel the moral ideals sprouting up in their souls, which also signify the ultimate impulses of their social actions. They stand there with their moral ideals, which basically constitute their actual mental nervous strength as human beings; they stand there with them, and they know that without them they cannot be human in the full sense of the word.

But then again he looks up at what, according to the conventional world view, may be the end of this planetary system with our sun and our earth. What happens in our external world does not ask about our ideals, our moral and spiritual impulses. It proceeds according to external natural laws and arrives at a final state that signifies a kind of solidification, whether solidification into warmth or cold, it does not matter; it is then the charnel house at the same time, the great cemetery for all They emerged as illusions in the midst of this world-becoming, they gave man an illusory sense of his human dignity, and they will be carried to the grave with the planetary system itself.

The fact that many people do not admit to themselves that it is so does not change the fact that the present world view unconsciously flows into their feelings. And basically, it is also a saying like that one could never understand why it is better to be a self than a non-self, which arises from the desolate feeling that one must have when one sees this natural course of world events, with the spiritual and moral illusions of humanity right in the middle, giving people an illusory sense of their human dignity, but which they will one day have to carry to the grave with all of humanity.

This is countered, even if so many prejudices still speak against it today, by the view of spiritual science. I have often explained it here individually and will only describe it briefly today. Spiritual science also looks at the external world events from which the human being has emerged as a physical being. But then it recognizes that these world events, which are subject to natural laws, are in the whole, to our universe, the relative universe itself, as the plant, which sprouts in leaves, becomes a flower, develops the fruit casing to the germ inside. That which arises in the plant until the germ develops, what is the covering, passes away; the germ passes over, and the new plant life arises from it. The old covering must pass away so that the new plant life can arise from the germ.

Anthroposophy shows that everything that is physical in us, as belonging to the external physical world, belongs to such a transient part of the universe, but that a germ lives. That a germ lives in the human being, that is the spiritual, the moral of the impulses that live within. These are our moral ideals, they are a still young world. Just as the sheaths around the plant germ dry up and fall away, so will the visible stars, the visible external objects of the three natural kingdoms, fall away. They fall away. That which is the germ of the future lies in our moral soul content. The world of the future arises from this. What we do today, what we want today, becomes a real, outwardly perceptible world-forming force.

However, the sense of responsibility grows when one becomes aware that what we have in our moral intentions today will one day become as perceptible to the world as the stars are perceptible to us today. But many a word that has been said in religious documents only makes sense when one is aware of what flows from a real knowledge of the spirit. One must always remember with elevated feelings that it was once said in a particularly paradigmatic way that what lives in man as ideals and pours out into words is the creative [germ] for future worlds, to which those who are now present as external nature will not be added; they will no longer be there when new worlds have arisen from our moral ideals. “Heaven and Earth will pass away,” said the founder of Christianity, ‘but my words will not pass away.’ That means: They will be worlds when the world of heaven and earth, which one now sees with eyes, will have passed away.

This is the anticipation of a spiritual scientific truth, my dear attendees. And if we are so connected with the becoming of the world through our moral ideals, then our consciousness of our true nature as human beings also grows. In turn, we have to draw from spiritual science itself moral forces, which then become social forces.

Spiritual science does not merely theorize, spiritual science does not merely present abstract teachings, spiritual science presents something into the world that becomes strength in the human soul. And strength, ladies and gentlemen, is what we need if we want to become social human beings. For strong, morally social people must place themselves in the associations. That is what it is about.

In what I have just said, however, there is something that may appear to today's scientists to be somewhat lay and very amateurish. That is why I was also taught, when I recently expressed the same thing in Zurich, by a Zurich private lecturer, that I “reify” my ideas in this and other areas, as he said. Now, he speaks of this reification as if I were speaking of ideas as realities. Of course, he has no idea how the things are meant. He speaks of this reification very dismissively and says that I would even have claimed:

In his two lectures, Steiner literally says:

- he says explicitly, and now he wants to quote words because this seems to him to be something outrageous - I would have taken it so far in reifying that I would have said:

“Anthroposophical spiritual science recognizes the moral as being just as real as the physical. In our moral life, it recognizes indestructible seeds for emerging later worlds.”

You see, this ruler of contemporary science makes the logical mistake of reifying ideas when, from the basis of real spiritual research, he presents the truth that, not through logical error but through the great, very promising world processes for humanity, the moral ideas that we carry within us become reified, become things, become realities. Today, you are already criticized if you dare to claim - then it is put in quotation marks - that anthroposophical spiritual science recognizes the moral life as an indestructible germ for future worlds, for everything physical. You are not allowed to do that from the point of view of today's, correct university philosophies, because you are scolded as someone who understands nothing about the world.

Because the one who understands something about the world, in the opinion of these people, cannot judge otherwise than that the world has arisen out of a fog according to real laws, that it runs according to mere external physical laws and falls back into the sun as slag, while the non-reified moral impulses, which resemble mere ideas, must be buried in the same world churchyard.

But, my dear attendees, if economic life is to recover, if economic demands are to be taken seriously, then this cannot happen without

at the same time the spiritual knowledge, which places the moral and thus also the religious life alongside the economic. For the economic associations will give rise to the living insight that others also demand, but do not know where to get. And from that which is spiritual knowledge will come the social ethos, the socio-ethical power to bring these insights into reality. This is what we must bear in mind when we speak of economic demands today. We cannot seriously speak of them without at the same time pointing out what can give people the strength to fulfill these economic demands.

But, esteemed attendees, how did it come about that people in the spiritual life are already saying that one cannot know why it is better to be an I than a non-I? Even if it is unpleasant to say so, it must be said: the one who gets the drive for his spiritual work only from what the economy alone, what the state can give, which puts the individual in a certain place, the one who must succumb to this drive because it has become has become a vital necessity, he, no matter how strongly he may be an idealist as an individual, may even be a spiritualist, but he is increasingly coming to regard the spirit as no more than a mere appendage of life. Then the final consequence is this, which has become a ruling one in the broadest circles of our socialists, that the spiritual life is only an ideology, something that arises as if out of a haze and fog from the only reality, the external, material, economic reality.

That this view prevails today in broader socialist circles, that this view also dominates feelings, emotions and impulses in these circles, is only because the ruling, leading circles, through centuries, have lost direct contact with the real spiritual world; with that spiritual world in which we speak not only of the spirit as a sum of abstract concepts, but as a reality, as we speak of the physical-sensory reality. This spiritual life, which recognizes the spirit in its reality, must unfold freely and independently, emancipated from state and economic life; it must be left to its own devices. For the longer the spiritual life is dependent on any external factors, the more the consciousness of the substantial, independent spirit that weaves and pulses and works and lives through the world is lost. Spiritual knowledge can only exist within a free spiritual life. And this free spiritual life will also be the source of real spiritual knowledge. From this real spiritual knowledge, the strength will flow into the economic interrelations that we need to make progress in economic life as well.

So, my dear attendees, everything that is contained in the impulse for the threefold social order flows from a truly real contemplation of life. So everything is meant to be directly practical, but in such a way that by the practical view we do not just mean the narrow view that looks at the machines and at the length of the working day, but at the whole human being, who wants to and will give us head and heart and mind and feelings, and that will bring them to us when we approach them in such economic and spiritual contexts that trust is the element of life and brotherly love as the highest effect of this connection is the atmosphere of life in these contexts.

This must be emphasized again and again, especially in the face of the numerous misrepresentations that are made today about anthroposophical spiritual science as it is meant here. It must not be said of this spiritual science that it has no place in practical life. On the contrary, it is the science that can be said, as I said here a few days ago, to be that which does not seek to elevate the soul to a mystical, unworldly existence, to a mystical cloud-cuckoo-land. Rather, it is that which is intended to fill the soul with spirit in such a way that this spirit feels strong enough to carry spiritual substance into material life. The mystic should not become unworldly in an egoistic way, seeking refuge somewhere where the world is not to be found. He should be imbued with the spirit so that he can carry this spirit into the world around him, which is a free spiritual world, a democratically equal world, an economic world built on trust, an outwardly material world. It is precisely through spiritual science that the realization must penetrate that it is the most blatant, most sophisticated selfishness to take refuge in a world-unrelated mysticism, to cry out for asceticism, while a truly spiritual penetration should precisely give the strength for life. This strength for life, it alone can lead us out of the impending decline, out of the terrible distress and misery, towards a task.

Then in the middle is the actual state life, which will develop when, on the one hand, the free economic life and, on the other, the free spiritual life are established.

In this way, the threefold social order will be created.

Then, in the middle, there will be the actual life of the state, which will develop when, on the one hand, free economic life and, on the other, free spiritual life are separated.

In this way, the threefold social organism will be able to shape the necessary social order of the future in a way that is full of life.

Sometimes today one hears the judgment, at least ten times, and that always only reminds me of how widespread it is: What will become of the state, of legal life in the middle, if intellectual life and economic life are separated? A famous Swiss legal scholar, the most important legal teacher in Switzerland and at the present time, said this himself when he became acquainted with the threefold social order. He said that he found the threefold order appealing, but he could not understand what would then remain for the state between economic life and the life of the humanities.

Now, my dear attendees, it will be shown that a great deal will remain for a powerful and vigorous state life and that those who judge things according to today's conditions just do not see what will remain remain, because, to a certain extent, what is supposed to be there in the life of the state, built on the same democratic foundations, has been consumed on the one hand by economic life, and it wants to consume it even more where the last consequences are to be drawn from this principle. People who say that the economic-political is a higher point of view than the actual economic one do not usually see this. They do not see that the final consequence of such views is the terrible, world-murdering Bolshevism that follows from them. They will see this gradually, if they do not force themselves to form a reasonable view.

In this way, the life of the state and of the law will stand in the middle, and economic life will be built up on its own forces, while spiritual life will stand free and independent. It is as a social shaping of these forces that the impulse for threefolding wants to work. For he must say, not in some programmatic way, not out of abstract thoughts, but out of a thorough penetration of the real necessities of the present, that only on the foundations, which he can perhaps still only express in an imperfect way today - I fully admit this - but which must be further developed through the collaboration, the very necessary collaboration of a great many knowledgeable personalities. In this qualification, however, those who today feel they are the bearers of this impulse for the threefold social organism are convinced: if social life with its longings for a future design is studied and observed in this thorough way, and if these longings are met with the appropriate measures, then what makes the social organism possible must arise. For in such a social organism there will be the basis for the possibility of life; there will be a truly invigorating and fruitful spiritual life that will bring forth a healthy economic life built on brotherhood. There will be in such a social structure a truly free spirit in an economic order built on trust as the only possible social economic force.

When the words “health issues” are spoken, many of our contemporaries may reflect on how our views, our opinions of everyday life, of life in general, of all its blessings and woe; when the words “health issues” are spoken, however, it is particularly a feeling that may be evoked here that slumbers more or less consciously or unconsciously in every human soul: that man rightly regards health as a precious possession in this physical life.

Not only those who are completely absorbed in this physical life, with all their thoughts and interests, regard health as a precious thing, but also those who focus their minds on the highest ideals of humanity, who focus their minds on the spiritual, must also recognize what a precious thing health is, and even if he says to himself: Above all, this health is valuable to me because it enables me to fulfill my tasks in the world when I have it, because it prevents me from fulfilling these duties, these tasks in life when it is in any way damaged.

What the word “health” encompasses is directly or indirectly related to our highest destiny, to our human goals. Therefore, it may well depress some who reflect on how health and illness are always viewed differently in a certain way, depending on how human views and opinions change; and those who are attentive observers of life in its depths may well have seen many changes in this regard, especially in recent decades.

But what underlies all striving in relation to health and illness, in relation to the healing of the human being, is in turn only that which we must call the science of life, the knowledge of life. What transformations have taken place in relation to the knowledge of life in these last decades, much greater ones than one would usually assume! It could tell the observer of life a great deal if he observed the way in which currents arise from the scientific foundation, from the scientific knowledge of the world, and lead to this or that view health, if he compares these currents and this foundation [with that] of 20, 30, 40 years ago, how it was then and how it presents itself to us today.

What has often been emphasized here in relation to many other areas, namely that our age has taken a significant step towards materialism, can be observed particularly in the area to which our present consideration is devoted.

Those who are able to look back on the scientific knowledge that underlies today's discussion, as it was formed 20, 30, 40 years ago, may come across a venerable personality when they happen to encounter this phenomenon. I myself once encountered this honorable personality, and I may well refer to the character of this personality because it seems symptomatic to me of what has changed over the past few decades.

Those who were lucky enough to study in Vienna quite a long time ago were able to get to know the scientific basis of our current field of study at the medical faculty in Vienna. They got to know the then famous and widely significant anatomist Hyrtl, the man who provided the basis for hundreds and hundreds of young doctors at the time, the basis that every doctor needs, the anatomical foundations... When he stood before his audience and built up the human being from the components of the human organism, which seemingly can only be expressed in the driest of terms for scientific observation, when he built the human being out of anatomical parts, then, listening to him, you had the feeling that behind this description, this explanation of the structure of the human organism, something else was still alive, something lived from a deep understanding of the spiritual, which builds the wonderful structure of the human organism... there was just something... something... there was something in Hyrtl's presentation that can only be expressed as follows: just as the creative power of nature itself, as the spirit of nature, allows the individual structures to sprout and grow into the entire structure of the human organism, so this human organism was anatomically built up before the audience.

Those of you who have often attended these lectures here know that spiritual science tells us that what we call the outer physical body, what the eyes see, what the hands touch and what the ears and the lower senses of the human being can perceive, that this is only part of the human being, only the outer sensual part, that everything that external science can only deal with this outer limb. They also know that the first higher limb in human nature, which truly and really lives for those who can observe human beings with higher abilities, is what we call the etheric or life body in spiritual science: the mysterious master builder who is there and builds up this human organism.

This etheric or life body is something that cannot be seen by the physical eye, but what the open “spiritual eye” of the seer can see as a fact just as much as the external sensual facts can be seen by the physical eye.

One would like to say: Hyrtl stood there as a chaste scientist, as a chaste physician; he said nothing about this etheric or life body, but how he spoke of it,

how the one developed from the other, it was as if that principle of the life body lived in his words; and that was enough, it had an enormous stimulating effect, he influenced his listeners so that something of the mysterious depths of the whole of human nature was awakened in them, that something of that striving was kindled in them, which wants to take hold of man ever more deeply and which does not remain on the surface...

Soon afterwards, one could see that these times were passing, in which this scientific foundation was considered in this way...

Let me make this clear from the outset: it was not just because Hyrtl was a particularly great genius, but because he had grown out of a time that, if not precisely cognizant of the spiritual world, at least had a feeling for it. Anyone who observes life knows that today everything is pieced together, that such a representation no longer exists in broad circles of science... therefore, we must emphasize all the more that it is precisely spiritual science that goes back to the whole, to the spiritual-living behind the sensual, that it has the task of fertilizing and illuminating that which can be offered in the external, sensory realm for the horizons that interest us today, for it is in the external, sensory realm that our admirable science has achieved the most extraordinary things... for there is no lack of individual research, no lack of methods by which one can gain insight into the individual external facts of natural existence and its interrelationships...

But what spiritual science will have to bring to this individual research... that is the overarching spirit of the matter...

Now, the very same Hyrtl made a remarkable statement, a statement that may be our guiding principle today and from which we can start today. It may sound strange to many today, and yet it was made by a brilliant anatomist and physician:

Only a physician can recognize illnesses, but anyone who knows what help is can heal them.

A seemingly rather strange saying; now, let us see how spiritual science can relate to this...

Above all, we must be clear about one thing, because of the brevity that must characterize today's lecture – its subject could take up 20 to 40 lectures without exhausting everything – with this brevity, it is necessary that what is said is understood in such a way that one recognizes the attitude from which it is said. This attitude is basically the same as that on which all spiritual science is based; it can be briefly characterized by saying that spiritual science does not have the vocation of proving one or the other party line right, it has to stand on a higher vantage point and, precisely because it looks into the depths of existence, of life, has to gain a point of view that can have a unifying effect... Those who look around at life know that the shades of opinion that fight each other on the... are not usually so that one can say that one is absolutely right and the other wrong...

As a rule, one must say: Those who fight with slogans, who carry a flag, have gained their views and opinions in very specific areas of life; these areas of life have, so to speak, had a suggestive effect on them, and they actually only say what can be naturally gained as a one-sided view of life from their area of life...

But theosophy is not supposed to agitate for this or that direction, not even in the area that interests us today, in the area of illness and health and healing... Perhaps the humanities scholar in particular might feel tempted to advocate for one or the other... because in how many party divisions do we see today the very area in which the human heart would perhaps most like to sense unity.

Theosophy has the task of saying what is, how things are in life... and then the theosophist has the confidence that man, when he knows through his knowledge what is, will then come to realize through himself what he should. The point of view has not yet become theosophical, which appears and says: I also want to persuade that this or that should be done, and not...

Theosophy or spiritual science should never have anything to do with “should” or demands. It should objectively tell what is and have confidence in the human being that if he knows what is, he will find the guiding principle for his “should” in his own soul...

Now, who could deny that the most diverse, the most varied, the seemingly most opposing party lines confront us precisely in the area of health issues... and with what conviction and sharpness is fought for one's own conviction and with what bitterness is the other conviction fought against! And it should also be mentioned at the outset that Theosophy in particular never wants to do anything against the sciences, against the true scientific work. To put it bluntly: spiritual science or Theosophy must not go along with dilettantism in this field; it would prefer to work in harmony with those who at least have the opportunity to be experts in this field...

Of course, it is impossible to list all the shades of parties in this field here, but even if that is not possible, at least some of them should be roughly characterized. First of all, there is the allopathic healing method, the one that is so heavily opposed by so-called natural healing and what is called homeopathy... Much more could be said, but we have to draw in broad strokes... Not so much should be said for the time being about what the concepts of spiritual science could achieve, but rather what is said, so to speak, in a popular or scientific way as a characteristic of the individual shades of the parties. There we hear that the medical healing method is based on the fact that there are illnesses, damage to health, and that there are specific remedies from certain realms of nature that counteract certain damage that we call illnesses in a certain way . For each disease, this or that remedy is indicated, and science works in a careful and conscientious manner to find the specific remedies for this or that form of disease through experience in the sensory realm...

Naturally, we cannot go into detail here; as I said, we should only point out the characteristic features. But now we hear from many others, who take the same so-called natural healing approach, that everything the so-called allopathic healing approach says is fundamentally based on error... Because it takes too little account of the deeper causes of the disease; it looks at the way the disease manifests itself, but one must go deeper, assume that the causes lie deeper, that where a form of disease occurs, there are deeper disturbances in the organism that can only be remedied by intervening in this organism in the way that nature itself would intervene if it were to direct and guide the organism in a completely normal way.

We hear that, above all, it is not so much a matter of combating the individual diseases, but of investigating those activities in the organism, those functions that have been undermined and as a result of which the disease occurs, and which in turn are to be put back on the right track through appropriate measures, and now various healing methods are indicated, various physical and other remedies...

Above all, the specific remedy is opposed here, which, as experience has shown, is there to combat this or that disease. With bitterness, one side fights against the other.

Now, regardless of how one or the other or I myself think about it, let us briefly characterize how, for example, the homeopathic healing method thinks in turn in its main features; it says: In what we initially encounter in the disease, we do not have what appears to be the primary damage, what appears to be the primary unhealthiness, but we have before us in the phenomena that present themselves to us a kind of force that is called upon in the organism to fight the actual damage that lies deeper. Thus, in what presents itself to us as the symptom of the disease, we have something that the organism brings into the field in order to bring out the actual, deeper damage. We must therefore pay attention to what causes the very symptoms that appear in the disease. We must investigate which remedy we can find in the natural kingdom that causes exactly the same symptoms in a healthy person as we see in the sick person. We then support what nature has initiated...

What appears to us as illness has been initiated by nature, and we should help it by applying the means that cause the same symptoms in a healthy person, in order to support the fight against the actual damage.

One would like to say that with all these party shades, as far as the theories are concerned, on what is given as a logical basis, one would like to say that one can go along a long, long way everywhere and one soon recognizes , after a little insight into the matter, how little the objections of the respective opponents actually apply. And we can actually say that in all these fields, the supporters put forward weighty arguments in favor of their convictions. Or is it not true when today scientific medicine points out, by means of easily compiled statistics, the great successes, especially in external health care, and the improvement in the health situation in cities under the influence of precisely this medical healing method... and how then it is pointed out how much good has been done in this very respect by the research of many a specific remedy in recent decades... Great successes can be pointed out; those who would compare the health conditions in cities about a century ago with today's would be unjust if they did not recognize what medical science has achieved here. On the other hand, however, we hear, and we certainly have to admit it, that even if these conditions have improved, on the other hand it cannot be denied that certain types of disease, heart disease, nervous disorders and the like are increasing at an alarming rate... and that must also be admitted...

And should not the layman sometimes use this or that word, saying that, even if it is correct in a certain respect, that many conditions have improved, many worrying social consequences are emerging...

One need only think, for example, of the fact that in the case of a disease that was only discovered in the last few decades, namely tetanus, attention is drawn to a germ that is rightly said to be carried by people who remain healthy and others then become ill from it...

... Where would it end...

It is, for example, quite possible and a fact that entire schools have been infected with this or that communicable disease and it has been found that teachers who remained healthy were the carriers of the germs; they themselves were not infected by it. What tyranny would result if one were to build dogmatic legislation on such cases?

... How does that grow, what one could call the fear of illness, the fear of the mysterious sources of illness, through a way of thinking that can be very easily based on such attempts that cannot be doubted at all...

You really have to be a party man if you want to fight this or that with certain buzzwords...

Some of the watchwords of natural healing, for example, are as if all specific remedies had to be eradicated, as if one could only go back to the basics of the disease through physical or other methods, and support the functions... one hears the same watchword over and over again: poison; all specific remedies are poisons, but a poison could never be anything useful under any circumstances. And you can see how the word “poison” can have an enormous suggestive effect on entire gatherings. You only have to let these suggestions work and thereby create convictions that are extraordinarily effective. But anyone who knows what poison really is knows that those who use such buzzwords are the ones who are least accountable for what poison is. What is poison? The phenomena, the facts of nature, especially those in human life, are so tremendously complicated that answering this question is not so easy. What is poison in nature?

Belladonna, for example, is a poison for humans; the rabbit can eat it quite well.

Hemlock... Socrates had to drink from the hemlock cup to carry out his death sentence, but for the goat, hemlock is not a poison at all.

Hydrogen sulfide is certainly very toxic to the organism in certain respects; but there are small organisms, so-called sulfur bacteria, a type of split algae, that live almost exclusively on this substance: they build their organism in a very strange way from the sulfur... and if you deprive them of the hydrogen sulfide, they die. This fact provides an example of how the material can be incorporated into the phenomena of life...

So the keyword “poison” should not be the only one that tells us what we are actually fighting...

We will only make progress if we try to approach the whole consideration more and more from the perspective of spiritual science...

What is the actual difference between medical healing methods and naturopathy... in principle? We see a big difference that the spiritual scientist can characterize quite accurately from his point of view without taking sides for one or the other direction...

For those who know the facts, it is simply nonsense to say that there are no specific remedies for this or that disease. But what is healing with such remedies based on?

The fact that there is damage in the disease and the remedy combats this damage, that this can happen, is not disputed. To dispute the positive, that which is gained from experience, is narrow-minded and would not be spiritual science. But what are we dealing with in the human being when we heal by combating some kind of health disorder with external means? We are dealing with the physical human body, the external aspect of human nature. Since the human being has this physical human body, there is no doubt that it can also be treated with such an external remedy.

Natural healing has a certain idea that there is something mysterious and supernatural behind the physical human body, that what makes up the physical body is governed by the etheric or life body... The doctor does not need to believe it, but he does take the view that there is something that lives and moves behind the physical apparatus. The naturopath has an inkling of this etheric or life body and tries, so to speak, not to give so much to what can only be externally determined by physical means, but goes back to what lies behind the physical, what can be determined. This is very important, but the pressure of the materialistic way of thinking is far too strong for him to be able to move towards real spiritual knowledge of human nature. It would be horrifying if anyone who claimed to be a scientist were to speak of the visible having its basis in the invisible, the sensual in the supersensible.

Therefore, one can at most suspect that there is such a thing, but one cannot speak of it as a reality. If one speaks of it and has gained conviction from spiritual science, if one has recognized the inner reasons that lead to this supersensible link of human nature, then one cannot stop there, then one also proceeds to other links of human nature... then one enters with purest spiritual science into the secrets of the invisible, but which is nevertheless very real and real for that reason.

Then you go further and learn that in this physical human body there is not only an ether or life body that distinguishes humans from everything that surrounds us as seemingly inanimate... This ether or life body is a constant fighter against the physical body following its physical substances and chemical forces during life. Because when this life body withdraws from the physical body, then the physical body of the person follows the physical substances and forces, but then it is a corpse. During life, however, the etheric or life body is a constant fighter against the decay of the physical body...

Thus, in the etheric body, we have the creator, the builder of the physical body of man or any living being, who stands behind this physical body.

Then we proceed to what we call the astral body. This is the carrier of lust and suffering, joy and pain, of all the surging feelings and ideas, of everything that is instinct, desire and passion, that is, the instincts. But beyond that, we then also come to a fourth link, the carrier of the actual self-awareness, the carrier of the ego.

These four members make up the whole human being, and if we want to consider the whole human being, we must consider that the higher, the supersensible members are the actual creators of the lower, the more sensual members. Everything that happens in the lower members arises from what happens in the upper members...

Therefore, one should not only proceed to the idea of an etheric or life body, but one must consider that deeper causes, much deeper causes must lie precisely in the astral body and in the soul-spiritual of the human being, if one wants to come to an understanding of illness and health. Here the causes of the illnesses are not so easy to find. This vehicle of pleasure and suffering, instinct, desire and passions, expresses that which is within it in the etheric body and in the physical body. If something unhealthy lives in the astral body, consisting of wrong passions, drives and instincts, then this must have an effect on the etheric body and the physical body:

But, someone might say, let us look at a person; what contradictions can prevail between their healthy perceptions and healthy urges and the illnesses they nevertheless have! In this case, we must fully embrace spiritual science and be clear that what we call the innermost essence of man, the actual individuality of man, is something that is only just enveloped by the physical shell, and that it takes completely different paths in its development than this physical shell. When we look at the core of a person, we say: this person consists of two currents...

The person who comes to us in life, let us look at him. He is first a result of heredity, a result of what comes from father, mother and the ancestors before them...

But in all that continues through the generations, in all that lives something completely different, something that now has to do with the astral body and I. And when we meet a person, we see not only what we have inherited from previous generations, but also what has descended from the spiritual world as the spiritual core of our being. We look at what is called re-embodiment or reincarnation, at the innermost core of our being, which carries over from life to life. This unites with what lies in the line of inheritance, permeating and energizing what is inherited from father and mother. And even if we do not see today how the instincts and drives of individuality affect the physical body in a way that makes us ill or healthy, we would see this if we looked at what the person has been in his or her previous life.

If we recognize this, we can learn to see the passions and instincts and desires in the present life that originate from what we brought with us from these previous lives and that act as causes of illness in this present life, even if they were not acquired in this life.

And this is where the knowledge of the essence of the human being begins, as a proper basis for assessing the healing method.

Can we somehow see how the astral body indicates what it has to say in relation to what makes the physical body healthy or sick?

For example, someone has to raise a child... according to the child's nature, this or that is good, one has the stereotyped view. Instead of strict individualization, also with regard to health, one has the opinion: there are many illnesses, but only one health. But in truth, there are as many healths as there are people. Every person has their own health, their own conditions of being healthy. But with stereotyped concepts, you can ruin everything possible with the child. For example, the child does not want to eat this or that food. This is, of course, naughtiness, one thinks. But it would be much more correct to say: This is proof that sympathy and antipathy is nothing more than the astral body feeling: I must have this if I am to work in the right way on my physical body, and what the child rejects, it cannot use.

What the child's palate rejects or craves expresses what is healthy for it. It is therefore right to observe carefully what the child demands, what it is keen on. When does the astral body perceive something as pleasure, especially in childhood? When what it enjoys has in itself, as it were, the potential to be incorporated into the organism in a beneficial way. Only when something is already corrupted in the order of healthy human nature, then enjoyment is no longer a true guide... That what is healthy for him, he also likes, and what makes him sick, he does not like, that is the only measure of health, that there is an appropriate sense for everything we take into our organism. So it is a matter of making the consciousness of what is good for us as alive as possible within us, of making our astral body, the carrier of pleasure and desire, lively for what is healthy for our organism...

There are now means to achieve a great deal in this regard... Human nature differs from person to person because a different individuality permeates and energizes the exterior.

A case that occurred: there was a person who, from early childhood, had a terrible aversion to all meat; he could not smell meat, so to speak. He could not smell it, so he did not eat it. At first he was in a tolerant environment. But there were aunts and uncles who thought that not eating meat was completely perverse... And so the good man allowed himself to be persuaded to at least start with a little broth, then move on to veal and so on... But he also came to mutton... and he soon ended up with

severe encephalitis because it was absolutely impossible for this person's body to do what was necessary to digest meat using the powers within it. He was so constituted that he knew very well what was healthy for him from an early age...

But if the same food, which was the only right food for this person, were given to another, the latter could suffer the greatest harm from it...

All people must be considered as individuals. And there are countless people who, if they want to continue living as they are living, can no longer possibly become vegetarians without further ado.

It has been said that human nature is not capable of doing the work necessary to convert what we take in from plants into what the human organism needs. With plant-based nutrition, a kind of work must be done internally by the human being that he is unable to muster. The work that has to be done there is partly taken off his hands by the fact that he takes his nourishment from the animal kingdom, where some of this work has already been done and he now has less work to do. However, this does not apply to everyone, only to many people. For many, it would be unhealthy if they could not apply the strong forces of digestion and processing that are necessary to digest plant food...

To understand this, one has to embrace the radical difference between the plant and human kingdoms... the animal kingdom lies in the middle.

It is a contrast between humans and plants... we can characterize this contrast first by saying that something that is purely present in physical nature...

A human being breathes, he inhales the oxygen in the air and exhales carbon dioxide. The plant absorbs the carbon dioxide, breaks down the compound, takes the carbon it contains and uses it to build its organism out of inanimate, purely physical carbon and releases the oxygen again. This is the interaction between humans and plants. This expresses a spiritual interaction in an external parable. Behind the plant stands its spiritual, behind the human being his spiritual. You know that a plant cannot flourish when it is deprived of light. Look at it, how it withers away. That which the plant builds up from inanimate substances, it builds up under the influence of light... Light! How much we owe to it... we take from it as much as we need...

But we must not only see, also in the light, not only pay attention to the physical. In that which is physical in the light, there is also a spiritual element. Behind physical light there is also a spiritual element. This spiritual element, which flows towards us from the sun to the earth in the rays of light, is the same as that which lives in our astral body, that inner light that works and creates in us — in the spiritual light, the spiritual aura. They are nothing other than the spirit of the physical body, the invisible light that works in us as the astral body. And that is what is at work in us! Outside, the physical light of the sun is at work on the plants. And that is the peculiar relationship between the physical light outside, which works on the plants, causing them to grow and flourish... and the spiritual light that is in us as our astral body. That is the relationship, that they are opposed to each other...

That which builds up the plants is removed, decomposed, destroyed by the process that the spiritual light ignites in us. And our life in the physical body as a spiritual being could not exist if we did not, so to speak, set up processes of destruction in everything we take in. We remove what the plants have built up. We continue in the opposite way to what the plants have begun... Thus we are spiritually opposed to the plant. And what is given to us as food from the plant kingdom, that we in truth destroy...

Our thinking is in its physical expression a process of destruction. What we take in must be worn away again, must be shattered again. This is how we maintain an inner life...

What is given to us from the plant kingdom as food is given to us in a virgin state. What is given to us from the animal kingdom is not given to us in such a virgin state... Because the animal stands in between the plant and the human, the animal fulfills that which the human has to fulfill to a certain extent... ... already accomplishes to a certain extent what man would otherwise have to accomplish within himself... and man can only begin his own activity where that which he has received is located. He only gets what the animal has already made out of it...

Let us look at man; he is truly a microcosm, a summary of everything that is going on outside...

His nutritional process is what the expansive plant kingdom elevates and transforms so that this human body can become an instrument of consciousness. In this respect, it is a totality. For the spiritual scientist, the animal is nothing more than a one-sided development of human characteristics. Each animal, each animal species represents certain characteristics for the spiritual scientist, developed in a particular way...

All these characteristics, combined in harmony – the one diminished by the other, the one balanced by the other – give us the human being...

The animal performs the natural process to a certain one-sidedness... We acquire this one-sidedness when we take the no longer virgin food from the animal kingdom...

Now let's assume that we are really organized in such a way that we can muster the necessary strength to process plant food. We have this strong reservoir of strength within us, which is only used when we take plant food. What happens if we don't do it, if we don't carry out this transformation from the vegetable to the human level? Then the unused forces seek other outlets in our organism.

The French abbé I told you about had precisely such forces within him. They are there and they have to work, and if they cannot find a healthy outlet, they will eventually throw themselves at another field of activity. The abbé then died from the effects of the large forces that arose in this improper way.

Let us take, on the other hand, a different person, such as a bank manager, who knows nothing but his profession. If we were to expect him to eat a vegetarian diet, he would not be able to do so. He will not be able to sustain it. He cannot process the plant substances to the point where they can serve him for the functioning of his organism; he must let some of the work be done for him.

We can therefore also see an important difference and contrast between the way plant food and animal food affect people. What does a person who wants to digest plant food have to develop in themselves? What do they do when they eat plant food? They have to muster certain forces that work from below, from the plant. These are forces that are more at the center of his being than those he needs to process animal food. These are forces within him that no one can do for him. By accomplishing this internally, he also has an inner source of independence and strength. His inner life becomes more active and intense as a result. What he consumes from the plant kingdom does indeed make his inner life more active. However, this requires a more comprehensive spiritual life, one that is directed towards contemplation, towards an understanding of the great interrelationships of life... If a person then takes his nourishment from the animal kingdom, then this is only right if he does not have these independent powers. For the nourishment that a person takes from the animal kingdom, he will use inner powers that make him less independent, since he has some of the work done for him...

In spiritual terms, what comes from the animal kingdom stimulates what makes man strong and vigorous without his intervention.

For those who cannot draw strength and energy for life from within themselves, a plant-based diet will be of no use; they will only be weakened by it. They need to have their strength and powers given to them, so to speak, prepared by animal food.

From such contexts, we can easily understand how it comes about that peoples who live on a plant-based diet lead a life more devoted to contemplation... while those who eat animal products show more warlike qualities.

Thus, what must be considered a health issue and a nutritional issue at the same time is definitely linked to the individuality of the person, to what the person can muster internally. And we see in the person whether the person does not partly acquire strong powers of independence in his inner being through a plant-based diet...

Through plant nutrition, we see him acquiring all the forces he needs to become, so to speak, a comprehensive human being, to become a human being who can see the big picture of life. Through what he acquires from animal nutrition, we see him being led to the specialties...

Thus we see from the interaction... through what... the great questions of existence for all details of life are regulated... There we see, so to speak, man's inner nature expressing itself in such a way that there are strong forces within him... or that he must have these strong forces given to him... We see, so to speak, the astral body at work in him... and how this work must be if the balance in the human organism is to be restored...

And once we have understood this, we will no longer doubt that much, much depends on how we are able to act on the astral body... but not only on this, but also how we can act physically on the physical body and ethereally on the ethereal body...

A materialistic view will only want to have an effect on the physical... Let us take the case of a sick person. The materialistically thinking person will look at these symptoms of illness and he will count on this: in this or that area, there is this or that air, there are these or those conditions, which, like one physical on another physical, affect the sick organism...

Those who are grounded in spiritual science will know that in many cases this is a very erroneous conclusion. They will know that it must work more radically and thoroughly if the human being is placed where his inner experiences can be stimulated in the appropriate way, where he can be truly happy, can become truly harmonious within himself. In particular, with certain forms of illness, namely nervous disorders, it will be most important that we work directly on the astral body and through that which can stimulate strong forces in the astral body...

Thus, if someone develops those strong forces within themselves that are developed through plant nutrition, it can be a good remedy for even severe damage to the organism. What works internally, when the inner forces that... must process the virgin plant food, can eliminate serious damage.

You can see from a person whether he also takes the trouble to convert the plant nutrients, in which there is little fat, into fat through his own inner powers, or whether he prefers to have it taken from him by enjoying animal fat... to develop those strong powers within him that make him independent... in other words, whether the person is not too lazy to contribute a little to his own fattening... this looks out of the eye whether it happens or not...

The one who does not overfeed himself with animal fat will also find within himself the possibility of developing the strong forces within him, and these are more and more inclined towards the spiritual...

And now there is a great, comprehensive law... that says: Everything that a person enjoys and looks at only as sensuality, that affects the withering, dying forces within him... and everything that he looks at as spiritual, that affects the invigorating, healing powers of a person... And vice versa, anyone who wants to help themselves in this direction can do so by eating enough plant-based food in addition to meat, and this can help in terms of awakening interest in the supernatural world...

Anyone who is willing to do something to prepare his own fat from low-fat plant foods will be able to become much more spiritual than someone who gets all his fat from animals...

A grotesque confirmation arises from the following incident. There is a so-called nudist culture in Berlin. Someone went there initially out of purely artistic interest, wanted to see what it was like and let the audience and what was presented there take effect on them. Then this person quickly ran away. It was a strange audience, almost all old men...

Where one actually assumes that the sensual has an effect on the sensual, there is an attraction to what is dying in life. And those who merely seek the sensual as sensual will be able to see that the dying parts of their being are particularly affected... whereas the spiritual interest... will particularly affect the germinating, growing parts of the human being.

Spiritual research begins to give people something that is certainly not as comfortable as just describing something... and also not as comfortable as listening to a lecture where images are projected onto a screen. You don't need to do much inwardly.

Spiritual science speaks of the supernatural, and that cannot be taken in as comfortably. It appeals to something in human nature, to which he must work, to which he must put the most active forces within him into cooperation... This spiritual science thus goes directly to the spiritual... to the paths of the soul... It is not there for the eyes... And no one claims that the concepts and ideas of spiritual science are real in the sense that they are tangible. In this sense, they are not supposed to be true. But what is hardly known today in wide circles, these so-called unreal ideas, what are they? These are precisely the healthy, the strong ideas, which, if they only work sufficiently in human nature, are at the same time the strong, the vigorous and effective ideas that make us healthy right into the etheric body.

When spiritual science guides us... it evokes ideas in us that have a healing effect from within in the most eminent sense... organic substance in such a way that it has already left its origins, so to speak, and cannot be repaired by itself again... The higher we ascend in the hierarchy of organisms...

Where internal forces are to be developed for recovery, the strongest force is that which flows out of the spirit of the human being, which is directed towards rejuvenation and growth, and the one who appeals to these forces also has a good foundation in the sense of health... the strong forces within are unleashed up to the higher realms of the health issue... Hardly a beginning has been made though...

We understand little more than a physical effect on the person... Here spiritual science is called upon to address the issue of health in such a way that remedies are found and are available that do not just work on the physical level but directly on the spiritual, that is, on the astral; and that work to restore physical health indirectly through the astral. Here indeed Theosophy has a great task. It will be able to solve it, because it can penetrate deeply into the life that surrounds us daily, into the life of the healthy and the sick person.

And here it is truly to be welcomed with great satisfaction that a good start has been made on the basis of the theosophical research, in that Dr. Peipers in Munich is applying a kind of color therapy that is thoroughly based on the theosophical view, on spiritual science... the secrets of color, its deeper spiritual foundations, have been divined.

Here one does not think of the physical effects... not the light works in these things, the color must first become an idea, must first shine and light up in the astral body... as a color idea, via the detour of the astral body, they work out into the periphery... Even if this can initially only be used for certain forms of illness, a start has been made...

And this theosophical current will, in these and many other things, by penetrating into the depths of things, still create many things of which today's materialistic mind has no dreams. Whatever one may say... the truth, the truth of the spiritual, will prevail. So... few points of view that are connected with this subject. It will have been shown to you how, on the one hand, spiritual science can never be one-sided...

Let us assume that someone has a migraine. What does he take? Migränin, for example. That is nothing! Or some other remedy is prescribed for him. But perhaps he does not have time to do everything that is prescribed for him... It is quite possible for a person to be so strong that he can bear it well if his physical organism is treated physically in certain areas.

But the problem can only be solved on an individual basis. Through a deeper knowledge of human nature, we will come to realize that there is a basis in spiritual science itself for evoking healthy urges and healthy instincts... that spiritual life is what...

Behind all matter lies spirit... and that which shows itself as content... in matter is only an expression of spiritual processes... The same applies to food: it should taste good, because the fact that it tastes good is an expression of the fact that it fits into the organism in a healthy and harmonious way.

In this way, spiritual science will enable you to stimulate feelings and instincts in a healthy way, and the result will be that those who study the spiritual wisdom will become healthy...

Just as the animals graze outside in the meadow and find the right thing in their instincts... so will spirituality and spiritual science, on a higher level, once again implant in man that which shows him, in full consciousness, what serves him, what is healthy for him... so that spiritual science itself is a great healing agent, a great healing agent... because it brings him the right knowledge for what is individually necessary for him in one case or another.

Recognizing illness in its relationship to the human being as a whole will help to bring about knowledge in this field too, and so Hyrtl, who... something very beautiful when he said from his experience:... Only the doctor can recognize illnesses... and he meant: The other is more difficult, he meant: You can't always help if you can recognize illnesses, only the one who knows what helps can heal... Only the one who is able to look deeply, very deeply into the foundations of human nature, can know what helps.

Answering questions [excerpts]

Question: [Not reported.]

Answer: It is important to distinguish between the irregularities that have arisen from external damage and against which he has at most the means to correct through the inner powers within the person, and between internal diseases... an external damage, a broken leg for example... But it is the same if, for example, any harm is done inside the stomach by unsuitable food.... just as little as with a broken leg can such external damage be treated from the astral body... It is nevertheless important that more is said about recovery from within the person than about forms of illness... more about the ways to recovery than about diseases.

Question: [Not handed down.]

Answer: [...] Feuerbach said: Man is what he eats. This is true if he uses the means to get higher by the nature of his food ... He should eat so that he is not what he eats.

Dear attendees,

Of the many visitors to the Goetheanum in Dornach, which can be reached from Basel by conventional means of transport in less than an hour, many ask: What are the tasks of this Goetheanum? What goals does it want to serve? Well, ladies and gentlemen, if one had to speak of these goals and tasks of the Goetheanum without any connection to the great, serious tasks of our time, it would hardly be worthwhile to speak about them in public. But this Goetheanum in Dornach does want to be connected in its tasks with the great tasks of humanity in the present day. And it is this connection that I would like to speak about today, at least in a few words.

Those who not only see the Goetheanum from the outside, but get to know the way of life there a little, will be able to notice that two human activities, which otherwise occur quite separately in life, are thoroughly connected there, and perhaps the external signature of this Goetheanum initially experiences its characteristics through this.

We organized courses for the School of Spiritual Science last fall. I already mentioned them in my previous lecture. During these courses, representatives of the most diverse specialized sciences expressed themselves about the ways in which their individual specialized sciences could be enriched by what could be brought into them from the spiritual science cultivated at the Goetheanum. So science has been cultivated there, but science in the sense of spiritual science. Besides that, however, one can see how artistic natures and artistic people have been working on this Goetheanum for years, and the whole building has come about in its present, not yet completed forms through these artistic people. And one could see how this fall, the individual scientists and also personalities from practical life spoke from one spirit, which was absolutely the same as that from which the artistic people have given this building its forms, its images and so on for years. That is what makes this building, the Goetheanum in Dornach, so unique: everything that has been artistically worked on is inspired by the same spirit as everything that is to be scientifically achieved there. This unified spirit of science and art is what characterizes the Goetheanum in the first place.

But there is a third element, too, that unites with this. All those who have spoken there about the most diverse scientific questions, as well as about the most diverse branches of practical life, and all those who have been working artistically for years and now, they are deeply imbued in their minds with the fact that what they speak, what they work, what they somehow accomplish is in some way connected with the great tasks of the human being. Everything that is to be thought on a large scale, and everything that is to be achieved in detail, may well be said to have a kind of religious spirit. Not some obscure sectarian movement, as the detractors of the Dornach building say, is what drives its essence, but what is being driven, it is driven out of a serious scientific spirit, but in such a way that this serious scientific spirit can become so alive at the same time that it can express itself artistically. And that which expresses itself scientifically and artistically from two completely different sides carries, at the same time, not in a sectarian sense, not even in some limited confessional sense, but in the very general human sense, a kind of religious devotion, a kind of religious veneration for the thing to which one devotes oneself.

But we can go even deeper, my dear audience, and we can hear this unity of work in Dornach. We can see how, admittedly, in other forms, in other ways, science is spoken in a way that is different from that which is otherwise the case in our educational institutions. And the scientific language is spoken in such a way that, for example, the individual sciences enter into a dialogue with each other, mutually illuminating and clarifying each other, so that the narrow-minded spirit of specialization and of specialized science recedes before what is to be striven for by all the individual sciences together as the general human. Speaking scientifically, I would like to say it is spoken from a different tone.

And if you then walk around the building, if you look at the building inside, at the painting and the sculpture, and ask yourself: in what style was this building erected? Then you won't get the usual answer. When you usually walk into an educational institution, you hear this or that science presented from its particular, specialized point of view. You then look at the building. You ask: in which style was it built? You get the answer: in the Renaissance style, in the antique style, in the Gothic style and the like. You cannot get such an answer in relation to the architectural style of the Goetheanum in Dornach. The only answer that can be given is that the Goetheanum in Dornach was built in the same style in all its individual forms, and that this is reflected in the work being done there in the various sciences. The same spirit from which scientific life springs is the same spirit that is embodied in the forms. Dornach has its own architectural style, and everything that meets the visitor when he enters the building through the portal on one side, looks around at the forms that surround him, and then listens to the word that is to reveal to him what science is being practised here, is one.

This unity – esteemed attendees – is what characterizes Dornach. And with that, this Goetheanum in Dornach certainly presents itself as a contradiction, but I believe that the world will gradually realize that it is a beneficial contradiction to the disunity of our present life, this life, from which the individual activities and the individual ways of thinking and looking at things come from the most diverse angles, mutually feuding and certainly not growing together into a harmonious unity. For it is precisely this that is so disastrous in our time, that the individual activities that arise from the most diverse [specialized areas] of our lives cannot somehow come together to form a harmonious whole. When you look at things this way, it may initially seem as if this Goetheanum in Dornach should, so to speak, be a kind of model for the way in which the individual activities of life should work together harmoniously. However, my dear audience, it does not want to be just a kind of model, it wants to be a place, this Goetheanum, in which and from which work is done in such a way that this harmony can also enter into the tasks of our time and that a rising life can arise from the declining life that threatens us.

To understand this, however, we need to take a closer look at the way in which modern civilization has developed over the last three to four centuries. The two most significant characteristics of this civilization – I have often emphasized them in lectures that I have been privileged to give here at the same place, and today I want to emphasize them again from a certain point of view – these two most significant characteristics are that, for three to four hundred years, a scientific life, especially a natural scientific life, has emerged in the development of humanity, which has become dominant for the broadest circles in relation to feeling, willing, and in relation to way of thinking. One should not deceive oneself about this! Of course, many people today are firmly attached to old confessional traditions or the like with their views and also act out of impulses that arise from these traditional confessions. But more and more has spread, especially in the course of the nineteenth century and in the first two decades of this twentieth century, that which has flowed from the authority of modern scientific life.

What man thinks today about the structure of the world, about what lives and moves in the various kingdoms of nature, and finally about himself, is expressed by what he regards as the authoritative science. And within certain denominations, they have endeavored to strictly separate so-called belief from science because they wanted to save something for the soul that goes beyond the acceptance of this science. But because they did not dare to extract anything from this science itself that could also say something about the eternal in the soul, about the higher meaning, about the supersensible meaning of human life, they wanted to found, so to speak, a place in the soul to which science has no access, from which they did not want to elicit that which speaks about the highest matters of the soul. They wanted to secure the place of faith so that they could at least assume something about this eternal aspect of the soul, this supersensible aspect of the human being, which science is not allowed to assume or which science describes as something beyond its limits.

But this is not intended to say the slightest thing against the tremendous progress of this science in recent centuries. For — my dear audience — spiritual science, as it is represented here, does not dare to use any kind of superstitious grounds to bring anything against science as such, but it recognizes in the fullest sense of the word what this scientific development of the last centuries has brought. It appreciates what has been achieved by science through observation of the external world in connection with experimentation and in connection with the combining intellect. And the spiritual science meant here should not be confused with all the dilettantism that arises from mystical or other backgrounds, which also want to satisfy human souls, which only oppose science because they have never come into any kind of contact with it. The spiritual science represented here fully takes into account — even if it miscalculates in some respects — it fully takes into account the progress of modern science, and it absolutely wants to follow a path that yields to nothing in terms of the strictness of the method, the conscientiousness of the way of thinking of modern science.

But, my dear attendees, anyone who engages with this modern science in all its various fields, and with all that it has brought, will ultimately come to a very specific conclusion – a conclusion that is no less significant because it, in a sense, justifies skepticism.

You see, esteemed attendees, I myself have been met with much hostility for the reason that, before I turned to what I had to say on the basis of anthroposophical knowledge, I tried to express myself in purely scientific works in a wide variety of fields. I did this because I believe that today a higher world view should not offer itself to the world at all without first justifying itself by having looked around in the most diverse scientific fields. But when one delves into these various scientific fields, one says to oneself: Nevertheless, we have not only developed the external methods of observation in a conscientious way, not only advanced the combining mind and the art of experimentation, but have also come to everything that the armed senses provide us through the telescope, through the microscope, through the X-ray apparatus, through the spectral apparatus and so on, and so on – even though we have developed all this, indeed precisely because we have developed all this, the riddles of life and the world have not diminished for us, but increased. And anyone who approaches this scientific development of recent times with an open mind knows that, basically, with every glance through the telescope, through the microscope, with every result of the X-ray apparatus or the spectroscope, it is not actually solutions to what we call the riddles of life and humanity, but new questions and ever new riddles, and that with each such result, the human soul must increasingly ask for something that can at least to some extent provide the solution to such riddles. Thus, it is not really solutions that have presented themselves to the triumphs of modern science, but new life puzzles and new questions have arisen, and those who engage in the scientific life of the present with an open mind are particularly confronted with these to a greater extent. This is on the one hand, in terms of the stream of knowledge; the development on this side has brought us a sum of new riddles, new questions. But we can also look around us on the other side and find what the last centuries have brought, if we look at it impartially, in a special light. It is fair to say that what science has given us has also shown us practical results. It has brought us our modern technology, and we may say: Most of what surrounds us today at every turn in life, all that technology has brought us in such significant advances, all of it is a result of the last few centuries and it is basically derived from the results of modern science. Technology has become part of life, and life has become highly dependent on technology. In a sense, can we not also say that, just as scientific development has presented us with puzzles and questions on the other side, so too does modern technological progress present us with puzzles and questions in relation to technology?

We are basically in the middle of these puzzles and questions, because when we look at the great advances in technology, we have to say to ourselves: Yes, they are there, and people also live in a life that is dominated by this technology. But this technology has not yet found its way to the people, otherwise we would not have today, among us, something that is so burning — my dear audience —, which in the broadest sense is called the social question. People have learned to adjust their machines. But what has been brought to us by the machines is not the solution to the questions of life in the fullest sense of the word. Instead, the greatest question of life flows out of it: How should this human life be shaped in social terms so that people, who have to work – as they once worked without machines – now have to work with modern technology, so that these people come together in full understanding in social life? Just as questions and puzzles of knowledge have been posed for us by the development of modern science, so modern technology, which has emerged from this scientific development, has posed the great question for us: How should life be organized so that people can find the possibility of a dignified existence within a life permeated by technology? So one could say: Both the theoretical and practical questions of life have actually emerged from modern civilization. And today we are not in the position of having fully developed solutions, neither theoretical and intuitive solutions nor practical solutions, but we are faced everywhere with questions, with puzzles that pile up, that make demands on people that can no longer be ignored.

This, ladies and gentlemen, must be felt in all its vibrancy if we are to do justice to the tasks that the Goetheanum in Dornach presents. For one can say: Those who are connected with the founding and expansion of this Goetheanum are precisely those people who feel this burning on the one hand of knowledge, on the other hand of the life questions in modern times, and who want to contribute what is possible for people to such life tasks as they present themselves can be tackled.

On the one hand, we see how people offer simplistic solutions: a person like Haeckel, in his “World Riddles”, offered simplistic solutions, while all he had to offer was a pile of new riddles. And people who believe that they are grounded in practical life also believe that, for example, the relations of production bring forth human life relationships. We keep hearing it emphasized from the Social Democratic program that it is the relations of production that have created life, that have created the form of life.

Now, my dear attendees, precisely when we look at the issue of modern technology, we can see that the production conditions that have been created by this modern technology have not brought about the form of life that goes with them. If they had brought it about, we would not have a social question.

In view of this, we must ask: what then actually characterizes this modern life? After all, it depends on the human being finding a way to relate to life that is informed by what he or she can understand, feel, want, and do as a human being. It is easy to say that today it is a matter of economic issues, that people must rise above the question of bread above all.

Now, my dear audience, there is no way to get beyond this bread issue other than by utilizing what the earth offers man in the right way for humanity and putting it into circulation. But what has to be done to achieve this cannot be done otherwise than through what man can feel, do and want, and with which man can place himself in the world. Basically, it is the world view, it is the inner spiritual ability of the human being that alone can provide a remedy even in the very most extreme economic questions. Therefore, we must look to that which can inwardly spiritualize the soul of the human being, which can drive the human being to a fruitful will, to that which can underlie a human understanding if we want to take a proper look at the great questions of the present, at the tasks of our time. Here one must say: that which is striven for at the Goetheanum in Dornach, and which to a certain extent is visible in the work being done outside, may perhaps inspire some people to reflect on the position of the human being in the course of human development.

I said earlier – esteemed attendees – that in Dornach one can see how scientific questions are discussed in a spirit that is at the same time the same spirit in which artistic natures have worked at the Goetheanum itself in terms of its external architecture, sculpture, and pictorial art. And I said that there is not only a certain unity between what is being done scientifically out there and what is being created artistically, but that there is also a certain religious mood that runs through both the scientific and the artistic work. Those who really immerse themselves in this Goetheanum in Dornach will find that there is a certain unity between three human modes of revelation of the inner being of this human being - between science, religion and art. Of course, I am not talking about — and I would like to emphasize this — the founding of a new religion in Dornach. That is not at all what it is about. Rather, it is solely about the fact that what is created in science and art is at the same time imbued with a religious spirit.

My dear attendees! This modern civilization, which I have just characterized in other ways, is characterized by the fact that science, religion and art have increasingly fallen apart in it. It is the peculiarity of the modern mind that it wants to cultivate science for a completely different reason than that which is the content of religious life, and in turn, it wants nothing to do with the unity of science and art. Those views have basically faded away, of which Goethe still had some – the Goetheanum takes its name from him, perhaps for precisely the reasons I have just mentioned – faded away is that was still in Goethe's views, that science should be cultivated on the one hand by pursuing that which lies in the current of truth, but that art should also be created out of the same spirit.

It is well known that Goethe was also interested in science throughout his life. He studied in detail how plants develop their various forms and how animals are organically created through metamorphosis; he was involved in other sciences. In all of this, he had an artistic eye. He conceived of the artistic in such a way that, by grasping with the soul that which he can also penetrate scientifically, he then shapes it inwardly, so that that which he, on the one hand, makes his own without form, scientifically, takes shape within him, so that he can create the work of art from it. Goethe thought [of an intimate relationship] between the truth that should prevail in science and the truth that should prevail in art. These things have almost completely faded away today, and that is precisely because modern civilization is absolutely intent on regarding science, religion and art as three different fields that arise from different foundations of human life and that actually have nothing to do with each other.

This was not the case at the starting point of human development. From what we have today, it is extremely difficult for us to recognize this starting point. At the starting point of human development, it was the case that people had a special, different kind of knowledge — not the kind of knowledge that is particularly valued today, which only applies to external natural things and observes these external natural things with the armed human senses — that they combined with the ordinary human mind. No, at the starting point of human knowledge was the ability to combine everything that the eyes observe and that can be combined by the mind with a certain spiritual vision of things, a seeing through of the external world, so that, along with what the senses perceive and what the mind can combine, the inner spiritual entities, the inner essence of things, can also be revealed to the mind's eye.

And [in] that which man at the starting point of his development, and still for centuries to come – to which we can look back as not really that far back – into that knowledge which man acquired, was so imbued with spiritual substance that he perceived this spiritual substance, which came to him from science itself, at the same time as the divine-spiritual in nature, in everything, everything. He did not know a science for itself and something that was to be given to him spiritually through faith, but he knew a science that at the same time provided the observation of external nature and also that which underlies his natural things and his whole life as a spiritual being. In what science gave him, he knew the divine at the same time, so that science for him became at the same time the revealer of that which he could worship from the innermost part of his mind. That which his reason grasped appeared to his soul in such a way that he could worship it religiously at the same time. If we go back to those places that were both places of learning and places of worship in ancient times – to the mystery schools – we find that what was revealed there through science was at the same time the message of what permeates the world divinely. So that what the word of science expressed gave at the same time what human worship of the gods recalled.

And one can go further. That which was offered in this regard, on the one hand, as knowledge, and, on the other hand, as something that also engaged the human emotional life, so that man could satisfy his need to worship his divine through what he was allowed to know, was given to him in such a way that it was not abstract and passive, giving him mere head knowledge, so to speak, only allowing himself to be thought of, but it was given in such a way that it was full of life, that it intervened in his life in the same way as, say, external circumstances intervene in his life, some friendship, some other circumstances that permeate the whole person. Our present knowledge can leave us so cold that we go to laboratories to do research; when we are outside, we no longer occupy ourselves. Life is something separate from this research. Or we sit down at the table and pursue some kind of science. We pursue it as long as we sit at the table. Then life takes place outside.

But this life takes up the whole person. This life demands more than just mental effort. We have to throw ourselves into it with our whole personality. Concepts that can only be experienced in the laboratory today, that can only be experienced at the reading table and so on, concepts that only occupy the head, that only occupy reason and understanding, did not exist in the old places of learning. There were concepts that, like living forces, took hold of the whole person, like life itself, so that everything that was technology, and above all art, emerged from these ideas at the same time. One had acquired ideas through knowledge, through which one satisfied one's need for knowledge. At the same time, there was something in these ideas to which the mind and the feelings could surrender in adoration. The will was permeated by that which came to one, so that the will could pour it into external matter, that it could create technique in ordinary life, art in the elevated life. And in the cultic acts, there was nothing else to be done at the places of worship except to create something artistic and technical, full of life, out of that which was the content of knowledge and religion. Human knowledge, human feeling of reverence for the divine in the world, human creativity, they were one. Humanity could not have developed further into the forms of civilization into which it necessarily had to develop if life had remained uncomprehended. It is an enrichment of life that what was, so to speak, an undifferentiated unity at the starting point of humanity - and even in times like those that underlay older Greek civilization - has developed. It was absolutely necessary for humanity to go beyond these uncomprehended contents of civilization, to particularly develop a scientific field, a religious field, and an artistic field. But what has emerged as a result, ladies and gentlemen?

We have gradually acquired a religious field that we, as I said, want to save from the onslaughts of modern science, which are accepted by all people and are being accepted more and more by those who have not yet accepted them today. More and more, the longing has arisen to establish, alongside these demands and onslaughts of modern science, a field of faith in which science should not have a say, in which one should enlighten oneself about the most intimate, innermost, and most sacred matters of the human soul. And suddenly we have science, which does not want to say anything because it claims that it cannot say anything about the eternal, about the supersensible of the human soul, and faith, which certainly wants to say something, wants to reveal something reveal about this eternal, about this supersensible of the human soul, but which shrinks from giving that which it accepts any such significance as external science gives to its statements. One can define, one can somehow characterize such a separation. But in the long run one cannot live under such a separation, for the believing mind must feel constrained in the long run when science appears on the one hand and expounds its judgment with its claim to certainty over a certain field, and when the truth of faith wants to assert itself as a special way to the truth, which is precisely to provide information about the most important thing for the human soul.

Today we still do not see clearly in this area, and that is why we keep trying to justify this separation of science and faith. But humanity suffers from it. And what it suffers from this side often takes place in the subconscious. But it does not emerge in its original form into human life. As a result, the human being's own intellectual development is also restricted; he is driven to make judgments that are not sufficiently secure in life; he becomes jaded in his judgment. And if we ask today: Why do we so often find mere routine in practical life where clear insight and a realistic sense are needed? Why have we brought ourselves into such terrible, catastrophic times in practical life, in economic life? Then we have to say: Yes, that is where something comes into play that human judgment is unable to do. We just don't see the connection with something else.

For those who see the big picture, the fact that we have not developed such foresight in our external economic and practical lives, that our judgments in other words have become so short-sighted in this practical life that they have brought us social chaos, stems from the fact that we have by limiting our scientific judgment to that which can only be observed externally and combined with the intellect, and blunting this judgment when it comes to the most important matters of the soul, to the supersensible, the eternal part of the soul. The fact that we are brought up in school in such a way that we are not allowed to apply what we have been scientifically educated in to the understanding of the soul forms such a judgment in us that we then also have short-circuited thoughts when we are supposed to think economically, and this results in catastrophes.

And so we live today in the terrible tragedy that theorists, that representatives of religious denominations repeatedly and repeatedly declaim that the truths of faith must be kept separate from scientific truths, that this plays into our pedagogy, into our didactics. It must be recognized – and I address this to those present – that this is breeding the human shortsightedness that, I would say, subconsciously impacts practical judgment, the same shortsightedness that then also led us into the chaos of economic life. We must recognize these inner connections, for it is man himself who is decisive for life, not external economic conditions, not external institutions, but man alone is decisive for the external life. If a person is educated in the wrong direction in one area of practical life, it is the same in other areas. And if, on the one hand, a person is driven to a dullness of judgment, this dullness of judgment will be especially evident in practical areas where he is supposed to be insightful, where he is supposed to see through the world.

And again, my dear audience, the artistic at the starting point of humanity, I have just tried to characterize it, it was the case that man grasped the supersensible with the sensual at the same time, and that he gave the sensual forms from his grasp of the supersensible in art their character. Thus art revealed itself from the same source from which science and religion originated. Goethe sensed something of this connection when he spoke his remarkable, meaningful words:

He who possesses science and art, also has religion.
He who possesses neither, may have religion.

But such views and feelings have actually completely disappeared today, and that is why we have arrived at a situation in art where, on the one hand, we have fallen into pure naturalism, making imitation of nature the only thing we strive for. And since in more recent times people have grown tired of this imitation, since they finally realized that with this imitation of nature, with this mere naturalism, basically nothing can be offered that in any way surpasses nature - because after all when someone is merely naturalistic, one must say that one still prefers to look at nature rather than at what he merely wants to imitate, because as far as nature goes, one cannot go in art if one merely wants to imitate. Once this had been recognized, people now sought - and this is quite understandable and even justified from a certain point of view - people now sought from within, in expressionism and in all kinds of other currents, they sought to capture in color and form that which is not in nature but which the human being can experience in his or her inner being, somehow in color and form. This is a quest that is, once again, something that represents a task for our time, also in the artistic fields.

So we see that, to a certain extent, art, too, has gone astray by separating itself from the other areas of human spiritual striving. But this differentiation had to occur – I said it before – otherwise human civilization would not have been able to progress. But today we are again living in a time when that which has separated from each other is having such an effect in the separation that, as man lets it affect him, this man begins to tear himself apart. We gradually came to live as a human race in a science that teaches us about the outer world in a wonderful way, but which, as we penetrate into it, alienates us from precisely that which we need if we want to be enlightened about our own soul. And we have come to a religious life that, I would say, had to create its own realm of truth because it did not dare to summon science itself to penetrate the transcendental through the same means it uses to penetrate the sensual. And art turned to nature or turns to all kinds of random human experiences in Impressionism, Expressionism, Naturalism and so on, and so on, in order to have its independent position. But then one surrenders to this art.

One must, so to speak, split and cleave that which is a unity in man: thinking, feeling and willing. That which lives externally, by acting on man, divides man. Today we have definitely reached a point in human development where man has lost himself in such a way that the various most important, essential branches of knowledge of his activity - the scientific, the religious and the artistic branches - have diverged to such an extent that he is no longer able to hold them together.

Do you see, dear attendees, this is what someone must feel who, on the one hand, has an unbiased mind to see through the right tendencies of the civilization of our time, and on the other hand, has a heart and an understanding for what is missing in our time in practical, economic, spiritual, educational and training terms, and what has brought us to the brink of disaster. Anyone who has a real heart for the hardship and misery of our time, and on the other hand can look impartially at how human souls are divided, will see a connection between the two, because they see that what has taken on catastrophic forms in life today stems from the fact that people are divided within and do not know how to place themselves in life.

Spiritual science, as one of the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach, faces this. This spiritual science speaks of it - and I have often presented the details in these lectures here. Today I would like to refer to these lectures and only point them out, but you can also find them in my writings “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in my “Occult Science” and so on, explained in detail. This spiritual science, as it is to be cultivated in Dornach, as it is to be gradually incorporated into civilization through the Goetheanum, it speaks of the fact that there is not only such knowledge as that which adheres to external sensory observation, to the arming of the external senses - telescope, microscope and so on, and to the combining mind, but that man bears within himself abilities which are latent, hidden, in ordinary life, in ordinary science, which can be brought down by the means which I have indicated in the writings mentioned and presented here in the earlier [lectures]. This spiritual science speaks of how ordinary, objective, external knowledge can work its way through to a higher knowledge: imagination, inspiration, intuition in the deeper sense. This spiritual science speaks of various levels of knowledge that in turn lead into the supersensible, that carry knowledge itself up into the supersensible realm.

And if one develops such methods of knowledge in this way, my dear audience, then one acquires a special position in relation to modern science. Above all, this modern scientific approach has truly come a long way in the most diverse fields! Let us just think – we could also examine another field here, but let us just think of what has emerged in more recent times as the theory of evolution. We need not think of extreme materialistic Darwinism, only of the theory of development as it has been established in recent times, and how it has been conscientiously and methodically developed for the most diverse spheres. We will say: in relation to all that could be achieved, great things have been achieved. In relation to form and essence, we can indeed survey the ever more perfect from the less perfect, and we can say: at the top of this series stands the human being. We can see a connection between the human being and the other beings. We can, by surveying something like this, remain entirely in the realm of external, objective knowledge.

But, dear ladies and gentlemen, in this way the human being is not understood. This is, I would say, only one particular aspect of what I said earlier. The human being is not understood by applying the methods of modern science to nature and to the human being, as we have been accustomed to doing until today. Something else is needed for that. But if we work our way up from this ordinary knowledge, as it is cultivated today, to what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science calls the imagination, where what is otherwise only grasped in the abstract is transformed into a pictorial concept, but a pictorial concept that is neither a dream nor a fantasy, but which carries within it the certainty that one is dealing with the image of a spiritual, not a physical reality - if one has developed oneself to this imagination, to this conception of the image through the supersensible powers of knowledge, as I have described them in my book ” How to Know Higher Worlds?», then one sees, while standing cognizantly before the human being, already presented in his form: one cannot comprehend him with the means of today's science; one must let thinking pass over into quite different inner soul experiences if one wants to comprehend the human being.

One can say that a human being has so-and-so many bones, and can compare these with the number of bones of higher animals; one can count the muscles, can look at the shape of the heart, can do all this with the means of ordinary science; but then there comes a point where this ordinary science leads nowhere, where it is transformed merely inwardly in the soul life , where one must try to grasp that in the human being which can only be grasped through imagination, where one must look at the human being – even just at his form when he stands before us – and say to oneself: Yes, the human being has just as many bones as the higher animals, but these bones are raised out of certain forms, they are given other forms. One can examine the metabolism of the higher animals, and one can then look at the metabolism of the human being. If you look at it with imaginative knowledge, you will find it to be set apart, you will find that the human being has been placed in the world differently if you look at the whole thing spiritually from the point of view of imaginative knowledge.

But what happens there? What happens there is nothing less than that what is otherwise abstract intellectual and observational knowledge gradually transforms into artistic perception. Now, my dear audience, no matter how much you rail against this artistic understanding of the human being when you have gone through the whole series of animals with the means of ordinary science, you can say: Art is not something that science understands. Certainly, someone can find the most beautiful logical reasons to prove that art has nothing to do with science. Let him do so, and he will be proved right with regard to everything that he logically invents and arrives at. All those who say: 'Science, as we understand it, must not be influenced by any artistic grasp of reality' will be proved right.

But there is something else to consider, dear attendees. If reality is such that it does not yield to this kind of knowledge, if reality is such that it can only be approached through artistic comprehension, through the transition of abstract concepts into imaginative-artistic forms, then no matter how long man may debate that art has nothing to do with science, then he must admit that with his science he remains outside of reality and that if he wants to enter into this reality, he must transform this science into an artistic understanding of reality. But that is where anthroposophically oriented spiritual science leads to. Reality does not arise from those abstractions and scientific methods, not even from those who work with telescopes and microscopes, who work with X-ray machines and with spectral analysis; reality does not arise from this external nature, but only when the concepts that have been acquired in science are transformed into art at the highest level. Then one also sees the human form artistically. And it is this artistic understanding, this artistic comprehension that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science leads to.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, this is one of the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach. We do not negate what is achieved in the laboratories, in the physics institutes, in the clinic, or in the astronomical observatory. On the contrary, we want to establish such institutions, permeated by our spiritual science, so that the methods of spiritual science can be brought into them. That is what is available in the form of the Goetheanum, the central building, in Dornach. Such institutions must be affiliated to it, precisely in order that the methodology which allows spirit to be recognized from the experiments and from observation may be carried into the laboratory, into the physics institute; at the same time, that which, for example, bridges the gap between pathology and therapy in the field of medicine, where in therapy we have to take the remedies from the greater world, the macrocosm, and apply them to the human being, the microcosm.

That is what makes the Dornach method, through its strict scientific nature, lead to the artistic, by showing that when we develop the develops the powers of his soul, rises from ordinary knowledge and the science of ordinary life to imagination, one rises at the same time to where science, by remaining strictly scientific, enters into artistic comprehension. In turn, we return to what Goethe sensed in the past. In a modern sense, what was at the starting point of human development, and what had to differentiate and separate for a while in human development so that civilization could advance, but which would now shatter the human being if he did not find union again, is developed.

But we do not have to somehow glue the artistic to the scientific on the outside; symbolism or allegory is quite foreign to us, but we want to shape reality itself. We want to be scientific, much stricter than one is accustomed to in our educational institutions today. But precisely because we have the scientific method and not only want to conceive of its end, but also want to experience it, what scientific life is flows into an artistic grasp so that full reality can be grasped. And that is why we can also grasp from the spirit itself in what we outwardly present in artistic forms.

This is the aspect of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that creates the bridge between science and art, the bridge that once existed, the bridge that must be found again and that will be fruitful for all individual scientific fields, but which at the same time will lead to our soul being so stimulated by what we work on from the most diverse scientific fields soul will be so stimulated that our ideas will not remain dry, empty, abstract, pedantic, philistine ideas, but will become life in our soul, both science and art, not as an allegorical, straw-like art, but as an art that brings into this outer, sensual reality a sensual image of the supersensible, of the spiritual world.

And, dear attendees, that is how it is with inspiration. It is the next stage after imagination, as you can follow in the books mentioned. There, the spiritual that permeates the world reveals itself in the human being, not only that the images fill him as in imagination, but the spiritual itself penetrates.

He who wants to deny this spiritual aspect stands in relation to the world in a higher sense than he who wanted to claim that man does not live on the inhaled air, which he in turn wanted to release into the outside world. In this moment, man is inwardly that which was just outside of him. He processes this air inwardly; he releases it again. Just as one cannot claim that this air comes from an organism, but it is that which connects him with the whole great world, so it is with the spiritual. Man experiences something spiritual within himself. But this spiritual is such that it is related to all the rest of the world's spirituality. There is a continuous inhaling and exhaling of the spiritual in man. I can only hint at this here. It is that which becomes conscious in man when he rises to the method of knowledge of inspiration. He then experiences within himself that which is otherwise experienced as the spiritual spread throughout the whole world; it is that which he experiences in the air that is in him and is processed in him [and] the air that is outside of him. But by experiencing this inspiration, he experiences the spirituality of the world. He permeates himself within with that which, as divine-spiritual, permeates the world. What the soul is can only be grasped if it is understood as part of the spirituality of the whole world. Therefore, only inspiration can reveal to us the essence of the human soul. Just as we rise from mere outer knowledge, from mere knowledge to the artistic grasp of full reality through imagination, so we can only rise to grasp the soul through inspiration. And this inspiration is at the same time that which imbues the soul with the living knowledge it contains of its eternal character, of its eternal essence, of its supersensible essence. We do not need a special field of truth for this belief, but rather the elevation of the field of knowledge itself to inspired knowledge, which reflects the essence of our soul.

In tomorrow's lecture, I will have to speak in more detail about this relationship between the soul-spiritual, the immortal in the soul, in connection with the so-called inner nature of nature, following on from what we have discussed today. For now, I will only say that what the soul must experience as its most important thing must be taken precisely from what, in earlier times, was also a matter of religious conviction. But because today humanity has educated itself in such a way that it can only believe in a certain amount of scientific knowledge, this scientific knowledge itself must be elevated to the religious.

Thus, arising from inner knowledge itself, we have an artistic element and a religious element at the same time. This is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is intended to make clear to humanity. The building of the Goetheanum in Dornach is intended to be a living testimony to this, because this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to convey the living spirit, not the dead, abstract spirit. That is why he gives artists the opportunity to create artistic forms out of the same spirit in their own building, and that is why, because he conveys the living spirit, not an abstract spirit, he gives the whole work a religious mood. He gives that which existed at the starting point of human development as a unity, as a scientific-religious-artistic unity.

This is what the human mind needs today if it is to play an active and active role in social life. From what one acquires for one's activity, for the inner mood of the human soul, there can then arise that which also provides an external, practical judgment. Therefore, one does not shy away from basing it on what lives in Dornach — which initially could not live naturally other than by forming the Dornach Goetheanum itself into a unity — that this that carries this out, founds something like the 'Futurum', which wants to bring the same way of judging, the same way of thinking, into practical life, in order to bring this realistic way of thinking into practical life.

Dear attendees! This Goetheanum is not just a single structure, erected to serve a quirk, to have something that is the same in its external style as what is thought, practiced and researched within, but this Goetheanum is a unified concept the reason that what underlies its origin is oriented towards that unity, towards which humanity must strive today out of its tasks of the time, because it strives towards what humanity needs in the broadest sphere of life for the recovery of social reality. The Goetheanum in Dornach is designed in this way because the way of thinking on which it is based is intended to reach into that which, through its fissures, through its lack of unity, has led to the catastrophes of the present. The Goetheanum does not want to be just a model; the Goetheanum wants to be the place where one can acquire, cognitively, artistically, creatively, religiously, emotionally, that which one needs today in order to engage with the great tasks of the time, including social tasks.

Once again it must be said: social life demands of man not only that other institutions be created. We can create as many other institutions as we like that seem paradisiacal to us; if man remains an anti-social being, if the social does not well up from the depths of his soul, then no possible social order can arise. It is man himself who is to become a social being. Then the institutions will also find each other when the human being is inwardly inspired by social impulses in the right way.

This is what we want to live in Dornach, this is what we want to give to the Goetheanum in Dornach as its tasks, not what the detractors say or what those claim who say that some obscure sect has founded some kind of home on the Dornach hill. Dornach is not based on that, but on honest observation and heartfelt compassion for the great tasks of the time, living into the great tasks of the time, both in those that are given to human knowledge, in that precisely with the great progress of science, new puzzles are given to us, that with the progress of technology, new tasks for life are given to us. Therefore, my dear audience, because one has a heart and mind for this task of knowledge, for these riddles of knowledge, for these tasks of life, riddles of life, one is connected if one really understands what is to be done with the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach. For if one looks at the matter in the right light, then one should at least strive to be able to answer the question: What are the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach? They are the tasks that are the tasks, the great tasks of modern knowledge and modern life.

Dear attendees,

Anyone who speaks on a topic such as this evening's topic and the one I will be speaking on the 27th of this month must be aware, especially with regard to the spiritual life of the present day, that there are numerous souls today who long for a new impetus, for a renewal and metamorphosis of of important parts of our entire civilizational life, out of many things that today clearly bear the hallmark that, if continued, would lead humanity into the decline of civilization, out of many things that have been the civilizing current for a century or two or more. We find this especially in those souls who are trying to look most deeply into their own inner being in the present. We can say that whatever needs to be said about the supersensible worlds can be spoken to every human soul at any time. It can be spoken, one might say, to the hermit who has withdrawn completely from the world and is only interested in his immediate surroundings; it can also be spoken to personalities who are fully involved in life. For what is at issue here is, after all, a thoroughly human matter.

But it is not from these points of view alone, dear ladies and gentlemen, that I would like to speak to you today and on the 27th, but rather from the point of view that arises when one allows the most important civilizational issues of the present to take effect on one's soul. And there, especially leading souls find much that shakes them to the core, that drives them in their innermost being to long for a renewal of certain parts of spiritual life.

If we survey the situation in which we find ourselves in the spiritual life of the present, I would say we can trace it back to two main questions. One of these questions is illuminated by the scientific life, by the form of scientific life that has been observed within the civilized world for three to four centuries. The other of these questions is illuminated directly by practical life, but also by that practical life that has experienced the deepest influences from modern science.

Let us first look at what modern science has brought forth. I would like to say, precisely in order to avoid being misunderstood, that what I am representing here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should by no means be opposed to the spirit of modern science. The great triumphs and significant results of this modern scientific spirit are to be fully recognized by the spiritual science meant here. But precisely because this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to penetrate with an unbiased soul into the spirit of this science, it must go beyond what has become the object of a general human education from this scientific spirit. In its specific disciplines, this science provides precise and conscientious information about many aspects of the human environment. But when the human soul asks about its highest concerns, about its deepest, its eternal destiny, it cannot receive any information within the spirit of science, especially not when it consults with itself quite honestly and quite impartially. And so today we find numerous souls who, out of more or less religious needs, long for a renewal of old worldviews.

What is external science, in particular anthropological science, is already drawing attention to the fact that our ancestors centuries ago did not know what is dividing and fragmenting human souls today: a certain disharmony between scientific knowledge and religious feeling, religious longing. If we look back to ancient times, it was the same human beings who cultivated a science that seems childlike to us today, but only seems childlike, and who, from this science, at the same time kindled the religious spirit in humanity. There was no discord between these two currents of thought.

Many souls today long for something like this. But one cannot say that a renewal of ancient Chaldean, ancient Egyptian, ancient Indian or other wisdom teachings would bring a special blessing to the present age. Those who believe this do not understand the true spirit of human development. Human development is such that each age has a special character, that in each age human souls want to be satisfied by something different. And what our souls need, simply by virtue of the fact that we live in the 20th century and have received our education from the 20th century, must be something different from what people of a distant past needed for their souls. Therefore, a renewal of old worldviews cannot serve the present. But one can orient oneself to what those old worldviews were. We will then see what actually gave rise to the satisfaction that human souls experienced within those old worldviews. We have to admit that the satisfaction for human souls in those days arose from the fact that they basically had a completely different relationship to scientific knowledge than we have today.

I would like to draw your attention to a phenomenon, my dear audience. If you point it out today, you are very easily accused of paradox or fantasy. But there is much that needs to be said that, just a few years ago, would have been considered highly dangerous for general education. After all, the last catastrophic years have at least brought about a change in the way we think and feel. And today, souls are better prepared than they were even ten years ago for the fact that the deepest truths may nevertheless initially appear paradoxical and fantastic to our habitual ways of thinking and feeling.

In ancient times, people spoke of something that, in view of scientific knowledge, is hardly questioned today, but which people will speak of again, probably also in the context of general education, in a relatively short time: of the Guardian of the Threshold, of the from the ordinary world in which we live in everyday life, in which we live with ordinary science, to that higher world in which man can recognize how he himself, with his supersensible, inner being, belongs to a supersensible world. Between these two worlds, the world that man perceives with his senses, the facts of which he can combine with his mind into natural laws, and the world to which man belongs with his actual being, one saw an abyss in those ancient times. One first had to cross this abyss. Within the old civilizations, only those who had been intensively prepared by the directors of the educational institutions of those days, which we now call 'mysteries', were allowed to cross this abyss. Today, we have different views on how to prepare for science and for a life of scientific research. In those ancient times, it was said that an unprepared person should not be allowed to receive higher knowledge about the nature of man at all. Why did they say this?

The reason for this can only be understood by someone who, going beyond ordinary historical knowledge, gains an insight into what the human soul has gone through in the course of human development. Today, we only have a knowledge of the externalities of human development. No attention is paid to the state of the soul. For example, no attention is paid to the state of the soul of people who have stood in the ancient oriental wisdom, of which only decadent forms still live in the Orient today. Basically, people have no idea how different the souls were in the world in those days. People in those days, just like us, saw the nature around them with their senses; they also combined in a certain way what they saw of nature with their minds. But they did not feel as separate from the nature around them as people today feel. They felt a spiritual soul within themselves. They felt that the human physical organization was filled with a spiritual soul. But they also felt a spiritual soul in lightning and thunder, in the passing clouds, in minerals, in plants, and in animals. They felt that which they suspected within themselves also outside in nature, in the whole universe. The whole universe was permeated by spiritual soul for them.

But they lacked something that we humans have today within our state of mind: they did not have such a pronounced, intense self-awareness as we do. Their self-awareness was duller, more dreamy than ours today. This was still the case even in Greek times. One can only understand later Greek culture if one imagines the souls of people in the Greek era as being in the same state as our souls. In earlier Greek culture, there can be no question of a state of soul such as ours. There was still a vague sense within nature. I would say: just as if my finger had a consciousness and then felt itself as one with my entire organism, as it could not conceive of itself as being separated from my organism, without which it would die, so man felt himself within the whole of nature, [unseparated] from it.

And those ancient sages who were the leaders of those schools of which I have spoken, they said to themselves: This is the moral in human self-awareness. But this self-awareness must not look at the world in such a way that it appears to be spiritless, soulless. If this state of mind were to face a world that is more spiritually empty – a world, I might add, that we perceive in our science, in our everyday life – then the souls of human beings would be overcome by a spiritual powerlessness.

This mental fainting was recognized by the ancient wisdom teachers in those people who were to arrive at such a world view as we have. Yes, can it be said at all that these ancient wisdom teachers said to themselves that souls should not arrive at such a world view as we say we have today? Yes, that can be said. And I would like to give you an example of this. Many examples could be cited, but I will highlight just one.

Dear participants, today we are justifiably satisfied that we no longer view the external and spatial structure of the world in a medieval way, based only on outward appearances. We stand on the standpoint of the Copernican world view, which is a heliocentric one. The medieval man believed that the Earth was at the center of the planetary system, and indeed of the entire star system, and that the sun and the other stars moved around the Earth. The heliocentric solar system brought about a complete reversal of all relationships, and today we hold fast to this reversal as something that we already absorb in our ordinary school education, in which we are immersed with all our education. We look back at the people of the Middle Ages, we look back at the people of ancient times, who in their Ptolemaic world system saw that which I have just characterized, the geocentric. But by no means did all people in those ancient times accept only the geocentric world system. We need only read Plutarch's account of the world system of an ancient Greek wise man of the pre-Christian era, Aristarchus of Samos. Aristarchus of Samos already places the sun at the center of our planetary system; he has the earth revolve around the sun. And if we take, not in the details, about which recent natural science has brought so much, but in the main features, the heliocentric system of Aristarchus of Samos, then it basically completely agrees with the one that is ours today.

What do we actually have here? Well, the world system that Aristarchus of Samos merely revealed was the one taught in the ancient schools of wisdom. Outwardly, people were left with the world system of appearances. Why was that so? Why were they allowed to keep this world picture of appearances? Well, it was said: Before a person can advance to this heliocentric world system, he must first cross the threshold to a different world than the one in which he lives. In his ordinary life, he is protected by the invisible Guardian of the Threshold, under whom these ancients imagined a very real, albeit supersensible being. He is protected from suddenly opening his eyes as if he were seeing the world, dead, de-spirited. For it is in a dead and spiritless way that we see the world today. We look at it and form our view of nature through the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, and we see it as dead and spiritless. When we form ideas about the path and movements of the heavenly bodies at the observatory with the help of a telescope and calculations, we see the world as dead and spiritless. The ancient wisdom teachers of the mysteries knew that the world could also be seen in this way. They conveyed these insights after the preparation, after they had led their students past the Guardian of the Threshold, but they prepared the students through strict training of the will. How was this willpower given to the students? By leading the students through privations, but also by encouraging them for many years to strictly obey the pure morals prescribed to them by the wisdom teachers. The will had to be strictly disciplined, and this willpower was to strengthen self-awareness. And when the disciples had progressed from a dreamy, dull self-awareness to a more intense self-awareness, only then were they shown what lay beyond the threshold for them: the world that, in the heliocentric system, represents outer space. But they were also shown many other things that we now recognize as the content of our everyday worldview.

So it was that the pupils of those ancient times were first prepared, carefully prepared, before they were taught what, so to speak, every schoolboy and schoolgirl today absorbs. So times change, so do civilizations. One simply gets a false idea of the development of humanity if one only knows the outer history, not this history of the human soul.

What had the students of the old wisdom schools brought with them to the threshold of the supersensible world? They had brought with them an instinctive knowledge of the world, which arose, as it were, from the instincts, from the drives of their bodies. Through these, they saw — today we call this animism — everything outside as ensouled and spiritualized. They felt the kinship of man with the world. They felt their spirit within the spirit of the world. But to see the world here as we learn to see it today, already in elementary school, these ancients had to be prepared.

Dearly beloved attendees, in all the various types of literature that amateurishly tackle mysticism, even if they sometimes give the impression of being scholarly, there is a lot of talk about the Guardian of the Threshold, about the threshold into the spiritual world. And they are often believed all the more, the more nebulous mysticism one pours out about these things.

What I have presented to you now is what arises for the unbiased spiritual researcher precisely through what the ancients called the threshold into the spiritual world. Not those nebulous things, of which some orders and some sects and the like speak today, were sought beyond the threshold, but precisely that which is general education with us today. But at the same time we see from this that we face the world with a different self-awareness. The old wisdom teachers feared that their students, if they had not first strengthened their self-confidence through self-discipline, would have become mentally impotent if, for example, they had adopted the idea: The earth does not stand still, but circles around the sun at great speed; one circles around the sun with the earth. This loss of ground under their feet would have been unbearable for the ancients, it would have dampened their self-confidence to the point of unconsciousness. We learn to endure this from childhood on. We live, as it were, in the world as our world of education, into which the ancients had to penetrate only after careful preparation.

Nevertheless, we should not long for the conditions of ancient civilizations. They no longer fit with what nourishes our souls today. What I am presenting to you today as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is neither a renewal of old Gnostic teachings nor an ancient oriental wisdom, which could only be brought to human souls today as something decadent. It is something that can be found today through elementary creative power from this human soul, in the ways that I will explain in a moment. But first, I would like to point out that in a sense we can also speak of a threshold into the supersensible world, or in any case into a world other than that of ordinary life and ordinary science.

The ancients suspected a different world from the one presented to them in their everyday life beyond the threshold. But what do we hear from our conscientious natural scientists, from those who are most right in terms of their methods? We hear that natural science presents us with limits to knowledge. We hear about “ignorabimus” and the like, and, it must be emphasized, within natural science with full justification. If the ancients lacked the intense self-awareness that we have today, then we lack something else.

Where did we get this intense self-awareness in the first place? We got it from the fact that the way of thinking and the way of looking at things that began with Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Giordano Bruno and so on came into humanity. As a result, we have not only gained a sum of knowledge, but modern humanity has also undergone a certain education of its soul life. Everything that we have developed under the influence of the way of thinking of these minds in modern times tends to cultivate the intellect, the powers of reason. Of course, today we experiment in science, we observe carefully and conscientiously. We observe the phenomena around us with our instruments, with the telescope, the microscope, with X-rays, with the spectroscope, and we use our intellect, so to speak, only to extract the laws of nature from the phenomena. But despite all this, what are we doing when we observe, when we experiment? We are doing it in such a way that within this work of knowledge we only let the intellect speak in formulating the laws of nature. And it is also the case that, in the course of the last three, four, five hundred years, it is primarily the intellect that has been emphasized in human development. But the mind has the peculiarity of strengthening, hardening and intensifying human self-awareness.

Therefore, today we can endure what even the ancient Greeks could not have endured: the awareness that we move with the earth in the bottomless, as it were, around the sun. But on the other hand, precisely because of this strengthened self-awareness, which shows us the world as soulless and spiritless, we are led to lack a realization that souls must nevertheless long for: We see the world in its material phenomena, its material facts, as they have never been seen by ancient people without a preparation of the mysteries. But we do not see - and that is why conscientious naturalists speak of ignorabimus and of the limits of knowledge - we do not see the world of a spiritual around us.

We stand as human beings in this world. When we reflect on ourselves, we have to say to ourselves: it is the spirit that is active in us simply by thinking about things, by summarizing the experiments, by summarizing the observations. But is this spirit the same as the hermit who stands in a world of material appearances? Is this spirit only present in our body? Is the world spiritless and soulless, as we have to understand it from the point of view of the physical and biological sciences, and rightly so? Today we stand before our environment. We are standing on the threshold of a new era. This has certainly not yet dawned on the broadest sections of humanity. But what humanity does not fully realize is not completely extinguished in the soul. One does not think about things, but inwardly these things sit as feelings of the soul. We have an unconscious soul life. For most people it remains unconscious. But out of this unconsciousness arises the longing to cross a threshold again, to gain spiritual knowledge of the world through self-awareness.

Now, whatever else one may call these things, which one usually feels only unclearly, they are in truth, from one side, the deepest riddle of civilization; they are such that people feel that a spiritual world around them must be found again. The world of ordinary science, devoid of spirit and soul, cannot be the one with which the human soul also forms a unity in its deepest essence. This is the first great civilizational question of the present: How do we again find knowledge that at the same time deepens our religious feeling? How do we find knowledge that at the same time satisfies the deepest needs for a sense of the eternal in the human soul?

It can be said that this modern science has brought great and powerful things, but for the unbiased person it has not actually brought solutions, but rather, one might say, the opposite of solutions. And we should be satisfied and glad about that too. What can we do with modern science? Can we solve the questions of the soul? No, but we can ask them in greater depth! Through this modern science, we have before us the world of material facts in their purity, free from what the human being brings into the world of soulfulness and spirituality from his or her subjectivity. We see, so to speak, the pure phenomena of the external material world. Through this, we get to know the questions of the soul more intensely. This is precisely the achievement of the modern spirit of science: it has brought us new riddles, deeper riddles. This is the first great question of civilization in the present time: How do we face these deeper riddles? One cannot solve the great soul questions in the Haeckelian, Huxleyan, Spencerian spirit, but one can, in this spirit, feel the great riddle questions for the existence of humanity today more intensely than ever before.

This is where spiritual science comes in. Its aim is to guide humanity today, in accordance with its nature, over the renewed threshold into a spiritual world. And the way by which modern man can cross the threshold differently from the ancient man, it is to be described here today in outline. I can only do this in brief strokes. What I only want to explain in principle can be found in more detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in my “Occult Science” and in other writings.

I would first like to draw attention to the starting point that a person who wants to become a spiritual researcher must take today. He must start from a point that, due to the whole of our time, people today are least willing to accept. It is the point in the soul's makeup that I would like to call intellectual modesty. Although we have developed intellectually to a height never before seen in human development as humanity to a particular height in the last three to four centuries, as a spiritual researcher one must rise precisely to intellectual modesty.

I would like to illustrate what I mean by comparing it. Let us take a five-year-old child and give him a volume of Shakespeare. What would he do with it? He will play with it, leaf through it, tear it up; he will not do what is appropriate with it. But when the child has lived for another ten or fifteen years, he will relate to the volume of Shakespeare quite differently. What has happened? Well, abilities that were inherent in the child have been developed in the child through external intervention by people, through education and teaching. It has become a different being in the course of ten to fifteen years. Intellectual modesty allows the person to say, even when he is an adult, when he has absorbed the current education in science intellectually: you could face nature and the environment in such a way that your approach could be compared to that of a five-year-old child facing Shakespeare's works. There could still be potential in you that can be further developed, so that you become a different being in terms of soul and spirit.

People today are not very keen on adopting the point of view of such intellectual modesty. Our habits of thinking and feeling towards the life of education are different. Those who have received the usual education today are then accepted into our higher educational institutions. There, one no longer has to deal with the development of knowledge, willpower, and the abilities of the soul. Basically, one remains within the scientific research at the point of view that inheritance and ordinary education give. Certainly, observation was broadened in an incredible way through experiment and science, but the same powers of cognition were applied that one has once in so-called modern intellectual life. One did not aim at developing one's human being to bring these powers of cognition further. One did not say to oneself: the person who has these powers of knowledge of life or science could stand opposite nature as a five-year-old child stands opposite Shakespeare's works, and he could develop powers and abilities of knowledge within himself that would lead him to a completely different behavior towards nature. But this is said by someone who, in the sense of the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science meant here, wants to become a researcher in the supersensible worlds. This is really about the development of human abilities that initially only exist in the Anlagen, albeit in every human being, but in order for them to be developed, a great deal has to be gone through.

I am not talking, dear listeners, about some kind of miraculous or even superstitious measures for the human soul, but rather about the development of abilities that every person is well acquainted with, that play a major role in everyday life and in ordinary science; they are just not developed to their full potential for the human being between birth and death.

There are many such abilities, but today I would like to characterize only two in their further development. You can find more details about this in the books mentioned. First of all, there is the ability to remember. This ability to remember is absolutely necessary for everyday life. We know, and those who are particularly interested in such things will know from the psycho-pathological literature, what it means for a healthy mental life that the memory is intact up to a point in childhood that lies quite early; that there is no period in life from which memory images do not emerge, bringing to mind the experiences we have gone through. If that which memory is extinguishes, then the human ego is destroyed; a severe mental illness has come over him. Now, what memory gives us is a re-emergence in pale or vivid images. It is precisely this ability, this power, that can be further developed. What is its peculiarity? Well, otherwise the experiences flit past us. The images we form of these experiences also flit past our soul. Memory retains them. I can only speak about this memory in sketchy terms; in my literature you will find a developed science precisely about this ability to remember.

What memory does with the otherwise fleeting images is that it gives them duration. This is what one first takes up and develops in the spiritual scientific method; one develops it through what I call meditation and concentration in the books mentioned. This consists of either seeking advice from someone who has experience in these matters or gleaning the advice oneself from the relevant literature, and of taking easily comprehensible complexes of images such as are geometric or mathematical figures, which one completely overlooks, knowing that these are not reminiscences from life emerging from the subconscious, but everything one has in consciousness is there through one's own arbitrariness in consciousness. One is not subject to auto-suggestion or reverie; one surveys that which one brings into the center of consciousness. Then one remains in consciousness for a long time with complete inner calm on this idea. Just as muscles develop when they perform a particular kind of work, so certain soul powers develop when the soul devotes itself to this unusual activity of remaining on such ideas. It looks easy, and not only do some believe that the spiritual scientist draws what he has to say from some kind of influence, but some also believe that what I am describing here as methods that take place in the inner, intimate life of the soul itself is easy. No, what I am telling you now also requires a long time; some people can do it more easily, others more difficultly. The depth of the performance is much more important than the length of time spent in such meditation.

But one must do such exercises for years. And what one has to accomplish within the soul is truly no easier than what one accomplishes in the laboratory, in the physics room, or at the observatory. Outward research is no more difficult to acquire than that which is carefully and conscientiously cultivated in the soul over many years. But then certain inner soul powers, which we otherwise only know as powers of remembrance, become stronger, and thus something arises in us as soul power that we have not known at all before. This enables us to clearly recognize what materialism says about the power of memory and remembrance. Materialism tells us that the human being's power of remembrance is bound to the material body; if something in the nervous system is not properly constituted, then the power of remembrance also declines, and it declines with age. In any case, mental powers depend on physical development. Spiritual science does not deny this for the life between birth and death. For someone who is developing his memory as I have just described it knows from direct experience how the ordinary memory, which conjures up images of our experiences before our soul, is dependent on the human body. But what he is now developing becomes completely independent of the human body. And the human being experiences how one can live in a soul realm, so that one has supersensible experiences in this soul realm, just as one has sensory experiences in the physical body. I would like to explain to you how these supersensible experiences are in the following way.

You know that human life alternates rhythmically between waking and sleeping. The moments of falling asleep and waking up and the intervening period of sleep occur in our waking life. What happens then? The following is present for the ordinary consciousness: when we fall asleep, our consciousness is dulled, and in most people it reaches absolute zero. Dreams sometimes bubble up out of this half-dulled consciousness. In this state, the person is indeed alive; otherwise he would have to pass away and be reborn, in a soul-spiritual sense, but his consciousness is paralyzed. This is because from falling asleep until waking up, the human being does not use his senses, does not use the impulses that represent his organic will impulses.

But the one who has developed the higher ability out of the ability to remember, which I have just mentioned, can switch off precisely the same. Such a spiritual researcher comes to the point where he no longer needs to see with his eyes, as one does not see with one's eyes when asleep; nor to hear with his ears, as one also does not hear with one's ears when asleep; nor to feel the warmth in the surroundings, nor to use the will impulses that work through the muscles, or through the human organization in general. He can shut out all physical things. And yet his consciousness is not dulled as it is when asleep, but he is able to devote himself to states in which otherwise a person is only in sleep, but unconscious; the spiritual researcher is fully conscious. Just as the sleeping person is surrounded by a dark world that contains nothing for him, so the spiritual researcher is surrounded by a world that has nothing to do with our sensual world, but which is just as full and intense as our sensual world. We face our sensory world through our senses; the spiritual researcher faces the supersensible world when he can consciously free himself from the body, when he is in a state that is otherwise experienced by a person between falling asleep and waking up; but he is fully aware in this state.

In this way, one learns to recognize that a supersensible world constantly surrounds us, just as a sensual world otherwise surrounds us. However, there is one significant difference: in the sensual world, we perceive facts through our senses, and within the facts, we also perceive entities. Facts predominate, and entities arise in the course of these facts. In the supersensible world that we open up for ourselves in this way, we first encounter entities. When we open our spiritual eyes to see the supersensible world, we are surrounded by real entities. And at first it is a world of very concrete, real, supersensible entities in which we are, not yet a world of facts; we still have to conquer that through something else.

So this is the achievement of modern anthroposophically oriented spiritual science: that the human being crosses a threshold again and learns to enter a different world from the one that otherwise surrounds him. And when a person learns to recognize how he is independent of the body, then he finally comes to say to himself: Not only when the soul falls asleep does it, as it were, separate itself from the body and then return to the body when it wakes up; through the desire for the body lying in bed, it returns. Through such supersensible knowledge one also comes to really get to know the essence of the soul, how it returns to the body through this desire when waking up. But if you acquire such real concepts of falling asleep and waking up, these concepts will eventually expand to include learning to recognize the human soul in its essence, as it was before it descended from the spiritual worlds through birth or conception into a physical body that is given to it through inheritance.

Once you have grasped and learned to follow the soul outside the body between falling asleep and waking up, just as you learn to recognize the lesser forces that draw the soul to the body in bed, you learn to recognize the soul as it lives when it is freed from the body after passing through the gate of death. In particular, the following ideas are recorded: One learns to recognize why the human soul has only a duller consciousness during sleep. It has this because the desire for the body lives in it. This desire for the body dulls consciousness between falling asleep and waking up to the point of unconsciousness. When a person passes through the gate of death, this desire no longer exists. And by getting to know the soul through the developed ability to remember, one gets to know it precisely in the state in which it develops after passing through the gateway of death; how it can then have consciousness because it is not bound to a physical body, because it no longer has any desire for one. This freedom from desire makes consciousness possible.

When a person passes through the gateway of death, he acquires a different consciousness from the one he had through the instrumentality of the body. In this way one also learns to recognize what forces were in the soul that attracted it to a physical body when it was in a spiritual world, but to a physical body that only generally shone before it as a physical body, which was not a specific one. One learns to recognize the soul as it absorbs the desire to come down again into physical life on earth. In other words, one first gets to know the eternal part of the human soul in its true meaning.

And that, dear listeners, is one thing that one gets to know in this way. But one also gets to know something else through it. By learning to recognize the eternal in the human soul that passes through births and deaths in images, I call them imaginations in my books, one learns to recognize that this human soul belongs to a supersensible world; that the soul belongs to a supersensible world just as the body belongs to the sensual world. And just as one can describe this sensual world through the body, so one can describe the supersensible world in its spirituality. One learns to recognize a supersensible world in addition to the sensual world.

However, one must be willing to develop a second soul quality, beyond that which is present in ordinary life. Today's scientist recoils at the mere mention of this quality as an intellectual capacity. One can fully appreciate the reasons why he does this; but nevertheless, what I have to tell you about the further development of this human soul ability is true.

The first power that had to be developed was the ability to remember, which becomes an independent force. The second power is the power of human love. In ordinary life between birth and death, love works through the physical organism; it is intimately connected with the instincts and drives of human nature. And only in the most sublime moments does some of this love detach itself from the physical. Then man has that uplifting moment when he becomes free from himself, which is the state of true freedom, where man does not give himself over to his instincts, but forgets himself, where he bases his actions on external facts, on the necessity of those facts. Because love is inwardly connected with freedom, I dared to say as early as 1893 in my Philosophy of Freedom, by which I wanted to found a philosophy of sociology for the present day, that true love does not make man blind, but rather seeing, that is, free. It leads him beyond that which otherwise blinds him when he is dependent on what is within him. Love allows us to be devoted to the outside world, and in so doing frees us from that which we must be freed from if we are to act freely.

But this love, which only shines into our ordinary life in truly free actions, must be cultivated by the modern spiritual researcher. Love must gradually spiritualize in the same way as the faculty of memory must spiritualize; it must become a power that is purely soul-life, and which makes him, as a soul-being, independent of the body, so that he can love without the body, through its blood, through its entire organization, providing the basis for this love. This is how immersion in the external world, in people, comes about; this is how you become one with the external world.

This developed power of love now brings us a second thing; it puts us into the spiritual world in a substantial way, which we enter through the developed ability to remember. And we now get to know spiritual facts and learn to describe the world in such a way that we do not merely say how our present planetary system once emerged from some old nebulous world, which will then in turn either disperse or fall into the sun. We do not look at such a world, which is alien to the spirit, and which is confronted by something else. And if a person is honest, they must feel that this world, as viewed scientifically, is confronted by the most valuable thing in the human being. In modern spiritual life, we have been able to get to know the besieged souls who tell us again and again: Science tells us about a world of pure natural necessity, that our world comes from worlds that were fog worlds, that clumped together into the four natural kingdoms, the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, up to man. But now, in the depths of his being, something arises in man to which he must attach the greatest value: his moral, his religious world. This stands before his soul, and it is what actually makes him human in the first place. But he must say to himself, if he is honest with regard to the purely scientific world view: This earth, on which you stand like a hermit of the universe with your moral ideals, will disintegrate, will fall back into the sun, will become a slag. There will be a large churchyard, the ideals will be buried.

This is where spiritual science comes in. It does not approach this situation from the standpoint of faith and hope, but from real knowledge, which is developed in the way I have indicated, and says: No, the mere scientific world view offers an abstraction of the world. This world is permeated with spirit, this world is permeated with supersensible entities. And if we look back to prehistoric times, what is material on earth has emerged from the spiritual; and what is material now will become spiritual in the future. Just as man discards his body and enters a spiritual world spiritually with consciousness, so that which is material on earth will fall away like a corpse, and that which is spiritual-soul on earth, that which is spiritual-soul in man, will arise in the future, even when the earth has perished. One could say that the Christian saying “Heaven and Earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” proves true here with a certain variation. Man can say: Everything my eyes see will perish, just as the human body perishes in the face of human individuality. But what lives in man as morality rises from what is perishing. Man senses a spiritual world around him; he lives into a spiritual world.

In this way, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science deepens our knowledge of the spiritual, and in doing so, it takes on a different form from that of external science in relation to the civilizational needs of the present. External science can in turn deepen knowledge and insight to religious fervor and higher consciousness. It gives the human being a spiritual self-awareness.

This is basically the first great civilizational question of the present day. If a person does not have the right inner support, if he feels like he is floating in the void as a mere material being, he cannot develop a strong inner being, nor can he appear as a strong being in social life. Man must create what external institutions are, man must create what external social conditions are. There is something significant about external institutions and external social conditions in terms of the great civilizational questions of the present and the future, and these civilizational questions lead us back to the search for the great, true consciousness of humanity. For only people who have such inner support, which can give them peace of mind, will be able to integrate themselves properly into social life. That is the first question: how can a person with inner support, with a secure hold on life, integrate themselves into our social conditions? The second is what we might call the encounter between people, human interaction. And here we enter a field where, no less than in the field of knowledge, modern civilization has brought man not new solutions but new riddles. Consider only the breadth of technology, of technical life, that the achievements of modern natural science have brought. Technical life, commercial life, life of intercourse, as they surround us from hour to hour today, they are the achievements of this magnificent, modern view of nature. But what we have not found within modern technology, what is posed as a new vital question, is: How should people live in this complicated technical, commercial and transport life?

This question is posed by modern civilization itself. That it has not yet been solved is shown by those terrible movements that present themselves all the worse the further east we go, into Asia, where human instincts are not used to create something upward, but, because the great civilizing questions have not been solved, are used to create something destructive. Undoubtedly, the whole of modern civilization would have to perish through what is emerging in the East. Much more terrible than people in the West imagine is what is lurking there to lead to the decline

of modern civilization. But it also testifies to how necessary it is to find something else to solve the civilizational issues of the present.

We must not only work in modern technology, which has emerged from the modern view of nature, but we must also gain another possibility: Man has become estranged from nature; he has been placed, practically speaking, with his actions and his whole occupation in a soulless, mechanistic way; he has been led from dealing with nature to dealing with the spiritless machine, with the spiritless mechanism of traffic; and we must find ways to give man something again that he can feel as something given by nature. It must be a world view that speaks to his soul with great power and tells him that man is something more than what he experiences here; that he belongs to a spiritual-soul, a supersensible world that surrounds him and can be explored in an exact science, just as the outer science is that leads to technology. But only such a science will also be able to establish the right relationship between people. Such a science will enable us to encounter a being in man that not only appears to us as it comes to us, as it appears between birth and death, but in such a way that we learn to respect the eternal, the immortal, the connection with a supersensible world forever. Through such a deepened knowledge, the feeling must change from person to person.

And a third thing is also important. It is important that the human being learns again that his life is not exhausted with the life between birth and death, as the modern proletarian believes from his ideology called ideology, but that what we do here in every moment has not only an earthly but also a cosmic significance. For indeed, when the earth has perished, what we bring out of our souls into our daily work, out of moral, spiritual and soul foundations, will arise in another world; it will take part in spiritualization in the metamorphosis.

Thus, spiritual science as anthroposophically oriented approaches the questions of the present in three ways. It brings people to a spiritual self-awareness. It brings people to see in their fellow human beings, in their neighbor, a spiritual being in turn. It brings people to give their work, their earthly activities, a cosmic, universal, spiritual meaning, however material they may be.

Spiritual science today not only has theoretical views about what can be worked out in this way, but has already begun to apply it in practice in life. In Stuttgart, we have the Waldorf School, which was founded by Emil Molt and which I am in charge of, and where a pedagogy, a didactics, is being developed through the knowledge of human nature that can be obtained through spiritual science, as it is meant here. Furthermore, in Dornach near Basel, we have the Goetheanum, a Free University for Spiritual Science, the construction of which I will show you in a few days with the help of slides. This Goetheanum in Dornach is not yet finished, but we were able to hold a large number of courses in the unfinished building last fall. I have also been able to speak here in Holland about spiritual science in the past. At that time I could only speak of spiritual science as a form of research, a research tendency, as something that lives in individual human beings.

Since then, this spiritual science has taken on a different form. It has begun to establish its own School of Spiritual Science in Dornach. Last spring I myself showed how what I have only outlined for you today in its beginning as spiritual scientific research can be applied to all fields of science in its execution. I showed physicians and medical students how what can be gained from this spiritual science in a strictly exact method can have an effect on medicine and therapy. Those questions in medicine that become borderline questions are juxtaposed with the health issues of humanity. Every conscientious doctor will perceive those practical questions of medicine as cultural issues. These questions are the ones that remain unanswered today because today's science does not want to rise from the sensory to the spiritual and supersensory.

How medicine can be fertilized, how all sciences can be fertilized by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, experts from all fields, from jurisprudence, mathematics, history, sociology, biology, physics, chemistry, pedagogy, tried to show it. Then there were also personalities who belong to the arts, to artistic creation, who showed how artistic creation can be fertilized by spiritual science. There were representatives of practical life, of commercial and industrial life, who showed how their lives, guided by spiritual science, are no longer merely caught up in the old routine that led us into the catastrophes, but how, through it, the human being is brought into life practice in a higher sense. This is precisely what these courses should show: how spiritual science does not want to cultivate some kind of dilettantism, some nebulous mysticism, but how it can fruitfully intervene in the individual sciences. But in doing so, it simultaneously elevates what is in these sciences to an overall spiritual and supersensible conception of the human being.

I will have more to say about the practical side here; then I will speak about teaching and educational issues and about the social question. Then you will see how the spiritual science meant here, the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, does not seek some nebulous mysticism in a sphere that is alien to life, but how it wants to grasp the spirit for other reasons: firstly, because the human being must become aware of his connection with the true spiritual origin; secondly, however, because the spirit wants to intervene precisely in the material, in the practical life, as it makes a distinction between the spiritless practical life and a spirit conceived in terms of a lack of life, which certainly does not grasp the spirit of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, nor that which is most necessary for the present.

Dear attendees, we have found people who have an understanding of what is to be achieved in the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach for the development of humanity, and how necessary it is in the face of the great civilizational issues of the present day that this be achieved. The difficult circumstances have slowed down the construction very much. We are not yet finished, and completion will depend to a large extent on whether people who have a heart and mind for all the human progress that is needed today will continue to come to our aid. In its unfinished state, we gathered more than a thousand people at the opening of our courses. Those who come to this Dornach after this — as will also be shown in the next lecture — will see that at the same time this spiritual science wants to work out of the full humanity: that it does not just want to speak to the human head, that it not only wants to gain that which can be presented through experimentation and observation, but that at the same time it strives for truly artistic expression, without falling back on straw-like symbolism or abstract, pedantic allegories. Therefore, not just any architectural style could be applied in Dornach – as the slide lecture will show – but the architectural style had to be drawn from the same sources from which this spiritual science itself flows. It is not a one-sided science such as today's experimental and observational sciences, but seeks to draw from the full human being. It wants to speak to the full, whole human being, despite the fact that it is as exact as any science can be.

I will still have to talk about the practical implementation, but today I had to present the results of the spiritual research on these matters, in order to then show in the practical areas how necessary this is for our time, which is based on the observation of the history of this period by this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It aims to add to the conscientious and methodical study of the material world, which it recognizes more than any other spiritual direction, the science of the spirit, which in turn can lead to religious deepening and to artistic creativity, just as the old instinctive science, which we can no longer renew, led to art and religion in the mysteries.

That this spiritual science is not opposed to religion and Christianity, I will have to show in the further explanation of the practical side. It strives for that which every true, religious deepening has to strive for, it strives for the spirit. Hence we have hope: all those people who today still resist this spiritual science will come round to it in the end, because this spiritual science strives for something universally human: it strives for the spirit, and for humanity, it needs the spirit.

Who could doubt that one can look at astronomy hopefully if the talk is of the world origin? For astronomy is rightly a science for which we not only have high respect because it leads us with weighty knowledge in the vastnesses of the universe. It is also something that speaks in spite of any abstractness and roughness most intensely to our souls and minds. So one can say: one can understand that the human soul hopes to get explanation of the deepest secrets of existence looking up at the starry heaven, which speaks so deeply to our mind if we open ourselves to it at night.

We want to ask ourselves from the viewpoint of spiritual science, what has astronomy to say about the origin of the universe? Perhaps, that what results from these considerations appears to somebody in such a way, as if a flower of hope is picked to pieces in a certain way. Someone who gets this impression, nevertheless, consoles himself with the fact that astronomy has just brought such miraculous results to us in the last decades that we have enough reason to be very glad about these results as such—also intellectually. However, we are led by this deeper knowledge of the newer time in this field to the fact that just this deepening of astronomy makes us less hopeful if we try to get explanation about the big questions of origin and development of the universe directly. There we can point to the fact that just to that what the physical research experienced as an immense deepening since Copernicus by observations or by courageous speculations in the course of the nineteenth century something was added that introduces us in a before unexpected way in the material character of the universe. Whereas one had once to confine oneself to state out of the boldness of the human thinking that if we look at the stars worlds face us at which we should look similarly as at our own world, the spectral analysis by Kirchhoff and Bunsen enabled us to investigate the material nature of the stars directly by the physical instrument. Hence, one can venture an assertion reasonably based on immediate observation that we detect the same materials with the same qualities in the different suns, in the nebulae and in the other things that face us in space as we find them on our earth.

That is why one can say that since the middle of the nineteenth century our science was seized by the knowledge: we rest here as human beings within a material world with its laws, with its forces. From the effect which these material laws of the earth show in the so-called spectroscope, and because the same effects are sent from the most distant space to the spectroscope, one can conclude that in the whole space, as far as the material world is considered, the same materiality and the same laws of materiality have poured forth. While it was once in certain respect only a kind of geometrical calculation to investigate the movements of the stars, the brilliant connection of spectral analysis with the so-called Doppler effect enabled us to observe not only those movements which happen before us in such a way that we recognise them as on a surface drawn as the movements of the stars. But since that time we can also include the Doppler effect, a little shift of the spectral lines, in those movements of the stars because the stars come closer or go away from us; while it was only possible once to calculate really what happened in a plane which stands vertically to our line of sight. Such a principle, as it is the connection of the Doppler effect with spectral analysis, is the basis of tremendous achievements of astronomy. What now the human being could invent as a kind of worldview as it turns out if we consider the space filled with suns, planets, minor planets, with nebulae and other things and their intertwined movements and their lawful affecting each other—about this worldview we say: we can understand that such a picture appeared to the human mind that strove for knowledge as a model of clearness, of inner substantiality, if one pursues to encompass reality with the thinking.

If we visualise what it means to calculate a thing that fulfils the space: the big and the small things move in such a way, the one has an effect on the other. If we visualise, what it means to be able to think such a clear thought in the space, we visualise it comparing it to any other physical effect that we see in our surroundings, for example, with the turning green of the trees in the spring or with the blossoming of a plant. Some people who stand or stood vividly in science know how bitter it is if they are compelled at first on the ground of completely outer consideration repeatedly to reach for concepts that can be thought by no means to an end if it concerns, for example, imagining a growing, developing plant, apart from more complex phenomena like animal organisms. Even already in the phenomena of chemistry and physics of our earth evolution some rest remains to us in the effects of heat et cetera even if we want to understand things, which our eyes see, and our ears hear, with clear concepts. If we look at space and can comprise it in such a picture that expresses itself in clear changes of location, in mutual relations of movement, then it is comprehensible that this has a beatific effect on our inside. Then we say to ourselves: such explanations that we can give of the movement of the stars in space and their mutual effect are very clear in themselves so that we can generally consider them as an example of explanations. Small wonder, hence, that this thought of the fascinating clarity of the astronomical worldview seized numerous human beings. It was very instructive for someone who pursued the theoretical science of the nineteenth century that the excellent spirits of the nineteenth century used approaches that were predetermined by the just characterised fascinating sensation.

Excellent spirits of the nineteenth century thought possibly in that way, we see out in space, see the mutual relations and movements of the stars, if we transform them into thoughts, a picture of miraculous clearness originates. Now we try to see into that little world into which, however, only the speculating thought can see which one built up as hypotheses in the nineteenth century more and more: the world of atoms and molecules. One imagined that every material consists of smallest parts which no eye and no microscope can see which one has to assume, however, hypothetically. Thus, one assumed that—as one has many stars in space—here are as it were smallest stars, the atoms. Then from the mutual arrangement of the atoms, as they are grouped together, arises—indeed, only hypothetically—that what can wake the picture in us in microcosm: here you have a number of atoms, they relate to each other in a certain respect and move around each other. If the atoms relate to each other and move, this means that the material, which composes these atoms, for example, is hydrogen or oxygen. All materials can be referred to small atoms of which they consist. These small atoms are grouped again, and then certain groups form the molecules. However, if one could look into these atoms and molecules, one would have in microcosm an effigy of the clearness, which we have outdoors, where the space is filled with stars. It was attractive for some thinkers of the nineteenth century if they could say to themselves, all outer phenomena, light, sound, elasticity, electricity and so on lead back to such effects that are caused by the movements and forces of atoms that happen as the forces and movements on the large scale if we see out into space. A strange picture originated in some spirits: if we look into the human brain, it also consists of materials and forces, which we find in the world outdoors. If one were able to look into the smallest things of the human brain, in the circulating blood, one would recognise something like smallest atomic and molecular worlds that are effigies of the big universe in microcosm. One believed if one could pursue mathematically what arises from the atoms and their movements, then one would be able to recognise that a certain kind of atomic movements—working on our eye—cause the impression of light, another kind the impression of warmth. Briefly, one imagined to be able to reduce all phenomena of nature to a small, tiny astronomy, to the astronomy of the atoms and molecules. Almost the word had been stamped which played a big role in the sensational talks that during the seventies Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1815-1896, German naturalist) held about the “limits of the knowledge of nature,” the word of the “spirit of Laplace.” This had become a kind of catchword and meant nothing else than that it would have to be the ideal of a physical explanation to reduce everything that we see round us to astronomical knowledge of the movements of atoms and molecules. Laplace was that spirit who surveyed the celestial mechanics. That spirit who could bring in this overview of the stars in space in smallest molecular and atomic things would approach, so to speak, more and more the ideal to recognise our nature astronomically.

Hence, we can say that there were people who believed: if I have the impression, I hear a tone, or I see red, a movement goes forward in truth in my brain. If I could describe these movements as the astronomers describe the movements of the stars, then I would understand what it concerned understanding the natural phenomena and the human organism. Then we would have the fact in our consciousness: I hear the tone C sharp, I see red. However, in truth it would be in such a way: if we perceive red, a little atomic and molecular universe takes place in us, and if we knew how the movements are, we would have understood, why we perceive red and not yellow, because with another movement yellow would happen.

Thus, astronomical knowledge became an ideal in the course of the nineteenth century, penetrating any physical knowledge with the same clear concepts, which apply to astronomy. One can say, it is interesting largely to pursue how under the influence of such a thought the theoretical natural sciences developed. I would like to point to something that faced me many years ago. I knew a headmaster who was an excellent man, also as a headmaster. However, he occupied himself during his remaining school activity to invent such a physical system along which one can also get without the attractive or repulsive forces valid since Newton's time. Thus,, that headmaster—Heinrich Schramm—whose works are rather significant, tried in his book The General Movement of Matter as a Basic Cause of All Natural Phenomena to get rid of the gravitational force except that what already the astronomical knowledge had removed.

It was very interesting what this man tried in a certain ingenious way at first. For if we believe that light, sound and heat are nothing else than movements of the smallest mass particles, if astronomical knowledge is able to shine everywhere, why should we still assume those weird, mystic forces reaching from the sun to the earth through the empty space? Why should one not also be able to assume instead of this mystic gravitational attraction in which one had believed up to now such a force between the atoms and molecules? Why should one not be able to shake this too? Indeed, this man succeeded—without considering a special attractive force—in understanding the attraction of the heavenly bodies and the atoms. He showed: if two bodies are confronted in space, nevertheless, one does not need to suppose that they attract each other, because someone does not assume such an attraction—so Schramm meant—who does not believe in such a thing like hands shaking in space. The only thing that one is allowed to assume is that small moved mass particles which push from all sides like small balls, so that from all sides small balls push the two big balls. If one exactly calculates now and does no mistake, one finds that simply because the hits between both balls and those that are caused from without result in a difference. The forces, which one assumed, otherwise, as attractive forces from without can be substituted by hits from without, so that one would have to replace the attractive forces by pushing forces, which attract the matter.

With tremendous astuteness, you find this thought carried out in the cited writing. I could bring in later writings of the same character; however, Schramm treated the thing first. Thus, Schramm could show how completely according to the same law two molecules exercise attraction just like the biggest heavenly bodies. Thus, astronomical knowledge became something that gained ground in the biggest space and worked into the smallest, assumed particles of matter and ether. This stood as a great ideal before the thinkers of the nineteenth century. Who did his studies in this time knows that one applied this ideal to the most different phenomena that astronomical knowledge was just a radical ideal. One is allowed to say that everything was suitable—at first during the seventies—to promote this ideal, because to that all the results of the more precise investigation of the conditions of heat were added. In the sixties, one recognised more and more what Julius Robert Mayer had shown already during the forties of the nineteenth century ingeniously: the fact that heat can be transformed into other natural forces according to particular numerical ratios. The fact that this is the case, we realise if we touch a surface with the fingers intensely, for example, the pressure changes into heat. If we heat a steam engine, the heat changes into the locomotive forces of the machine. As heat changes into motion or compressive force into heat, the other natural forces, electricity et cetera change likewise into natural forces of which one thought that they are transformable. If one connected this thought with the laws of astronomical knowledge, one could say, what faces us there differs in relation to reality only because a certain form of movement within the world of the atoms and molecules changes into another. We have a certain form of movement in the molecules, a little, complex astronomical system, and the movements change into other movements, one system into another system. Heat is transformed into locomotive force et cetra that way.

One believed to be able to figure everything out this way. So big and tremendous was the impression of astronomical knowledge that it provided such an aim. We have now to say that at first still a little was gained concerning a theory of world evolution with all these thoughts. Why? There we have to look around at the ideas of those people who were in the immediate cultural life and ideals of their time. For I do not want to start immediately from that which spiritual science has to say and what can be easily contested by its opponents. We can convince ourselves the easiest how these things happened if we look a little closer at that speech About the Limits of the Knowledge of Nature that Du Bois-Reymond held on the Conference of German Naturalists and Physicians in Leipzig on 14 August 1872.

There Du Bois-Reymond spoke highly of this ideal of an astronomical knowledge and said that true natural sciences exist only where we can lead back the single natural phenomena to an astronomy of atoms and molecules, anything else is not valid as an explanation of nature. Thus, somebody would have explained the human soul life scientifically if he had succeeded in showing how after the model of astronomical movements the atoms and molecules must form a group in the human being to let appear a human brain. At the same time, however, Du Bois-Reymond drew attention to the fact that we have done still nothing for the explanation of the soul and its facts by such an astronomical explanation. For he said, assuming that the ideal is fulfilled that we can really say, the movements of the atoms happen within the brain after the model of astronomical movements: by the perception of the tone C sharp this movement complex arises, by the perception of the colour red another—then we have satisfied our need of causality scientifically. However, no one, Du Bois-Reymond emphasised, could realise, why a certain kind of movements just changes into the experience of our soul: I perceive red, I hear organ tone, and I smell rose smell or such.

For Du Bois-Reymond drew attention to something that already Leibniz had stressed and that nothing can be objected. If we imagine—if it depends only on movement—a gigantic human brain, so that we could walk in it like in a factory where we can observe all movements of the wheels and belts and could show: there is a certain movement—we draw it nicely and calculate it as we can calculate the movements of the planets around the sun. However, nobody would know if he did not know it from other things that this movement, which I observe there, corresponds in the soul to the experience: I see red. He would not be able to figure this out, but he would be able to find out only laws of movement and can say to themselves, the movement runs this or that way, this and that happens in space. However, he would not be able to find the connection between these movements thought according to the model of astronomy and the peculiar experience: I see red, I hear organ tone, and I smell rose smell. If he did not know from anywhere else where from these experiences are, he would never be able to conclude them from the movements of the atoms. Du Bois-Reymond even said rather crassly: “Which conceivable connection exists between certain movements of certain atoms in my brain on the one hand, and, on the other hand, with the original, not further definable, undeniable facts: I feel pain, I feel desire, I taste sweet, smell rose smell, hear organ tone, see red, and the immediately flowing certainty from that: so I am? It is absolutely and forever incomprehensible that it should not be irrelevant to a number of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen etc. atoms in which way they lie and move in which way they lay and moved in which way they will lie and move.”

What Du Bois-Reymond said there did not completely comply with natural logic; for just in this crass expression we can see that it is not irrelevant to a number of molecules—to material parts—in which way they lie and move. For you know that it is not irrelevant to sulfur, saltpetre and coal in which way they lie side by side. If they lie side by side under certain conditions, they yield gunpowder. It is also not irrelevant in which relation one has brought the carbon to the hydrogen; but it concerns whether the material is led with the movement to another material with which it is used and can maybe form an explosive force. This quotation was overshot if it also had a shade of correctness. However, already Leibniz had recognised the correct thing: the fact that there no kind of transition exists between the astronomical movement of the molecules and atoms and between the qualities of our experience and our inner soul life. It is not possible to bridge this abyss with the bare astronomical science as a “movement.”

We have to get out this clearly from the various mistakes in the speech of Du Bois-Reymond. Nevertheless, this is the valuable of this speech: it was something like a reaction, like a feeling against the omnipotence and the infinite wisdom of the astronomical knowledge. If we take into consideration what we are able to make evident so clearly, we find the possibility to transfer it to the big astronomical knowledge. If we assume what is certainly justified that one cannot find the bridge to the experiences of soul and mind from the astronomical knowledge of the movement of the smallest mass particles anyhow, then, however, one cannot bridge from that what the big astronomy offers to any effects of soul and mind which fill the space! If it is true and we imagine the human brain so increased that we could walk in it and look at the movements in it like at the movements of the heavenly bodies, and if we could perceive nothing of mental counter-images in these movements of our brain, we do not need to be surprised if we stand in such an enlarged brain—namely in the universe—and cannot find the bridge between the movements of the stars in space and the possible mental-spiritual activities which cover the cosmic space. They would also relate to movements of the stars like our thoughts, sensations and soul experiences relate to movements of our own cerebral mass. When Du Bois-Reymond spoke this, everybody who could think could conclude what was never done up to now: if that is right which Du Bois-Reymond showed with some certainty, one must also say, if anything mental or spiritual fills the space, no astronomy, no astronomical knowledge can say anything against or for that spiritual or mental filling the space, because one cannot conclude anything spiritual from movements.

With it, it was necessary to say, the astronomer must restrict himself at the description of that what goes forward in the universe. He cannot at all judge about the fact that on a large scale soul experiences of cosmic kind belong to the movements of the stars as our soul experiences belong to the movements of mass particles in the brain. With it, already in the seventies of the nineteenth century astronomy was limited. However, one would have had to ask quite different from Du Bois-Reymond asked, namely, is there any possibility to penetrate in another way to find the mental and spiritual beings filling the cosmic space?—Therefore, spiritual science points in contrast to astronomy to something that we discussed repeatedly in these talks: the fact that the human being is able to develop his cognitive forces to higher levels than he has them in the normal life. If these cognitive forces have been lifted to a higher level, it is possible to find other things in space and time than that at what one looked as the ideal fulfilment of space and time in the nineteenth century: the astronomic movements of forces and atoms in space.

However, we must not think too poorly about what the external natural sciences have to say concerning the evolution of the world. For the scientific facts, which have led, indeed, to a certain radical ideal of an astronomical molecular and atomic knowledge, developed something that we have to regard almost as a model of a scientific, deeply in the secrets of existence shining fact. Even if it has a limited significance, nevertheless, it is a fact of very first rank. Today it can be indicated only because what it concerns is the answer of the question: “What has astronomy to say about the origin of the world?”

  In order to answer this question, one has to point to the fact that within the scientific thinking, research and experimentation it is clearly proved that it is right, indeed, in general that we can transform natural forces into each other that we can transform, for example, heat into work or if we have done any work this into heat. However, that is right with a quite weighty restriction. While on one side it is valid: heat can be transformed into mechanical work, into kinetic energy and kinetic energy again into heat—we must say on the other side that if one wants to transform heat back into work, in kinetic energy, this cannot happen unlimitedly. We realise this the clearest with the steam engine. We produce the movement by heat, but we cannot at all transform all heat into kinetic energy. Some heat gets always lost, so that we always have to calculate with all processes in nature where heat is transformed into movement with a loss of heat, as it is sure with a steam engine. For even with the best steam engines we can only transform about one quarter of the heat into movement, the other is emitted into the cooler, into the surroundings et cetera. We are able to do it only in such a way that we must realise that a part of the heat—as heat—is emitted in the cosmic space.

The knowledge that, indeed, kinetic energy can be completely transformed into heat but heat cannot completely retransformed into kinetic energy has also become in exterior relation one of the most fruitful knowledge for the science of the nineteenth century. Since thermodynamics is based merely on this knowledge, so that a big part of our present physics is built on it what has been characterised just here as the knowledge that heat cannot be retransformed completely into kinetic energy, but that always a rest of heat remains which is emitted. This has been shown apodictically by such investigations as for example those of the famous physicist Clausius (Rudolf C., 1822-1888, German physicist) who generalised this sentence that with all processes in the universe this sentence must be applied. Hence, we deal with all conversion processes where heat plays a role, with a transmission of heat in that work which is just considered with the facts of our nature. However, because always by the transformation a rest of heat remains, one can easily understand that the final state of our material development will be the transformation of all kinetic energy, of all other work in nature into heat. This is the last that must result: every physical process must convert itself into heat because always a rest of heat is left. Thus, all world processes run in such a way that heat will become bigger and bigger which results as a rest and at last the result must be that all movement processes will have been transformed into heat. Then we would be concerned with a big world chaos that exists only of heat, which can no longer be retransformed. Every life process that the sun causes on earth leaves rests of heat; at last, everything that shines from the sun to us tends to pass over to a general heat death.

This is the famous “Clausius's heat death” into which any material development of the universe must discharge. Here physics delivered a knowledge for that who generally understands something of knowledge that is quite apodictic against which one cannot argue. Our material universe heads the heat death in which all physical processes will once be buried.

There we have something from physics that we can transfer immediately on the entire astronomy. If we were only able to see movement changing into heat, we could say, the universe could be infinite forwards and backward, does not need to end. However, physics shows in the second law of the mechanical theory of heat that the material processes of the universe head the heat death. One can be convinced: if it were not so difficult, if one must not have such a lot of mathematical prior knowledge and go into difficult physical processes, much more people would know something of Clausius's heat death than it is really the case.

There we have brought something in our astronomical worldview that signifies development as it were. Imagine how fatal it must be for a materialistic knowledge to open itself to this apodictic result! Someone who only considers the spiritual and mental as concomitants of the material movements must suppose immediately that everything mental and spiritual is buried in the heat chaos, which our material world heads. Thus, all culture for which the human beings strives, all beauty and effectiveness of the earth would once meet their death with the general heat death at the same time.—One can now say that in particular this general heat death has become somewhat fatal for the astronomical knowledge. Not all astronomers take the easy way out like Ernst Haeckel in his Riddle of the Universe. He means, the second law of the mechanical heat theory contradicts, actually, the first one that all heat is convertible. Indeed, one cannot deny—Haeckel also knows this—that our solar system hastens to such a heat death, but he consoles himself saying: if the whole solar system is doomed to die the heat death, it will once collide with another world system, then heat originates from the collision again—and then a new world system originates!—However, he does not consider that a clash of the slags and rests is already considered in the general heat death, so that one cannot hope for consolation from that.

There are also serious people who feel urged to get the possibility from the physical-astronomical knowledge to understand the world development almost try to come beyond the general heat death. There the attempt of the Swedish researcher Arrhenius (Svante A., 1859-1927) may be mentioned who refers in his book The Becoming of the Worlds (1908) in manifold way just to such questions from the viewpoint of physical chemistry, physics, astronomy, and geology. One can say, here the attempt is already done in somewhat wittier way than Haeckel did to overcome the theory of the general heat death. However, if one regards everything that Arrhenius tries to adduce, one must say, it is persuasive in no way. Only briefly, I would like to characterise what is taught from this side about the overcoming of the general heat death. Of course, one cannot deny that our solar system heads the general heat death. However, besides it Arrhenius represents another idea that is based on certain assumptions of Maxwell (James Clerk M., 1831-1879, Scottish physicist) and his so-called pressure of radiation. This is something that is opposite to the former attraction of the world masses that perpetually radiates from the single heavenly bodies into space to the other heavenly bodies generating pressure caused by various natural forces.

This pressure which as it were the heavenly bodies send into space is able—because it is a force radiating in the cosmic space—to carry the smallest particles of matter which are pushed off by a heavenly body. Arrhenius now tries to show by all kinds of considerations that it is natural that, as long as special conditions do not take place, these phenomena caused by the radiation pressure prevent the general heat death by no means. But Arrhenius believes that such special conditions are caused by the fact that as it were this cosmic dust becomes nebulae which are in particular material states—for example, by the fact that in such nebula any star drives from anywhere, would have compressed the matter that it has taken away, and increased the temperature that way. If it were possible that such a star that meets the matter drives in such a nebula, attracts the matter and compresses it, increases the temperature, we would have something that causes an increase of temperature in the cosmic space again, and we would have something that could be transformed again into work. Arrhenius shows wittily that the cosmic dust that approaches to such a nebula is in another position—as it were, it is carried away in such a position in which it escapes from the general trend of the heat death.

I could indicate only briefly, what is also indicated too briefly in Arrhenius's writing. However, someone who goes into that which has led to the assumption of the general heat death cannot help admitting that the possibility is only virtual, that in a nebula, even if the temperature rises, the heat death could be detained. Since, nevertheless, these are only fallacies, and the law of the general heat death is such a general one that we must admit if we properly proceed: according to the physical laws the stars, which collide with a nebula, have only to bring the rest of their former existence with them. Thus, these processes, which happen in the nebula, must also be included in the trend of the universe to the general heat death.

Now it is typical that Arrhenius still goes on and includes the possibility in his idea of the radiation pressure that a heavenly body could push seeds of living beings to the other by the radiation pressure. Indeed, one can prove—with a big appearance of correctness—that the cold through which certain plant seeds and animal gametes would be carried would work preserving on them, so that one could suppose by calculation only that life was carried from one heavenly body to the other heavenly body by the radiation pressure. One could work out this, for example, for the distance from the earth to Mars. Then one spares the earth—instead of saddling the earth with it—the possibility, as one wants it, otherwise, in physics, geology et cetera, to have produced life because then one can say: the earth does not need to have produced life, because it can have flown to it from other heavenly bodies.—Besides, it does not issue a lot. For, will one attain anything special with it that one moves the question of the origin of life to other heavenly bodies? There we have the same difficulties, only that on the earth the conditions hinder us to accept the origin of life on other heavenly bodies. Generally, these matters can show how apparently materialistic prejudices influence well-intentioned enterprises of the present, which start from the eternity of life. Since the whole line of thought is materialistic, so that one does not take into account that life could have its origin here as well as in that what could be thought as radiation from one heavenly body to the other. This shows that in the present even well-intentioned thoughts suffer from placing themselves on the ground of materialism.

Thus, the same faces us everywhere: the study of physical laws, material laws, material forces is used, so that as it were everything that physics finds is transferred to the big world edifice, and one tries to imagine the origin of the universe with these forces. We have realised that such thoughts exceed the limits of the astronomical knowledge everywhere. Since the astronomer cannot at all conclude anything that deals with the forces, which cause the becoming of the world from that what he has before himself. We can realise again that our thinking and feeling are mental processes which cause material processes quite certainly, for example, in our brain, even in our blood. Someone who feels sense of shame to whom the blush rises in his face can convince himself of the fact that mental processes entail material processes. However, someone who admits that the mental-spiritual causes material processes in us has to say to himself, if I stood in the human brain and studied the outside movements, I would only see movements in the movements; there I would not at all anticipate that I include the movements that are caused by the spiritual-mental processes. I ignore the spiritual-mental causes.—May it not seem comprehensible that the astronomer studying the heavenly bodies is urged to develop the causes one or the other way that any star moves one or the other way? Are we allowed to conclude from the bare movements or from the dynamic laws: the sun must be positioned in a certain way to the earth, the moon must be positioned in a certain way to the earth, must orbit the earth in a certain way, and thereby these movements can result? Astronomy can generally decide nothing in what way they are caused in the mental-spiritual. Therefore, we can come just from the field of astronomy to the necessity to point by quite different means to the true causes also of the universe. There I can point—today just only with a few words—to the connection of earth, sun and moon.

Their mutual life and their relations of motion have developed, as these three heavenly bodies relate to each other. If we want to recognise why the sun, earth and moon relate to each other just as they relate today, we must not only move up from those forces on earth which we recognise as the physical-mechanical to the space, but we must still move up from other processes which happen on earth. Most certainly we have if we look at the human being something before us that belongs to the whole earth and its connection with the sun and moon as the blossoming of flowers or any other process—or as an electric process in the air. Certainly, the human being belongs with all that he is to the earth, and it is an abstraction if one only thinks the earth as the geologists do, as an only inorganic, inanimate thing, but one has to include the human beings in the whole processes of the earth.

At first, we have the difficulty that we must distinguish two things if we want to understand the difference between human being and animal in the right way. With the animal, the type predominates, so that an individual ego is not effective in its whole development between birth and death in so determining way, as this is the case with the human being with his individual ego, which expresses itself in education and the cultural life. This distinguishes the human being from the animal with which the type predominates. Now it is in such a way that such things go over by transitions into each other. With the animal, the type predominates, but the type goes into the human nature.

The further we to go back in time, the more we find that the human being is also a generic being, and we see the individual more and more originating from the type. On the ground of the type, the individual emerges. We have the ideal of a human future before ourselves, which says to us, the individual, the ego-nature of every human being will be victorious over the type in the course of the earth development. Nevertheless, going back we just realise the type on the ground of human development. Going back, we have also approached another condition of consciousness more and more in which the human being was connected dream-like, vividly with a spiritual world. That is why we must regard these two things as related: the type and the pictorial, dreamlike consciousness of the ancient times on the one hand and, on the other hand, the development of the individuality and our individual consciousness by that what the human being has to obtain in the course of the times. Such an emergence of the individuality from the type, the intellectual from the clairvoyant-dreamlike must be searched in its origins within the whole world development. Since, so to speak, as the stone which falls to the earth is controlled by the general world laws, this emergence of the human individuality and intellectuality from the human type and clairvoyance is also connected with the big cosmic laws which work everywhere in space. We have already done a step in this direction when we characterised the significance of geology for spiritual science.

We could show there that we can trace back the earth to a condition in which such processes are earthly, telluric, which only happen today if our thoughts and sensations work like decomposing in our organism, so that we find—if we go back to the earth origin—such epochs in which the earth was in a process of decomposition. That knowledge shows—what is shown more exactly in the Occult Science—which has been characterised in these talks that as it were the whole earth has sheltered from too extensive a decomposition process by the fact that it has separated the moon. The moon had to be separated from our earth so that that condition could be overcome which can be described as a decomposition process within the earth evolution.

We do not only have a mechanical-physical process, but we have to regard the extrusion of the moon as such a process that became necessary because the earth sheltered, while she expelled the moon, from too extensive a process of decomposition. The earth could thereby get a new relation to the sun directly. Since while it had the moon in itself, this decomposition process was so that the effect of the sun could not penetrate the terrestrial atmosphere—if we imagine the terrestrial atmosphere at that time. Therefore, only a new condition had to be caused, so that earth and sun could catch sight of each other. With it, with the cleaning of the terrestrial atmosphere—what became only possible with the extrusion of the moon—the condition of forces came into being which gradually transformed the old generic consciousness into the self-consciousness, into the intellectual consciousness. Thus, the extrusion of the moon, the cleaning of the terrestrial atmosphere and the direct relation of earth and sun are connected with the entire human development. We could now go back even further and would find such a condition of our earth development in which the earth was still connected with the sun.

We would also find that the separation of sun and earth happened in order to make the existence of conscious beings generally possible on earth. Only by the repulsion of the earth from the sun that force system came about which made it possible that beings could become conscious. Thus, the ancient clairvoyant consciousness became possible by the repulsion of the earth from the sun—and the advance to a higher consciousness, an intellectual consciousness by the extrusion of the moon from the earth. If we ascend clairvoyantly to that what external astronomy cannot give, we have to regard the cosmic forces as the reasons of the separation of the sun and the remaining planets from the earth—that is we come to spiritual causes.

I could only indicate the principle. Of course, everybody could ask, did the human being already exist, when earth and sun separated? Indeed, he existed, only under other conditions. It is a matter of course that the human being, as he lives under the current conditions, would not be possible if the sun were together with the earth. However, this would be no objection. We receive spiritual causes for the movements of the heavenly bodies. Now we do no longer stop at that to which astronomy pointed more than one century ago at the mere utilisation of physical laws saying: the earth was once connected with the sun in a big gas ball, that started rotating, and thereby the planets and also the earth were separated and later also the moon from the earth. - Now, we do no longer get around to asserting that such a thing happens only due to mechanical-physical laws, but inner, spiritual reasons must be there why the earth separated from the sun.

The earth was separated from the sun, so that the human being was raised to the conscious experience, and the moon was separated from the earth, so that he can advance to his higher consciousness. Briefly, we start bringing that in the astronomical worldview what we must bring in—namely into the astronomical worldview of the small brain that what we must bring in if we want to go over from the mere movement of the cerebral atoms to the conclusion: I see red, hear organ tone, I smell rose smell et cetera.—Thus, we must go forward if we want to find the transition from that what the popular astronomy can give us, to that what the causes of the events are in space. Hence, those who want to stop at the ground of external physics should confine themselves to investigate this only what movements or what forces are what is to be recognised astronomically. They should confess that another progress of knowledge is necessary if astronomy wants to come to an explanation of the becoming of the universe, should confess that they would have to stop as representatives of a rationalistic and empiric astronomy at the explanation of the becoming of the universe.

Considering this, it turns out that the great and significant results of modern astronomy fit in our spiritual-scientific world edifice quite wonderfully. Take the Occult Science. There is shown how our earth has gradually developed, how it goes—just like the single human being in the successive earth-lives—through developmental stages how, so to speak, a planet goes through developmental stages. There our earth is led back to a former planetary stage, this stage to an earlier one, so far, as one can trace back it, up to a stage, which is called “Old Saturn” with which, however, not our today's Saturn is meant, but a planetary predecessor of our earth.

The same cognition that is quite independent of any outer physics and any speculation, shows that a planetary predecessor of our earth, just this Old Saturn, was mere heat and that spiritual forces intervened in this condition of heat, so that spiritual forces took possession of the heat chaos. All development is thereby caused up to our earth. In addition, spiritual science shows that really the material under our feet is dying off. In the talk What Has Geology to Say About the World Origin?, we have shown that geology has advanced so far to agree with us that the earth crust is dying off. We understand everything that we know of the earth crust only well if we understand it as dying off. However, in this fact is contained that the spiritual becomes free from the material. If among us the planetary material dies off, the spirit gets free from it.

We have another possibility now! We can point to the nebula—there we have no speculations after the model of the physicists, nevertheless, do not stop at the heat death—and can say, indeed, there we have the things in which all remaining processes are transformed into heat. However, as with the beginning of the earth spiritual powers seized the heat state, spiritual powers lead the nebulae into which by the heat death the solar systems discharge from the heat death to new solar systems. There is, actually, nothing more astonishing than the accordance of one of the most admirable laws of the nineteenth century in its application to astronomy—like the application of the second law of the mechanical heat theory—with the positive, actual results of astronomical observations.

If you do not take the speculative inventions of all kinds of radiation, but if you start from that what one can obtain from the spectroscope or from the photography of the astronomical phenomena, you realise that everything complies down to the last detail with that what one can obtain as evolution of the worlds from spiritual science. For it shows how that what one sees as an astronomical spatial picture is the result - the spiritual result—of spiritual beings. We can say different from the modern astronomical physicists: the human being has no reason to fight against the heat death or to be afraid of it, because he knows that from it new life will blossom as from the old heat chaos life blossomed which we have now before ourselves. Because a real repetition and increase of life is possible this way—not only from that what Arrhenius assumes that life is winded up like in a clockwork anew and takes place in the nebula anew, but development is only possible if a spiritual element works from one heat state to the other. If our world substance is buried in the grave of heat, the spirit has advanced a step and conjures up higher things, higher life from the heat chaos. Hence, the final state of the earth embodiment—the Vulcan stage—is in the Occult Science that which points to this what looks out as a new life from the grave of the heat death. Therefore, the name “Vulcan” is used. If we challenge astronomy, we can just realise that the external science complies deeply with that what spiritual science has to give.

Indeed, people will say repeatedly, you spiritual scientists are daydreamers, because the right result of exact science absolutely contradicts what you believe to get from spiritual science.—Anybody could then say, you have seriously spoken even of Moses, but we know that all that is overtaken. Since the glorious natural sciences have taught us long since, we are way beyond the world development of Moses—natural sciences have shown this.—Those speak that way who only are present from without. However, let us ask the others who were present not from without, but more from within. There I know a very significant physicist who has considerable share of the development of optics, Biot (Jean-Baptiste B., 1774-1862), who said, either Moses was as deeply experienced in sciences as our century, or he was inspired.

A leading physicist of the nineteenth century said this. Now those who write popular books about worldviews maybe mean, indeed, a physicist thinks that way who deals only with the outside of the phenomena. Nevertheless, those who go deeper into the being of the organic show that one was chased away from the spirit in the course of the nineteenth century where one searched the natural causes. -- How did Liebig (Justus von L., 1803-1873, chemist) think, who deeply penetrated into the being of the organic, about the relations of the world, to which he had dedicated his research efforts, to the spiritual world? He says that these are the opinions of dilettantes who derive the authorisation of their walks on the border of the fields of physical research to explain to the unknowing and gullible audience how world and life originated, actually, and how far, nevertheless, the human being has come concerning the investigation of the highest things.—People may say: have you never heard that Lyell (Charles L., 1797-1875) founded a geology? Have you never heard about the big progress, which came with him, that he overcame those worldviews, which still count on spiritual forces?—I could bring writings by Lyell forward to you that make deep impression today. However, just Lyell said once, in which direction we pursue our investigations, everywhere we discover the clearest proofs of a creative intelligence, of its providence, power and wisdom.

The founder of the newer geology says this. Now the people could come and say, nevertheless, Darwin (Charles D., 1809-1882, English naturalist) has overcome the influence of any spiritual forces. Darwin showed how by purely natural processes the evolution of the organisms happens.—However, Darwin himself wrote: “I opine that all living beings that ever have been on earth are descended from a prototype into which the creator breathed life.”—So people can also not quote Darwin who says there, we are daydreamers if we speak of spiritual beings and spiritual forces. Then still people maybe come and say, do you not know the basic nerve of any scientific development of the nineteenth century, which has deeply influenced any development? Do you know nothing about the basic law of the transformation of the natural forces?—We have just spoken of it today, have realised that the transformation of the natural forces does not contradict what spiritual science has to say.

However, the people could want to refer to Julius Robert Mayer (1814-1878, German physician and physicist), to the founder of the law of the mechanical heat equivalent as well as of the transformation of the natural forces. However, Julius Robert Mayer did the strange dictum: I exclaim wholeheartedly, a right philosophy can be nothing else than propaedeutics for the Christian religion!—The things are different everywhere if one goes back to the origins and to those who created these origins who are the great pathfinders on the way of human knowledge, and not to their followers, nor to those who want to find lightweight ideas—like the newer astrophysicists—and want to encompass the whole world with it. If one goes not to the latter but to the former, one can say, spiritual science completely agrees with the great pathfinders.

Hence, spiritual science knows that it can position itself in the development of the human mind, and that it advances harmoniously with the development of humanity with everything that has promoted the human development. If a merely external, physical astronomy wants to devise the evolution of the universe, one may remind those who act in such a way of a general quotation in the Xenien by Goethe and Schiller:

To infinite heights the firmament extends,
However, the little mind also found the way to them.

We must shelter from the fact that the little mind finds its way to the firmament. For we can show that just as little as the consideration of the brain leads us to a spiritual-mental life, but that this is separated from the mere movements and this can go beyond them, just as little the consideration of the external movements and laws is able to penetrate in the spirit of the universe. Hence, there it remains true in a certain way what Schiller means speaking to the astronomers:

Do not chat to me so much about nebulae and suns!
Is nature only great, because she gives you to count them?
Your object is the most elated, admittedly, in space;
But, friends, the elated does not live in space!

Schiller means that. It is right if one regards the movable appearance in space only. It is not right if one goes into what—as a spiritual—emits the laws of space.—Thus, the words remain true: ascending with the mind to the stars always causes the notion of the spiritual-divine in every mind. If we want to ascend, however, with our cognition, our cognition has to go the way: per aspera ad astra—through severity to the stars, through the thorns to the roses

However, this is the way of spiritual knowledge. Just the spiritual-scientific way to the stars shows that it brings along the human being to say to himself: as my materials and those which are in my surroundings are spread out in the whole universe—as the spectroscope shows--, the spiritual that lives in me is spread out in the whole universe and belongs to it. My corporeality is born out of the universe—my soul and mind are born out of the universe. It remains true what should be characterised here once again with some words which I already stated on another occasion: it remains true that the human being can only come to the entire world consciousness if he gets clear about the question which astronomy cannot answer: the question of his share of the world and his destination in the world. It is true that the answer to this question can give him security of life, optimism, hope of life if he knows from the spiritual-scientific knowledge what the words mean:

The wealth of materials approaches the human sense
Mysteriously from the depths of the universe.
The spirit's word flows clarifying
In the soul's grounds from cosmic heights full of contents.
They meet in the human inside to reality full of wisdom.