The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The lectures that follow will be based directly on the observations I have made already. I do not mean by this that we can say anything of consequence about present-day social life just by thinking out social reforms from first principles, in an abstract and Utopian manner; but rather that the spiritual philosophy expounded here could, if transformed into impulses of the whole man, into a human attitude of mind, provide a framework within which we could understand social life and shape social forces. The succeeding lectures will have to demonstrate that a philosophy of this kind, orientated towards the spiritual, does not remain at the abstract and Utopian level, but instead is peculiarly well equipped to deal with immediate concrete reality. Today, however, I want to establish a link between the lectures I have given already and those I have still to give.

Anyone who has taken in the full significance of my lectures so far will agree that what has been expounded has not implied a conception of life for the hermitage, for contemplative existence in a quiet cell. The conception of life proposed has its social side too—it is one that leads not only into spiritual worlds as such, but also into the world of spirit and soul that surrounds us directly in our fellow-men. It is, of course, easier to speak of social questions today if you are identified with a particular political party. Then, you have a platform, you have ready-made ideas, and can say: This is our age! These are its needs! But we here certainly cannot start from any of these ready-made political programmes. In the first place, I am fully convinced that—to speak somewhat sweepingly—there is actually no party that is entirely mistaken in what it asserts. The only thing is that the parties usually fail to recognize the limits beyond which their assertions cannot hold. On the other hand, I do not believe that any party is completely right; in a sense, it must always be mistaken as well. The only thing is that, given the particular way men look at the world, we can understand this mistakenness well enough. A tree, too, can only be photographed adequately from several sides. All the claims normally made by political parties seem like photographs of life from different sides. Yet people treat these various standpoints exactly as if someone were to look at a photograph of a tree, taken from the right, and say: “This picture is completely wrong,” knowing only the view from the left. Thus, all the objections from a certain standpoint to the views put forward here are familiar to me, and if I had to expound them all, it would not, given the philosophy of life I am advocating, prove a very difficult task.

I must say this in advance, in order to show that it is only by approaching social life and social problems from the most varied directions, as is attempted in the lectures that follow, that we can form a life-like picture of them.

There is much talk nowadays of social needs. Looking back over the history of humanity with an open mind, however, we observe that this has been true for only a relatively short period of man's development. There have, of course, always been social needs and social endeavours. That they should be formulated, almost as an abstract theory, however, is a feature of very recent times alone. And when we try to discover why it is that almost everyone these days is talking about social needs, we realize that there has been no period perhaps with such strong anti-social impulses as ours.

When the urgent necessity of life presses and misery knocks at our door, we do meet the challenge to produce positive social impulses. But when people speak of social needs, they really mean something different; they mean man's feeling that he is not simply a separate being, but that he must move among other men, and work among and with other men, and that he exists for his own satisfaction and the good of others. In this respect, the men of earlier epochs were actually much closer to one another, paradoxical as it may sound, than we are today. And this was only natural, because we nowadays live in a historical epoch which, as the preceding lectures have already indicated, has summoned particular powers from the depths of man's nature, especially within the civilized world. These powers are specially adapted to the purposes I have described, but are less well suited to arousing in man the social instincts and social impulses that were present, if in a form no longer appropriate to the present time, in earlier epochs.

Looking back over man's development, we see that, in the course of three or four centuries, there has emerged from within the human soul a capacity, a soul-power, which we can regard as intellectual—the power of reason, of a more or less rational view of the world. This view has been splendidly successful in the field of natural philosophy. It can carry men a tremendously long way towards developing their intercourse, their traffic with external nature. But the problem arises whether this power, which represents the glory and triumph, so to speak, of very recent times, is also suited, as it stands, to facilitate the intercourse of man with man. Only a clear view of this problem can, ultimately, throw light for us on the social needs of recent times. These needs, as they are ordinarily formulated, can only express a superficial outlook, symptomatic of something lying much deeper in man. This is what stands out above all for a spiritually scientific approach.

Again, when we look with an unprejudiced eye at the way in which social configurations and groupings arose in earlier epochs and indeed, fundamentally, still arise today—right down to cartels and trusts—we must conclude: the dominant forces in them are ultimately not intellectualized ones, not those of a rational attitude to life, but are instincts, unconscious feelings. And if we were to create social configurations by means of the intellectualized power that reveals itself so splendidly in natural philosophy, they would probably have only very slight viability. For, after all, it is not without significance that this power of the intellect has shown itself to be particularly important in the observation of inanimate nature, and that a man who desires only natural philosophy and does not wish to move upward to an outlook on things in accord with spirit, finds himself faced by an insoluble riddle when he has to move over from the inanimate to the animate. It is not surprising that what is of great importance, precisely because of its inner structure, for the inanimate, the dead, is not as powerful and fruitful in relation to something that is not only alive, but must also develop into human social configurations informed by spirit.

We can say, therefore: In certain subconscious regions of the soul, the forces that have been formative in social configurations are still present. On the other hand, man owes two of his strongest and socially most effective impulses to the characteristics of the present epoch. And for these he has to find the proper place in social life as a whole.

One of the most important social questions of today became apparent to me thirty years ago, when I was trying to look at the problem of man's freedom within his social life. The experience of freedom is really just as old as intellectual life. Only when intellectual life raises man to the apprehension of pure thought, by which he then comprehends natural phenomena, does he become conscious of his freedom. To all mental activity, earlier ages added something that resulted simply from organic processes and had its roots instinctively in the unconscious regions of will or else unconsciously in the life of feeling. To perceive something as clearly as is possible when thinking rises to distinctly apprehended and mathematically formulated laws; to comprehend something so clearly that we are present in it with our entire substance: this has only been possible to man since he raised himself to the pure thinking that inspired Copernicus, Galileo and their successors to modern scientific research. The experience of freedom is thus explicitly connected with something that leads away from the instinctive forces that previously formed society.

If we are approaching the problem of freedom with complete seriousness, however, we are cast for a moment, by this discovery, into a kind of emptiness, which we experience with all the terror that emptiness, or rather nothingness, does inspire in men. What we discover is that, in earlier epochs, when mankind was more naive about the life of the soul and had not attained to the consciousness that prevails in modern times, there could exist attitudes that were more imaginal and did not inhabit pure, abstract thought. But we need such imaginal attitudes if we are to take our place within the complicated social life of man. The things that enable us to find our place in the world can never be determined by abstract thought.

Now, in the last few days I have shown how the development of spiritual science takes us from abstract, dead thought once again to vital thought, by which in fact we can penetrate not only into inorganic, lifeless nature, but also into the forms of living nature and into the heart of spiritual worlds. By understanding this most modern development, man thus re-approaches, with his consciousness, what in earlier epochs existed in an instinctive way. I know that many people today still shrink back when they are told: that which operated instinctively in earlier epochs, fertilizing the imagination from the unconscious, can be raised into consciousness by a development of the soul such as I have described. Immediately, people suspect that behind this demand there lurks a kind of philistinism and pedantry that would translate naïveté into self-consciousness. People will continue to shrink back from this path into consciousness so long as they do not realize that the naive experience that was originally instinctive to man is to be restored, despite the consciousness of vital thought. But this vital thought then also introduces us to the shifting concepts that play their part in social life.

Let me refer to just one example of this today, by way of introduction. People at present talk a very great deal about capitalism and the function of capital in the social order. There are countless definitions of capitalism, often politically coloured. Yet this absence of unanimity obscures another point. We must clearly understand that the function even of something that forms as much a part of the social structure as capitalism cannot be comprehended in sharply delineated concepts. Instead, we require those vital concepts that the nai've, instinctive life of the soul once had and the conscious life of the soul can again acquire today. People need only look, for example, at what capital meant in Central Europe, in Germany, where a particular social development began later than it did in England, and what it means in England itself. In England, simply because of the existence of earlier stages in the country's economic life, when this development did set in commercial capital was available to create something which, in Germany, had to be effected by raising capital in other ways. If we look at the rôle of capital in Central Europe and then in England, we very soon find that our concepts, intended as they are to comprehend social life even in its individual configurations, cannot be sharply delineated. We need, instead, concepts that take hold of immediate reality at a particular point, yet remain elastic, so that they can move on from this point to other configurations of the social structure. And since we live in an age that is specifically educated to intellectualism—which subsists only in sharply delineated concepts—it is necessary for us, if we are to reach an understanding of social needs, to find our way out of intellectualism into the world of vital thought. This in turn can transform itself into social impulses such as arose from instincts in the earlier stages of human development.

The philosophy I am here advancing is specifically intended not to be something theoretical. It is often accused of dogmatism; accused, when it has to pronounce on social life, of looking for Utopias (which are also dogmatic). The charge is without foundation. The point of this philosophy is not at all what people mean by any particular concept; it is a definite attitude to life as a whole, physical, mental and spiritual—an attitude directed towards apprehending this life in its individual concrete forms in accordance with reality.

Thereby, however, a certain perspective on extremely important social needs of our age is opened up:

When we contemplate human life itself by means of a spiritual outlook such as I have been developing, we find that, like the historical development of humanity in general, the life of an individual human being is subject to certain changes. The resulting phases, which are apparent even to a casual observer, reveal their true nature only when we can see into their spiritual ramifications. It then appears, for example, that neither the infant in its first years of life, nor the child of primary school age, nor even the adolescent below the age of twenty, lives fully within the intellectualized mode of thought that has emerged in the course of man's development. In the last analysis, we only comprehend intellectualism with an inner sympathy in the more mature period of our twenties, when we begin to experience it as a kind of mental bone-system. Until then, we actually feel, if only instinctively, as if our life still had to solidify within us along lines which eventually result in this mental bone-system. Yet our entire social life, which understandably is shaped by adults, is permeated by the influence of intellectualism, in spite of the fact that intellectualism itself cannot be socially creative. It floods into areas where the instincts have become uncertain. We thus have in our present-day social pattern an inorganic combination of the instincts, grown uncertain, with an intellectualism that seeks to enter social life but does not really fit into it.

The end-result of this is that we form ideas of what is going on in social life which are quite unlike the forces that are really present. Nowadays, we speak in rather inexact terms, for the most part, about what governs society. We, mankind that is, have educated ourselves, in these three or four centuries, to cast everything into intellectualized moulds. As adults we can do this, but not while we are children or while we are young people.

Youth develops powers other than intellectual ones. The infant develops first the powers which make it, I would say, a single sense-organ, similar to what I have called a “spirit-organ,” but at a more material level. Its whole being is engaged in perceiving its environment, and it transposes what it perceives into its own movements. It is an imitator. This imitation, which pervades the life of the child's psyche, is quite certainly nothing intellectualized. Next, the child enters an age—say from second dentition to puberty—in which it is called upon no longer to imitate, but to absorb the opinions and convictions proffered by the adults round about.

Please do not think that the man who wrote The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is saying what he has to say now out of any reactionary instinct. What I have to say is in accord with a law of man's development. From second dentition to puberty, the young person evolves from within his being the need to listen to some person of natural authority and to what he or she offers him. Anyone who can look at life impartially will agree how fortunate it was for his inner harmony of soul throughout life if, at this age, he was able to look up to this or that person of authority with a proper respect. He did not now imitate this person; the relation was such that he felt: through this human individual is revealed to me what I myself ought to be and want to be; I listen to what he or she says and absorb the opinion into my soul.

The genuine psychologist will even discover something further. People continue to insist that, at this primary school age, a child should only take in what it already understands. In this way, only this one stage in the child's development is catered for. Not only this, but endless trivialities are piled up in an effort to present the child solely with what, it is believed, he “already understands.” The child certainly understands more than many people believe: not through intellectuality, however, but through its whole being. There is another point, too. We may reach the age of thirty, forty, fifty or sixty, and then something shoots up from the depths of our soul which is a reminiscence from our eighth year, let us say. We took it from authority; we absorbed it with respect. At the time, we did not understand it in an intellectual sense; but we came to feel at home in what we thus absorbed with our whole being. It was then drawn down into the depths of the soul. Decades later it reappears. We have become more mature. Only now do we understand it and bring it to life. It is enormously important to us in later years to be able to revive in this way what we have carried with us since childhood. This is something quite different from living among mere memories, untransformed.

This, too, then, can result from a vital art of education—one that seeks to give the child of this age, not sharply delineated concepts but vital ones. The former, it is true, have their uses in life. To the child, however, their effect is as if we seized his hand and clamped it so that it could not grow, had to remain small, and could not take on different shapes. We must move forward to an education which transmits vital concepts that will live on with the child as his limbs do, and are accordingly not sharply delineated but have an inner growth. Only then shall we give the child not only the right joy in life, but also the right strength in life. When the child experiences the sort of thing I have just indicated quite naively in his soul, his understanding and comprehension is not intellectualized. He is taking something from a respected authority, something that will instil in him vital powers.

Next, there follows an age when, essentially, all we can do is to approach the world with our concepts (which do not immediately take on sharp contours) all informed by the capacity for love. With this, we penetrate into things so as to emerge, sometimes, with quite illusory but all the more potent ideals, which fire our love.

Only when we have passed through all these can we move, without damage to our humanity as a whole, into the intellectual phase. Yet the material that in many cases the old generation nowadays presents to the young is really something appropriate only to a later age. It is no accident, therefore, that young people often fail to understand us as teachers: it springs from their very nature.

Older epochs developed in social life forces by which the old could be understood by the young in a quite different manner from today. Hence the social gulf that has opened between age and youth. It can be understood by those who comprehend our age as we must if we trace the development over the last three or four centuries. Not only through spiritual profundity, but through the animation of our spiritual life, we must restore the adult's capacity to reach complete understanding with youth.

But bridging the gulf between generations is only one side, only a very small area in fact, of present-day social needs. It can be brought about only by an extension of man's whole inner experience. Only those who strengthen the present intellectualized life of the soul by vital thought and spiritual vision, or at least accept the results of such thought and vision—for they too vitalize the whole soul—will regain the ability to look fully into the child's life. They will thus be able to draw out of the child's life itself the powers by which we can reach an understanding with him. But in indicating the gulf that has opened between age and youth in our time, we also indicate the whole series of gulfs separating man and man, man and woman, and class and class in our time. For just as merely intellectualized life separates us from the child, so too it ultimately separates us from other men. Only through vital thinking, which re-approaches certain instinctive conceptions of the cosmos, can we establish our position in the social order as firmly as the man of instinct did, to make social organisms possible for the first time. We find, too, that only through what we achieve with an empty consciousness—when we are inspired from the spiritual world with what spiritual entities reveal—can we really understand other people and see across the gulfs of class and sex.

This is the second stage in living together in society. The first is that of discovering imaginatively our own position. The second is that of finding a bridge across to someone else, someone who lives in a different social constellation. Nowadays, this is made very difficult for mankind; for when we take up a position in social life in line with our feelings, our judgment is not ultimately based on reality. In the last analysis, it is precisely when we think that our judgments are most in accord with reality that they are furthest away from it. You can see this by observing how even outstanding personalities today, who take up a position in life and would like to manipulate life, are fundamentally incapable of matching up to reality.

Let me give an example—not in order to say anything for or against the person concerned, but simply to characterize the phenomenon. A particularly striking personality among those socially active in recent times was Rosa Luxemburg. In personal acquaintance, you found a woman completely endowed with social graces: measured in movement and mode of speech, restrained in each individual gesture and phrase. A certain gentleness, even, certainly nothing tempestuous, was in her personality. Yet when you heard her speak from the platform, her way of speaking was ... well, I will quote an actual example. She would say, for instance: Yes, there were times when man believed he originated from some spiritual world or other, which had placed him within social life. Today—she said—we know that man once clambered about in the trees like an ape in an extremely indecent fashion, without any clothes on, and that from this ape-man there developed those who today occupy the most varied positions in society. And this was delivered in a manner that was fired, I would say, with a certain religious impulse. Not, indeed, with the fire of immediate personal impact, but in a manner that large proletarian masses can best understand: with a certain measured dryness, so that it could be received too with a certain dryness of feeling and yet call forth, for all its dryness, a certain enthusiasm. This because people felt: at bottom, then, all men are equal and all social distinctions are swept away! But none of this was spoken from an involvement in social life itself. It emerged from theory, though one that believed itself to be true to life. It created a reality that is ultimately no reality, no fruitful reality that is.

The standpoint of most people in social life today is like that of Rosa Luxemburg: they speak about society without the power in their words that comes from life itself, from experience of the social aspect of man. To speak of society is possible if, with the old instinctive power of looking at social forms, we can find our own place in life and also a bridge to men in other walks of life, other classes, or other generations, and to individual human personalities. This was achieved in earlier epochs out of extraordinarily deep-rooted human instincts.

These powers of cognition become conscious as man develops into the spiritual organism or “sense-organ” he becomes as a human whole, in the way I have described. As a result, he can live by choice, free of the body, in the spiritual world.

For sympathy with the other person is always an unconscious or conscious extra-physical experience of his being. It is dead theory to think that we look at someone, see that he has an ear shaped so, a nose, a face shaped so, and, knowing that we too have such a nose and a forehead shaped thus and so on, and that we have a self, assume unconsciously that the other person also has a self. This is not what we do. Anyone whose mind can take in what happens knows that we have an immediate perception of the life of the other person. This immediate perception, we might say, is simply the act of seeing, raised to the spiritual level.

Certain theories in present-day philosophy have even discovered this fact. Spiritual science shows that, by bringing the power that operates unconsciously and instinctively up into consciousness, man can project himself into the other human being: only thus can he really place himself within the context of social life. With the intellectualism attained at the educational level in human development to which we have been raised—or rather, with what can grow out of that intellectualism—we can point to this self-spiritualizing development of the human soul; and when this is possible, social perspectives too can be gained. Certainly, it is only by apprehending the spiritual in this way that we can gain the strength to cast aside old fears and achieve an immediate experience of the impulse of freedom in man.

Now the soul can only really apprehend this impulse of freedom out of a full human life. That this is so, I should like to illustrate once more with an educational example.

What, precisely, is the basis of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was created from a view of life in accord with the spirit? It seeks to act as a social organism in the life of today in a way that present-day forces themselves require. Its aim is therefore certainly not to inculcate a philosophy in any way. It would be an entirely false conception of the principle of the School to think that it sought to impart to the children any particular philosophy of life. A conception of the world and of life that is held to be in accord with the spirit exists in fact for the staff. And what, in this conception, is not theory but life may also come out in the skill and tact of the teacher, and in everything that he does, in all the work of instruction and education.

The isolated statements that are often made about the teaching methods at the Waldorf School really miss the point. They may well lead someone or other to say: Of course, there are other methods of instruction and education with the same aim. In terms of abstract principles, it is true fundamentally to say that what can be stated about the methods of the Waldorf School is also found elsewhere. What is important in the Waldorf School is the immediate life that flows from a conception of the world which creates life and not merely concepts.

What does this achieve? Well, it is difficult to describe life in sharply outlined concepts. I shall therefore explain what I mean in this way: quite certainly, there are on the staff of the Waldorf School some teachers who are not unusually gifted; we can say this without hurting anyone's feelings. But even if the widest range of physical, mental and spiritual talents were represented in the teacher, we should still have to say: among the children he has before him, there may be some who will at some stage in life develop talents that go far beyond those the teacher himself possesses.

We must therefore create educational methods by which we can handle the children at each age not only in such a way that they acquire the talents we have ourselves, but also that they develop any latent talents we do not have at all. Even if no geniuses ourselves, we must place no obstacle in the way of the child's development towards genius. It is all very well to go on declaiming that the child's individuality must be developed, and that “education is a drawing out and not a putting in.” You can say this, and as an idea it all sounds wonderful, and you think of it as something fruitful in life. But what people often mean by it is simply that they will develop in the child what they think is capable of becoming something individual, but not anything that goes beyond the individuality of the teacher himself.

In the Waldorf School, everything is directed towards education in freedom. Man's inmost spiritual element remains essentially undisturbed by the Waldorf School. It is not disturbed, any more than a plant placed in the ground and allowed to develop freely in the light and air has all kinds of stakes applied to it, training it into a set shape. A child's spiritual individuality is something completely sacred, and those with a genuine experience of human nature know that it will follow, of its own accord, the influences exerted on it by everything round about. The teacher thus has to set aside what can hinder this tenderly protected individuality in its development. The hindrances, which can result from the physical, the mental and even the spiritual sphere, can be discerned by a genuine knowledge of man, if it is developed on the pedagogic and psychological sides. And when we do evolve such a knowledge, we develop a fine sense for any impediment to the free development of individuality. There is no need for violent interference. Any alien shaping of the personality should be avoided. When we see that there is an impediment we must set aside, we set it aside. The individual will know how to develop through his own power, and his talents may then go far beyond what the teacher possesses.

Here is true respect for human freedom! This freedom is what enables man to find within him the impulses that lead and drive him in life. In earlier periods, as he instinctively grew into his social environment, man absorbed from it something that then operated within him as moral and religious impulses. This process has been paralysed, I would say, by intellectualism. What can consciously produce the social impulses that were once instinctively attained, has still to be developed.

Two things thus confront modern man. On the one hand, he must now seek his ethical and religious impulses in his own personality, finding them only among his soul's innermost powers. On the other hand, in the course of the last three or four centuries intellectualism has come of age, so much so that it is now regarded as the sole authority. Yet it can afford no such direct spiritual experience, but only observe the life of nature and classify it.

We are thus confronted by what we as humanity can achieve—magnificent as it is—within natural processes. And here humanity as a whole is productive. We can see this productive aspect emerging in the last three or four centuries in the splendid instances of co-operation between natural observation and technology. Anyone who can follow what man achieves by understanding nature can also see how he has advanced technologically. You need only look at a straightforward example—how Helmholtz, let us say, a genius in some respects, invented his ophthalmoscope.

To appreciate this, you must take into account the fact that his predecessors—as if impelled by scientific progress—were already close to the discovery, and he had only to take the final step. We might say: scientific thinking as such enters into man and leads him onward. Subsequently, he is productive in the field of technology. For what he extracts from nature serves him as an inspiration. Right down to the most recent discoveries, we can follow how, in anyone who becomes a natural scientist, what he absorbs impels his spirit from one technical advance to another, so that the inspiration of nature still goes on. There's inspiration for you!

Modern man lacks such inspiration, however, when he comes to the ethical, the volitional, the religious—in short, to everything that starts from the soul yet leads at last to social forms and life. What we need here is a force that will operate in the spiritual sphere as purely natural inspiration does in our external technology. In the latter, we have gone an incredibly long way. What we have achieved there, we, the men of modern times, must pay for in the sense that our purely spiritual life has languished for a while, sustaining itself on old traditions, in the religious as well as the moral and social sphere. Today, however, we need to be able, out of the human personality, to arrive in the full experience of freedom at immediate moral impulses. Because we are faced with this social necessity, I was able, in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, to show that there must be such a thing as moral intuition. And, as I indicated then, the real moral impulses that man can find to give him ethical and moral strength, which operate more individually now in modern life, can only derive from a spiritual world. We are thus forced to rise to spiritual intuitions precisely because in our contemplation of the outside world we do not attain anything spiritually productive.

Anyone who can consciously experience the technical age from within is especially inclined to say, on the other hand: faced by the need to stick close to the ground in technology so as to survey its inanimate substance, we cannot, from what technology gives us, gain moral impulses as earlier men could. They beheld the spiritual in storm and wind and stream and star and experienced it as natural forces. We cannot do this, because our knowledge of nature has had all this refined away from it. We can only gain our moral world, therefore, by intuiting it in a directly spiritual and individual manner.

For this, however, we require a vital spiritual force within us. And this force can follow, I believe, if we are steeped in the implications of the philosophy of life I have put forward here. As a philosophy, it certainly does not wish to lay down the law in ideas and concepts. It seeks rather to present ideas and concepts only in order that they may become as vital within us, on the spiritual plane, as our life's blood itself, so that man's activity, not only his thinking, is stimulated. A philosophy of life in accord with spirit thus reveals itself as a social as well as a cognitive impulse.

In consequence, we may perhaps be justified in saying: present-day social needs, as they are often formulated in public life today, appear, to those who can dispassionately perceive the true nature of our times, to be symptomatic. They are symptomatic of the loss of the old instinctive certainties of social life and of the necessity to establish, consciously, a spiritual life that will give the same impulses as did the earlier instinctive one. Because we can believe that such a stimulation of man's innermost vital powers really corresponds to the social needs of today, we would wish, in this age of severe social tribulation, to speak of the age and its social needs in this sense.

Sometimes, today, people feel that the immediate distress of the day, the misery of the moment is so great that, fundamentally, we ought to devote ourselves exclusively to it, and look for wider horizons only when some relief has been afforded close at hand. Of all the objections put to me since, at the instigation of a circle of friends, I have been trying to speak about social life once more and to take an interest in various things connected with it, I have felt most strongly the force of the countless letters sent to me, especially two years or so ago, saying: “What is the point of all these social ideas? Here in Central Europe the most urgent thing is bread.” This objection was made over and over again. We can understand it. But in another sense we must also understand that the earth is incapable of withholding its fruitfulness at any period, if only men can find a social organization that will enable the earth's gifts to flow into society and there be distributed.

It is thus, I think, right to believe that to devote oneself to the immediate situation is a loving and noble task—in which no one is impeded by reflections such as I have set forth here. Yet, equally, it must be said: for the moment, what can be done in this way may be good; yet on the other hand, men must gain an understanding of society as soon as possible, in order to prevent the factors that bring men into such distress and misery from recreating themselves.

That we cannot get by in the social sphere with the old Utopian and intellectualized formulations should have become apparent to people when many of those who, only a short while before, were speaking with incredible confidence of what social life should be were then called upon to do something. Never was there a greater perplexity in a society than among those who reputedly knew with absolute certainty how social configurations should be organized, if only the old regime could be cleared away as rapidly as possible.

Experiment in this direction has indeed created, in Eastern Europe, the most terrible forces of destruction. And for men today to believe that, without fundamental social thought and feeling and experience, simply by continuing the old formulations, they can arrive at anything but destructive forces, is an illusion. The spectre of Eastern Europe gazes threateningly across to the West. Its gaze, however, should not leave us inactive, but should be a challenge to us to seek at every moment for vital social forces and a vital formulation of social needs, now that the abstract and Utopian ones have revealed their unfruitfulness.

How this can be achieved will be shown more fully in the lectures that follow. I have tried today simply to provide an introduction showing that, behind explicitly formulated social ideas, there lies something more profound, something that is linked with a transformation of the whole life of the soul.

In very recent times, this is beginning to be understood even among a wide circle of the working class. Anyone who looks about him knows that social needs, and in particular our reactions to them, are in the midst of a profound transformation. The unfruitfulness of the old slogans is already more or less recognized. And already it is being emphasized in many quarters that we must move to a spiritual sphere, and that moral and religious impulses must once again pervade social life. We have not yet, however, evolved the life we really need.

Our age thinks itself extremely practical and realistic, and does not know how theoretical it is in fact—especially in determining social needs. Our task today, we may perhaps observe in conclusion, cannot really be to set up completely new social or other ideals. We are not short of abstract expressions of ideals. What we need is something different: experience of the spiritual, not merely excogitation of the ideal. What we need is spirit, not in concepts merely, but with such vitality that it goes with us like a human companion in all our doings.

In apprehending the spirit as something vital in this way, we shall also be able to rise to something socially effective. On this point, we may say: today, we need not merely a formulation of ideals and social needs. We need something that will give us strength to follow the ideals, and give us inner life to make these ideals incandescent; something that impels our will to wholehearted enthusiasm, fruitful to the world, for ideals and for the life of the spirit.

Yesterday, my dear friends, I explained the primary difference between a society like ours and other societies or associations. I said its statutes and the points on its program do not exhaustively describe the character of our Society—if we add or delete points and statutes, nothing significant will be added to or subtracted from what our Society is essentially meant to be. I also pointed out the most obvious way in which our Society differs from the usual kind of program-based society or association. That kind of association can be dissolved at any moment. But if it became necessary to dissolve our Society and we actually disbanded, that would in no way change the real state of affairs since our Society, unlike others, is based not on illusory human inventions such as programs and statutes, but on realities. We touched on one of these realities, namely that the lecture cycles are in the hands of all our members, a fact that would not change in the slightest if the Society were dissolved. And the same applies to many other realities on which our Society is based.

Consequently, we really must get to know the conditions necessary for the survival of our Society and not delude ourselves about them. I gave a rather superficial explanation of these conditions yesterday, and would like to go into them more deeply today.

You all know that in many materialistic discussions on the nature of life itself, we can find many definitions or explanations of what constitutes a living being. You have probably learned enough on that subject from spiritual science to realize that all these explanations and definitions are of necessity one-sided and incomplete. The greatest mistake or illusion of materialistically minded people is to think they can encompass the essence of a thing in a single definition or explanation. To illustrate how grotesque this idea is, I once told you the story of how a Greek school of philosophy was searching for a definition of the human being. What they finally came up with was that a human being was a living being with two legs and no feathers.¹ Well, this is undoubtedly correct; it is an absolutely correct definition. But the next day, someone who had understood this definition brought in a plucked chicken and said, “Here is a living thing that has two legs and no feathers, so it must be a human being!”

The usual attempts at defining life are no better than that. That's just the way it is with definitions, and we have to be aware of that fact. There is also a comparable materialistic definition of life given by a famous zoologist, a definition that is quite correct and useful within the limits of its applicability:² “A living thing is something that can leave a corpse behind under certain circumstances; what it leaves behind when it is destroyed is thus not a living thing.” Clearly, this definition applies only to the outer limits of the physical plane, where a living being does in fact leave a corpse behind at its demise; thus, this definition is valid there. When a machine is destroyed, it does not leave a corpse behind; we would be speaking metaphorically if we talked about the corpse of a watch, for instance. However, if our Society were dissolved, it would actually leave behind a real corpse, in the truest sense of the word.

What is the nature of a corpse? Once a corpse has been abandoned by its soul, it no longer obeys the same laws as it did when it was united with that soul. Instead, it begins to obey the physical laws of the earthly elements. The same thing would be true of the corpse of our Society as soon as the Society was dissolved. In addition, the Society's vehicle, namely all the lecture cycles now in the members' possession, would also be part of this corpse.

We can be quite precise and scientific in taking this comparison further. If a corpse is not to have a detrimental effect on its surroundings, it must be cremated or buried. This would also apply to the corpse our Society would undoubtedly leave behind at its dissolution. As a consequence, once we know what our Society really is, we become aware of our responsibility toward what it is based on. A society or association based on statutes and programs is like a machine that leaves behind only pieces if you destroy it, but our Society would leave an actual corpse behind if it were dissolved. It would leave behind something that would have to be thought of as a corpse and treated accordingly.

My friends, we really must think about what our Society requires to survive. For the time being, let's turn away from the superficial fact that the lecture cycles exist and look at their content, which, as I mentioned yesterday, is now present in a certain number of heads. It exists not only in the heads of people who took it in properly and harmoniously, but perhaps also of those—present company excepted, of course, for politeness' sake—who took it up in a distorted form and go on distorting it as they talk about it. All of this is really there and is alive in the Society. And just think of the effect it would have as the Society's corpse if the Society were to disband. That is why we must take responsibility for guarding what our Society requires for survival, and why I appealed to you yesterday in various ways to safeguard those needs.

Now, I just said that if the Society were dissolved, it would leave behind a corpse. This characteristic tells us that in the truest sense of the word, the Society is a real living being. But the Society also possesses another characteristic of living things, namely the fact that it can get sick. I told you that an association founded on the basis of a program and statutes is like a machine or a mechanism, and when members do something that does not fit in with the machine, they are expelled. Expelling members from an association founded on statutes is always just a matter of “lovingly” applying a rule.

However, in the case of a society like ours, which is a living organism rather than a mechanism, taking the action of expelling a member will very seldom have any significant effect on the actual problem. In our circumstances, expelling a member who has done something wrong is simply taking the easy way out. That is not to say that we cannot do it, but we do have to realize that it is much more important to keep the organism of our Society so healthy that it acts as a healer in its totality when confronted with individual unhealthy growths. In most cases, healing a sick organism is nothing more than calling up the healing forces of the entire organism when an individual member or organ is ill. It is important that we understand the process of potential illness within our Society and become aware of the need to call up the healing forces of its entire organism.

Now, I already explained yesterday that one important force for healing consists in getting used to being absolutely exact with regard to phenomena on the physical plane—truth in exactitude, and exactitude in truthfulness. In outer exoteric life, if some bit of information is altered through gossip or lack of precision in being passed on from one person to the next, that doesn't matter nearly as much as it would matter if we were to let this become habitual within our Society. One of the most urgent needs, then, is for us to take exactitude as our guiding principle in everything we say and do.

It is only natural for people to ask what they must do in order to help strengthen the Society. The answer is that the single most important thing is for each individual to really feel like a member of the Society in the right way. Members must experience the Society as an organism and themselves as its organs. That requires, however, that we all make the affairs of the Society our own and that we are able to follow the Society's train of thought. Knowing about the concerns of the Society and wanting to know about them is of fundamental, crucial importance. Of course, this presupposes a certain interest in the Society as such, and to develop this interest, we have to know that the Society is an organism and take this fact seriously. It is much more than just a metaphor.

For example, we need to understand the following. We have three points listed in our statutes.³ It follows from what I said before that statutes are only of secondary importance for us. Nonetheless, they are there. In fact, they have to be there. And if we consider these three statutory points, we can describe them best by saying that they represent our work, the work of our Society. But if you think about how it is with human beings and their relationship to their work, you will find that people's work is what makes them tired and wears them out. Describing a person's work, however, by no means definitively characterizes that person, and it makes just as little sense to say that the work within the confines of these three points on our program encompasses the whole nature and essence of our Society.

However, performing this work does wear the Society down. This means that our Society, just like a human being, needs to be taken care of. Just like a human organism, the organism of the Society also needs care. And it's not enough to think that being a member of the Society means nothing more than using the Society as a place for fostering what is expressed in these three points in our statutes. It also means taking an interest in the guidance and management of the Society as such. When someone lacks this interest, that really means that person is opposed to the Society's ongoing existence. Being interested only in the work the Society does is not the same thing as being interested in the Society as such. But in order for our Society to exist as a basis for this work, a certain interest in the Society as such, in the Society as an organism, must also be present. That is, a certain principle of togetherness, of living and working together, has to be cultivated within our Society.

I said yesterday that in certain cases it is necessary to become quite drastic in calling a spade a spade, and also that it belongs to the very nature of our Society to be able to count on not having these things spread abroad immediately. The grotesque example I used yesterday, the example of the man in the barbershop whose habits were at odds with those of his surroundings, was meant to show that the motive behind this kind of clash is often quite different from what people claim. As I showed, the man in question was motivated by hysterical vanity.

Karma has led us to set up our headquarters here in this area, and so we find ourselves living under conditions that are not exactly ideal in all respects, if I may put it like that. That was what I meant when I said that even if each of us behaved in an absolutely exemplary manner, we might be attacked with still more slander and so on, even if all our members were absolutely exemplary in how they behaved within the general population. So you see, I am not saying that we must take all possible prejudices into account, but only that we need to look at the living conditions our Society needs.

In terms of our own human nature, our own physical body, we know that we have to be physically adapted to the external conditions of life around us, on which we depend, and that our physical organism is in constant interaction with the outside world. The same thing applies to the outer organism of our Society. It has to develop within the social framework in which our karma has placed us, and this makes it imperative that our members respect our Society's needs with regard to living conditions. I have explained what these conditions are time and time again.

An important point I once expressly stated in a rebuttal⁴ of a local pastor's article attacking our Society⁵ was that our Society as such does not have anything directly to do with religion. After all, what matters is not only to always say the right thing, but also to say what needs to be said in each particular instance. That is what is important. And one of the things most crucially needed for our whole movement to flourish is for the outer world to finally realize something I've tried to explain again and again. I have said repeatedly that our movement has no more to do with religion than the Copernican view of the solar system at its inception had to do with any particular religious confession. That the religious denominations were opposed to the Copernican system was their problem, and no reflection on the Copernican view itself. And now we must stand firm on one point, namely, that we have no intention of founding a sect or a religious movement. At one point, I had to get downright unpleasant, because, with the best will in the world, people were writing articles about our building and calling it a “temple,” which was very detrimental to us. It made it seem, quite unnecessarily, as if we were competing with the religious denominations. That is why I always remind our members to try to popularize the term “School for Spiritual Science.”

It is really important for people to hear again and again that we have nothing to do with a religious sect or with founding a new religion or anything like that. Our members commit untold sins against the Society when they fail to point out, when providing information, that our Society has nothing to do with founding a religion. Not only that, but by omission they actually do a lot to make it seem as if we were trying to found a religion. It is important to take this into account even in trivial instances and to take every opportunity to beat it into people's hard heads that this is not a temple and not a church, but something that is dedicated to scientific purposes.

Sometimes, my friends, what is said is less important than how it is said. We have to realize that we will always give outsiders the impression that we are a sect or some kind of new religion if we invariably put on a long face in talking about anything happening in our movement—“so long a face that your chin hits your stomach,” as someone once put it to me.⁶ I know this is not a nice way of putting it, but it is certainly to the point. Of course, this is because many people imagine that this kind of exaggerated seriousness is the only way to talk about feelings related to religious life. But we must make every effort to free our movement from the preconceived idea that we are trying to found a church, a religion, or a sect, and to popularize the idea that this is a spiritual scientific movement taking its place in the world just as the Copernican system did, so that everyone can see that we are the ones being wronged. The Church made a mistake in opposing the teachings of Copernicus; it had to accept them eventually anyway.⁷ The same thing will happen with our movement as well—the Church will have to accept it.

This is an example of how we have to learn to speak very exactly, and precise speaking must be considered the lifeblood of our Society in its relations with the outside world. It is one way of doing something really constructive on behalf of the Society. People who are only interested in reading lecture cycles—which has its uses, of course, and we couldn't do without it—and take no interest in the governance of the Society, especially here, where you are all in such close contact—well, people who do not want to develop that interest are actually not in support of the Society as such, as I said before. You must develop an interest in the Society! The point is not simply to be there for the sake of participating somehow in the work the Society has to do, but to develop an interest in the Society as such. This means, however, that the affairs of the Society as a living entity have to enter our individual awareness. And the less we need statutes in order to do that, the better.

You see how necessary it is for us to become more and more able to stand firm when someone from the outside says something negative about our Society, and to be able to say that we can vouch for the fact that something like that could not possibly happen in our Society. We must be able to count on the fact that the kind of slander that gets circulated is false in almost all instances—although exceptions are always possible, of course. This, however, requires a really vital interest in the affairs of the Society.

Let's assume that some kind of indiscretion occurs. For example, let's take the hypothetical case of a man and a woman who, one fine afternoon in May, are so indiscreet as to do something they shouldn't do, outside and in full view of the people in the neighborhood. Let's assume that this kind of indiscretion takes place. What ought to happen as a matter of course if our Society were constituted as it should be? The natural thing would be for the people in question to realize in the course of the next few days that they ought to find an older member in whom they could confide, and ask what can be done about it. That would mean that they are making their own private matters the concern of the Society.

Please note the kind of example I have chosen. It is not simply the kind of thing we should regard as a strictly private matter that is none of our business. Rather, it is something that could be extremely damaging to the Society. We cannot function on the principle of the knee that says, “That's my private business”; the knee has to feel like a part of the whole organism. Of course, such things must also be received with real interest. They have to be seen as a concern of the Society; there must always be someone there who is aware of not only what is of immediate interest to him or her, but who also knows a lot about the Society and can contribute to the Society's ongoing well-being.

In other words, this means that we have to get beyond saying, “I have my own circle of friends, and it's to my credit that I brought them into the Society; this circle of friends is what interests me.” I certainly do not mean to criticize people for developing friendships and personal connections—that is none of the Society's business. However, it does have an immediate effect on the Society if people are only interested in the Society because of their own membership in it. We have to make the concerns of the Society our own. We must preclude the possibility of first hearing about some offensive incident from someone outside the Society rather than from within our own membership, and we will automatically take a step toward preventing this when the right kind of interest in our internal social relationships is present.

For instance, at present you can ask four or five people whether a particular person has been attending our lectures in the past few weeks, and discover that none of them knows. That can easily happen among us. Of course, it is understandable if one or the other person doesn't know anything about it, but if you cannot find out anything at all, even by asking around among people who can be presumed to be in the know, that demonstrates a lack of interest and shows that our Society is a mechanism, not an organism. It shows that people are not taking an interest in its life and vitality. That is what I want to emphasize again and again—the need for an interest in our Society's life and vitality.

You see, my friends, we are sometimes surprised by events in our Society that would not surprise us if the members were sensitive to their obligations—and I use that word deliberately—and were participating in the thinking, feeling, and doing of the Society as if they were part of a living organism. But two things are necessary for that to happen. First, each one of us must be willing not to deal with incidents touching on the Society's needs as if they were his or her strictly private concerns. And second, anyone willing to do that must seek out another member with a sympathetic ear.

In this present crisis involving the part of the Society around the building in Dornach, regardless of how many formal resolutions and new paragraphs you formulate, you will still not be able to cope with what is going on in the Society. In spite of all that, we will still not be able to prevent ending up with the above-mentioned corpse on our hands. You can only prevent it by beginning to take an active interest in the affairs of the Society. This means more than the one-time application of intelligence and good sense to formulating new paragraphs and setting up tribunals to deal with “transgressions”; it means making the Society an ongoing object of interest in a living context. But above all, it means we must not be afraid to think, regardless of how unsettling that may be.

I have already mentioned that we are now living in a highly abnormal phase of European history, which we hope will soon come to an end. In times like this, we have to realize that we should not feel free to send anything and everything we happen to think of over international borders, even if it is nothing incorrect or offensive. I am not talking about private matters, I'm talking about things that concern the Society. In fact, however, a large number of our members do not want to think at all about what might or might not be appropriate to the times. Of course, nothing wrong has been done and I do not mean to reprimand anyone, but only to encourage you all to give it some thought and consideration before you act.

We all know that applications for membership or notices of acceptance are totally innocuous documents that cannot possibly cause political repercussions. However, that is not how nations at war look at things. So why do our members insist on sending membership cards out of the country? Perhaps out of thoughtlessness, perhaps out of stubbornness, because they have a point to prove. But if such things continue to happen on a large scale, people will mistakenly read all kinds of things into them, and it will become impossible for the Society to continue to exist. Our members, of all people, ought to be distinguished by their ability to think! But we have to pay attention to these things, or we will not see the Society continue for very much longer.

Once in a while I need to refer back to things in the past. For example, our criterion for admitting members to the Society has never been that only exceptional human beings who were head and shoulders above the rest of humanity would be considered. That is what many people think, but it's not true, and there are others who think that people who are admitted to the Society are in no way exceptional. In fact, we also made a point of admitting people to help them become healthy. And then what happened? Other members began to regard one of these people, someone who was to be helped by being admitted, as a kind of apostle, as someone who was there to heal the Society.

Why is it possible, my friends, for something like that to happen? It is because we are not adequately aware of the ways and means we have at our disposal to prevent it. Just think back to some of the things that have happened—and think we must, if we are to sustain an esoteric movement! If you think back, you will find that whenever something like that happened, whatever you needed in order to be able to assess the situation was usually made available in a lecture; it was spoken out. You only had to be alert to it whenever some danger was present. This means, however, that you really have to consider in detail the lectures given during the time in question. There is no need for us to make the mistake of getting overly personal in our efforts to do the right thing; we can stick to objective facts. But we have to understand what is objectively true on a case-by-case basis.

At this point, there can be no doubt that something radical and fundamental has to happen, especially for that part of our Society gathered around this building. But it is high time to make sure that we do not look for this fundamental and radical action in the wrong direction, that we do not believe it can be accomplished through a few simple things, a few principles and resolutions. That will not bring about any fundamental change or any fundamental healing.

My friends, I must confess that it is not at all easy for me to discuss these things as I have been doing yesterday and today, simply because I would prefer to be talking about other things, of course, and because I also know that many of you have no desire to hear such things, since, after all, your reason for being here is to hear various esoteric truths. However, my friends, if the Society continues to be of as little use as the recent actions of some individuals suggest, we may have to concede that it is no longer possible to use it as a vehicle for introducing spiritual science into the world. Just think of the discrepancy between what I have just said and something else I have had to say here many times in the last few weeks, namely, that spiritual science as we know it must be the greatest influence of our times in counteracting the presumptuous, superficial, and deceptive knowledge existing in the name of science and research. Indeed, spiritual science must make itself felt as a fundamentally progressive element within humankind. And yet we still have to talk about things that should really be self-explanatory, and all this at the risk of being constantly misunderstood. We all tend to see the sins of the other and not make the effort to see our Society as a real living organism, that is, to experience ourselves as organs within this organism.

Of course, members who have joined us only recently can easily make mistakes, but I wonder what some of the long-term members are doing here if they are not doing anything to prevent the mistakes of the newcomers. It should be a principle of ours that longtime members pay attention to the new members as individuals and offer help, in word and deed, to protect them against mistaking foolishness for cosmic wisdom.

It is inherent in the very nature of an esoteric society, however, that foolishness occurs every now and then. Thus, there have to be as many members as possible who can see through the foolishness and prevent it from being implemented. That includes what is in Mr. Goesch's letter.⁸ He claims that promises have been made and not kept, and has tried to confirm this through a member who he believes or assumes has been promised something. When this member told him that this was not the case, Mr. Goesch, instead of admitting he was wrong, said that this was one more proof that magic is at work—when I shake hands with somebody on something, the handshake wipes out the promise in that person's memory. This is one of the main accusations in Goesch's letter.

It is obvious, my friends, that Mr. Goesch has not only written about these things, but has talked to a number of individuals about them. A vital interest in the affairs of the Society would really have required these people to go in all due haste to a more experienced member and make him or her aware of this situation. It is absolutely incomprehensible how anyone can allow Goesch to say something as impossible as, “When people tell me no promise has been made to them, the conclusion I come to is not that they really were not promised anything, but that their memory of the promise has been wiped out by the power of suggestion,” and let it stand uncontested. When things like this are allowed to happen unhindered, then clearly the Society is not viable and cannot be used as a vehicle for esoteric truths.

There are two things, my friends, that are very much on my mind. One is the fact that everything I know compels me to consider bringing spiritual science to human beings as both necessary and urgent. But I am equally aware of another fact, namely, that the instrument established for this purpose is in the midst of a crisis. That is why I cannot help “tormenting” you with what I had to say yesterday and today. After all, meetings to take remedial action have been announced. But if these meetings run their course the way they did in earlier, similar cases, we will get nowhere.

Please be aware that the simple measure of expelling some one will never accomplish anything. Expulsion cannot resolve any concern of the Society. As you recall, we expelled Dr. Hugo Vollrath many years ago, and he managed to do everything he did later on in spite of having been expelled.⁹ The same thing will happen in similar cases. It is possible to expel a member, but that is not enough; we cannot rest content with that.

If you will get out Theosophy, which is the first book I wrote in the theosophical movement on the subject of theosophy, and read the chapter entitled “The Path of Knowledge,” you will find certain things that, if you think them through, will make it easy for you to come up on your own with what I said yesterday and today.¹⁰ It is all there in that chapter. However, I must assume that not even this very first book of mine has been understood, for if it had been, many recent events could not have taken place.

When the special members' meeting takes place tomorrow, we must be sure that we are looking at these things with all due seriousness and dignity.¹¹ We need to ask ourselves whether we really want to let things get to the point where we have to admit that spiritual science cannot be disseminated by means of a society like this one. If that is the case, if it becomes impossible to do this through the Society, then we will need to find other ways of dealing with what is left behind as its corpse, and that will be much more difficult.¹²

I am not responsible for making the agenda for tomorrow, but how that agenda is dealt with will play a part in deciding whether the Anthroposophical Society will continue to exist in the future. Therefore, I will content myself with making an urgent appeal to you to deal with this situation with the greatest possible responsibility and to not gloss over things that are of the utmost significance for human civilization as a whole.

Tomorrow there will be a eurythmy performance at half past ten, followed by a lecture.

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Today I should like to discuss a few things, speaking at times more generally, in connection with what was said yesterday and the day before. From those two lectures you will have been able to learn that spiritual science, as conceived here, is to be born, in our time and for the very near future, out of the deepest and most serious demands of human evolution. I have often mentioned that we are not concerned here with those ideals which originate in man's subjective nature, but rather with what is being deciphered from the spiritual history of the evolution of humanity; and from this spiritual history one can clearly see that the science of initiation, that is, the science which brings over its knowledge from beyond the threshold of the spiritual world, is absolutely necessary for the further evolution of mankind. But all that can be said today concerning a genuine knowledge of the spiritual world is opposed by those powers which stand for the antiquated; and the opposition of the people in whom these powers live must be overcome. The statement of the necessity for a complete transformation of learning and thinking with regard to the most important affairs of human evolution must be seriously and basically understood. Therefore I should like to ask you to attach special importance to the idea that it must be our purpose to overcome everything of a merely sectarian nature, still rampant even in the anthroposophical mind, and really to see the significance for the world and for humanity of anthroposophically-orientated spiritual science.

People today are still far from being awakened out of the sleep in which they were enfolded by that development which I have already described to you in certain of its fundamental characteristics, and which began about the middle of the 15th century. Certainly what was incorporated in the evolution of humanity during that time: namely, external physical science with its great triumphs, the materialistic conception of cosmic laws, and with it the mistaken social ideas so clearly evident today—all that has from this direction enveloped humanity in sleep continues to have a powerful effect; and a fruitful advance will not be possible unless mankind is shaken out of this sleep. Let us never forget that the knowledge of the spiritual has powerful enemies in all those who wish to be assured first of all—just from pure mental indolence—of the continuance of what they have been accustomed to think. We cannot say that we should take no notice when on the part of such people hostility and opposition to spiritual science as it is purposed here become more and more determined as this spiritual science becomes better known. To be sure, anyone might believe that such things should be allowed to pass entirely unnoticed; but that would be an utterly wrong view in our present time. We do not fail to notice noxious insects which approach us; we try to get rid of them, and often this must be done in ungentle ways. The mode of procedure must be decided in each individual case.

These things must also be understood out of the necessities of the time. Therefore it must be viewed with very special satisfaction in these times of ours, which are becoming ever more difficult, if there are nevertheless people who are possessed of sufficient power of will to stand up for our cause. But there are alas! still far too few people who fully comprehend the seriousness of what is now at stake in the evolution of humanity. On the one hand, there are those who do not intend to stir out of long-accustomed habits—not for any spiritual reasons, but from mental laziness and other such considerations; and on the other hand, there must be those who strongly oppose with their whole being whatever is ripe for destruction. We must not suppose that any sort of indulgence toward what is ready to perish can be allowed to hinder us today. In the last five or six years people could have learned that things belonging to the old order lead ad absurdum; and those who have not yet learned it will have abundant opportunity to do so in the immediate future. There must be in us the zeal for that which is to be implanted as something new in the evolution of mankind.

That a violent hatred would be manifest toward that anthroposophical spiritual science which has now been carried on in Europe for two decades, could be foreseen—anyone could foresee it who knew and knows that what we call anthroposophical spiritual science is intimately connected with the powers which must be summoned in the present and the very near future for the progress of humanity. This spiritual science must not be confused with sleepy-headedness, with that disposition to create for oneself a little sensual soul-enjoyment by means of spiritual ideas and concepts. We stand at the beginning. Against us rages the battle of the will to exterminate. In so far as we have understood the true impulse of our spiritual science, we have never intended to act aggressively; but we must not neglect whatever is necessary to meet the opposition of the aggressive element which will appear more and more from without. Here our courage must not give way; we must not try to proceed through indolence. It will not be easy to infuse truth into human evolution, and indulgence is positively not that with which to gird ourselves. Matters have come to a pretty pass indeed, as the recent events on the occasion of a lecture by Professor T. in Reutlingen prove. If the gentlemen who are the official representatives of Christianity are baffled, then they are ready to say, as a city clergyman did in the discussion: “Here Christ is mistaken!” Of course Professor T. is not mistaken; but if what he has to say does not agree with the revealed text of the Bible, then Christ is wrong, not Professor T. That is characteristic of the disposition we meet today, only people will not see it because it is uncomfortable to see it; and it could be found in all fields if only people were inclined to look for it.

For those who are able to see the relations in life, it is clear that the European calamity of recent years, although it has apparently played an external role, is inwardly connected with what people have become accustomed to think, and concerning which—please pardon the somewhat trivial, banal expression—concerning which people are so fond of saying: What glorious progress we have made! and smack their lips with satisfaction.

What is necessary is to become inwardly objective. Under the influence of modern culture people have lost objectivity. The personal is everywhere in evidence. When sometime the history of the last five or six years is written, that will be possible only from spiritual-scientific foundations, and then the chapters of this world history will show how enormously the personal element has influenced the great world-historical events. I said that it will be impossible without spiritual-scientific foundations to speak of the events of the last five or six years; and in support of this I need only refer to what I have frequently indicated here. Of the thirty or forty men in prominent leading positions who participated in 1914 in what is called the outbreak of the World War—people love inexact language nowadays, because it is adapted to cover up the truth; it was neither an “outbreak,” but something quite different, nor was it a “world war”; it was something entirely different, which will not come to an end for a long time yet—of the thirty or forty men who participated at that time, a large proportion were not entirely compos mentis, the forces of soul and spirit were not all functioning, and where the consciousness is clouded, there are doors by which the Ahrimanic powers have especially easy access to human resolutions and human intentions.

The Ahrimanic powers played an essential role in the beginning of those events of 1914. Even today anyone who is so minded could easily perceive, from following up events in a purely external way, how necessary it is to infuse spiritual knowledge into the evolution of humanity. But man is far removed by habits of thought, perception, and feeling from observing such things with absolute seriousness. There is on the one hand the fact—and more than that, the imminent fact—that the time is ripe for people to appear who are able to bring suitable and capable souls to meet those spiritual impulses which have been entering our physical world since the last third of the 19th century. Side by side with the fact that we have sailed into a materialistic time, there exists the other fact that the doors between the spiritual world and ours stand open since the last third of the 19th century, and that people who open their souls and minds to spiritual impulses can have relations with the spiritual world. To be sure, the number may be small of those whose consciousness is touched today by the spiritual world; but it is a fact that this spiritual world makes itself felt in many a human spirit. We may say that the next ten, twenty, thirty years, up to the middle of the century, will be years in which more and more people will have learned to listen to the still small voice, and so open their inner being to the impulses of the spiritual world which would enter.

Those people today who receive such impulses from the spiritual world, who know about the truths and the knowledge that must enter into human evolution, know the following also: If what we call science, and especially what we call art, is not fructified by the science of initiation practiced by such people, humanity will face a quick decline, a fearful decline. Let the kind of teaching that prevails in our universities continue for another three decades, let social questions be treated as they are now for thirty years more, and you will have a devastated Europe. You can set up ideals in this field or that as much as you please, you can talk yourselves hoarse about individual demands coming from one group or another, you can talk in the belief that with such urgent demands something will be done for humanity's future—it will all be in vain unless the transformation comes from the depths of human souls, from the thought of the relation of this world to the spiritual world. If in this regard there is not a change in learning, a change in thinking, then the moral deluge will overwhelm Europe!

The important thing is to realize what it would actually mean if a number of persons who look deeply into the knowledge from beyond the threshold were obliged to recognize that the confusion, the materialistic tendencies, the social errors, are going on and on—and people do not wish to alter their thinking and learning—it is important to realize what it would signify if these few persons possessing the science of initiation were compelled to see that humanity is going downwards because of sheer laziness in thinking and feeling. You should not be deceived as to the number of motives there are today for such a state of affairs in the so-called civilized world. There are many ruling motives—for is it not really natural to expect the humanity of our time in its pride to reject everything coming from the direction of the science of initiation? Humanity is so immensely clever in every single one of its individuals! humanity is so inclined to sneer at what can be won only by working upon the development of one's own soul. Humanity believes that without learning anything it knows everything. In neither the natural nor the social realm can the problems of the present time be solved without a fructifying of human thinking, feeling, and willing from the spiritual world. To many people today it seems positively like a creation of fancy when we speak of this science of initiation, or of anything like the threshold of the spiritual world. It is true, not everyone today can cross the threshold to the spiritual world; but no one would be prevented from perceiving the truth of what is said by those who have crossed that threshold. It is false reasoning when it is said again and again by one or another: How am I to know that what is presented by anyone as the science of initiation is correct, when I cannot myself see into the spiritual world? That is false reasoning. Common sense which is not led astray by the erroneous ideas of our time in the natural or the social sphere can decide of itself whether the element of truth rules in what anyone says. If someone speaks of spiritual worlds, you must take account of everything: the manner of speaking, the seriousness with which things are treated, the logic which is developed, and so on, and then it will be possible to judge whether what is presented as information about the spiritual world is charlatanism, or whether it has foundation. Anyone can decide this; and no one is hindered from making fruitful in the natural and social realms that which is brought over from the well-spring of spiritual life by those who have the right to speak of the principle of initiation.

Those forces of humanity's evolution which have so far guided man unconsciously, so that he has been able to advance, are becoming exhausted, and will be entirely exhausted by the middle of the century, approximately speaking. The new forces must be drawn from depths of souls; and man must come to understand that in the depths of his soul he is connected with the roots of spiritual life.

As to crossing over the threshold, naturally not everyone today can accomplish that, for the human being has become accustomed in the course of recent centuries to consider everything he encounters as taking place in time. But the first experience beyond the threshold is of a world in which time as we understand it has no significance. The time concept must be abandoned. Hence it is advantageous for people who wish to prepare themselves for an understanding of the spiritual world, to begin this training at least, by trying to picture backwards—let us say a drama, which outwardly starts, of course, with the first act and proceeds to the fifth—to picture it as starting at the end and going back to the beginning of the first act; to imagine and feel a melody, not in the succession in which it is played, but letting the tones run backward; to picture the daily experience, not from morning to evening, but running backward from evening to morning. In this way we seriously accustom our thinking to the canceling of time. In our daily life we are accustomed to picture the second event as occurring after the first, the third following the second, the fourth following the third, and so on; and our thinking is always an image of external happenings. If now we begin to think sometimes from the end toward the beginning, to feel from the end toward the beginning, we impose an inner compulsion upon ourselves, and this compulsion is good, for it forces us out of the ordinary sense world. Time runs one, two, three, four, and so on, in this direction. If we reverse our thinking, so that it goes from evening to morning, thus: instead of from morning to evening, then we are thinking against time. We cancel time.

If we are able to continue such thinking, going back in our life as far as we possibly can, we shall have gained very much; for only one who escapes from time can enter into the spiritual world.

We say that man is provided with physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. At first only the physical and etheric bodies come into consideration for the physical sense world. The etheric body still takes part in time in earth events; the astral body can be found only when we are freed from time. The physical body is in space; the ego, the true ego, can be found only when we have escaped from space, for the world in which the true ego lives is spaceless.

So there are two conditions belonging to the earliest experiences namely, that we become free from time and free from space when we cross the threshold to the spiritual world. I have often referred previously to various ways of attaining concepts which disregard space, when I have called your attention to the dimensions—not in such a childish way as four-dimensional space and the like are often spoken of by spiritists, but in a more serious way. Just consider how much of the content of your consciousness is lost when you are no longer in space and time. Your life is completely adjusted to space and time. The soul life of man, as well, is entirely accommodated to space and time. If you enter a world to which you are not adapted, the lack of adaptation implies sensations of pain and suffering; so that the first entrance into the spiritual world is not won without the vanquishing of pain and suffering. People fail to realize this, or else they shrink back in terror from the spiritual world because they are unwilling to enter the kind of abysmal world in which space and time do not exist.

When I thus call before your mental vision this first experience of life beyond the threshold, you become vividly conscious that there are indeed few people today who have sufficient inner courage to venture themselves, as it were, into the bottomless and timeless in actual experience. Certain people, however, are bound by their destiny to cross over the threshold; and without the wisdom which can be brought over from beyond the threshold no further progress is possible. From this you will feel what is necessary. It is necessary that what we call confidence of one man in another should be increased in the future. It would be a fundamental social virtue. In our time of social demands this virtue is one of the rarest, for although people demand that everyone shall serve the community, no one has confidence in another; the most unsocial instincts hold sway. In order that the general education of humanity shall progress in such a way that human beings may grow into the spiritual world, it will be necessary that those who may rightly speak of the science of initiation be given confidence—not confidence arising from blind belief in authority, but from common sense; for what is brought as information from beyond the threshold can always be comprehended if only common sense is really employed.

And then from the viewpoint of common sense, and keeping that in mind on the one hand, we must, on the other, constantly direct our attention to what confronts us today. Although not everyone says thus openly, “There the Christ is mistaken” yet the logic of the present life is characterized by this kind of talk. And when people say they cannot distinguish between what is announced with inner logic from the spiritual worlds and what the university professors say—then common sense is not in evidence, or at least there is no intention to use it. When anyone declares that Christ is mistaken, surely from his common sense a man can say without further ado that such a person can no longer be taken into account from this point of view.

We have lost a real science of the soul. We no longer have any; and I have pointed out—only recently in public lectures in Basel¹ and in other places—why we have lost the science of the soul. The science of the spirit became uncomfortable to the Catholic Church as early as the 9th century; and, as I have frequently explained, the spirit was abolished at the Eighth General Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 869. At that time the dogma was announced that, if a man is a true Christian, he must not think that he consists of body, soul, and spirit, but only of body and soul, and that the soul has spiritual qualities. Psychology still teaches that today, and believes that such teaching represents the point of view of unprejudiced science; but it is only repeating the dogma of 869. Even all that refers to the soul was monopolized by the confessional churches in the form of belief, in the form of creed or dogma. All knowledge pertaining to the soul that should come from man himself was monopolized by the denominational societies; and only external nature was left as the object of real knowledge, of free knowledge. No wonder we have today no science of the soul, for secular scholarship has devoted itself entirely to the science of nature, since the science of the soul was monopolized and the science of the spirit abolished. So we have no science of the soul. If we build upon the science that is the fashion today, we can make no progress; for if we build upon the word-psychology of our time (it really is not much more than that), we cannot come to a real understanding of what takes place in the soul. You know from my statement in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment that upon crossing over the threshold to the spiritual world, thinking, feeling, and willing become separated in the consciousness. In the ordinary present-day consciousness thinking, feeling, and willing form a sort of chaos; they are intermingled. At the moment when the threshold to the spiritual world is crossed, at the moment when one sets about acquiring the science of initiation through experience, thinking, feeling, and willing become independent powers in the consciousness. They become independent, and then one learns to know them.

Only then does one learn really to distinguish thinking from feeling and from willing.

Especially does one learn to distinguish thinking from willing. If we consider the thinking which is active in us as human beings, not according to its content, but as a force—if we consider the thinking force in us, we find that the very force with which we think is something like a shining into our life of that which we experienced in the spiritual world before birth, or before conception. And the will-nature in man is something embryonic, something germinal, which will come to complete development only post mortem after death. So we may say: If this (see diagram) is the course of human life between birth and death, then thinking, as it exists in man within the course of this human life, is only an appearance, for its true being lies in the time before birth, or before conception; and willing is only a germ, for what develops from this germ does so only after death.

Thinking and willing in human nature are fundamentally different.

If now someone appears possessing the logic of our time, which tends to classify and arrange everything systematically, he will say: “We have been told today that thinking is the force which comes from the life before birth, and that willing is the force which points to the life after death.” Now one has defined; by definition one has nicely drawn the line between thinking and willing. But nothing is accomplished by definitions, though their insufficiency is generally not observed. Many definitions, especially those which are considered scientific, appear very clever; but they all have a hitch somewhere—which recalls that definition once given in ancient Greece to the question, What is man? “Man is a two-legged creature without feathers.” Whereupon the next day a pupil brought a plucked fowl and said: “This is a man, for it is a two-legged creature without feathers.” Things are not so simple that they can be treated thus with the ordinary intellectual tools. You see we can say quite well, we must maintain, that what we experience as thinking has its true reality before birth, and that only something like a reflected image of it shines into us. Here a certain difficulty presents itself, but you will overcome it with a little effort of thought.

If you have a mirror here, and here an object—for example, a candle—you have here a reflected image. You can distinguish the image from the object, and will not take the one for the other. If in some way—let us say with a screen—you have the candle itself covered, you will see only the reflection in the mirror. The reflected image will do whatever the candle does, and so from the reflection you will be able to see what it does. You are accustomed to think spatially, and you can therefore easily imagine how the reflection of the candle is related to the reality. But the thinking force in us, as force, is a reflected image, and its reality is in the life before birth. The real force whose image we employ in this life, is in the life before birth. Therefore the principle of human consciousness which results from observing one's own consciousness is: I think, therefore I am not, cogito ergo non sum! That is based on the principle which must be grasped: that in thinking something of the nature of an image exists, and that the force of thinking belongs to the life before birth. Modern development began by setting up the opposite as the basic axiom of philosophy: Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am, which is nonsense. You see what tests modern humanity must go through; but we are at the crossroads, and we must learn to transform our thinking about the basic factors of the soul life.

Having thus in a certain way traced back thinking to its essential being, we might now be able to state something similar with regard to willing. When we regard the will-force between birth and death and what it becomes after death, we must conceive willing, not as reality and reflection, but as germ and completion. This provision: namely, that we have the image of thinking and the embryo of willing, alone gives us the possibility of The Riddle of Man, and Riddles of the Soul, as well as in the second edition of Philosophy of Spiritual Activity where these things are also treated philosophically.

But here is a peculiar fact from which you must see how little the indolent, everyday thinking suffices for entering into reality. We have grasped the essential nature of thinking; but when we do grasp this essential nature of thinking, we must say at the same time: This thinking is not mere thinking, but in it is also a force of willing. With the very inner being with which we think we will at the same time. It is principally thinking and has an undertone of willing; but in the same way, our willing has an undertone of thinking. We have in fact two different things in us: something which is chiefly thinking but has an undertone of willing; and something which is chiefly willing but has an undertone of thinking (see Diagram No. IX). When you consider the reality, you will not be able to form pure concepts which can be arranged systematically, but in a certain sense the one is always at the same time the other. Only when you come to an understanding of these things do you begin to perceive certain relations of man with worlds which are beyond those seen with our eyes and heard with our ears, but within which we live no less than in the world of the senses. We cannot say that other worlds than the sense world do not concern us; we are in their midst. We must realize that, while we are walking about here on this earth, we walk through the spiritual worlds exactly as we walk through the physical air.

Relations—I say—with the spiritual worlds result when one sees into these delicate details of human soul-life. Through that which is more thinking and has only an undertone of willing we are connected with a certain kind of spiritual existence of the spiritual worlds. And with another kind of spiritual worlds we are connected through that which is more willing and less thinking. That has indeed its deeper significance; for what we discover in this way manifests itself in human life; and the differentiations which exist in the world arise because the one or the other force of human nature is always developed more in one direction or another. Those forces, for example, existing in the willing which has an undertone of thinking were pre-eminently developed in the ancient Hebraic culture; and those forces of the human soul-being which are based essentially in the thinking which has an undertone of willing were developed in what is called the ancient pagan culture. At the present time we have the two streams flowing side by side; we have in the civilized world the two streams intermingling: one, a continuation of ancient paganism, in the conception of nature; and the other, which comes from the ancient Hebrews, we have in the social viewpoint of the present, in our ethical and religious concepts.

This dualism also exists today in the individual human being himself. On the one hand, man worships nature in a pagan fashion; and on the other—without finding a proper basis in nature, except that he carries over his habits of thought into so-called social science, or sociology—he ponders on the social life, even the ethical life. And when he philosophizes, he says that in one realm he finds freedom and in the other natural necessity, between which there is supposed to be no bridge; he finds himself in a ghostlike region between the two, and the confusion is terrible.

But in many respects this confusion is the content of the life of the present time, of the life that is perishing. What is lacking in this present life of ours? We have a conception of nature: it is merely the continuation of ancient paganism; we have a moral social conception: it is merely the continuation of the Old Testament. Christianity was an episode which was at first historically understood; but today it has fallen through the sieve of human culture, so to speak. In reality, Christianity does not exist; for with the people who frequently speak of Christ you can do as I recommended in connection with Harnack's Nature of Christianity. Wherever Harnack writes “Christ” in this book, you can strike out the word “Christ”, and substitute “God the Father,” or you can even replace it with a merely pantheistic “God,” or anything of the kind, and generally speaking there will be no essential contradiction. Where there is contradiction, he is talking nonsense, with predicates unrelated to subjects. All these things must be said today, for it must be thoroughly understood here what the content of the future consciousness must be.

Likewise, you see what the present theory of evolution is: that man has evolved from lower beings, and so forth; that these lower beings have developed themselves up to him. Certainly you need only to refer to my Occult Science to see that in one sense that must be said even by us. The fact is, however, that when we consider the human head, we see that this human head as we carry it on our shoulders today is already devolving, not evolving. If our entire organism (please understand me clearly now)—if our entire organism were to have the same organization as our head, we should have to be continually dying. We live only by means of the vital force in the rest of our organism, which is constantly being sent up into the head. The forces through which we finally die have their being in our head—are in our head. The head is an organism that is perpetually perishing; it is in retrogression. For this reason that which pertains to soul and spirit can attain its development in the head. If you represent the head in a sketch, you must do it thus: its ascending evolution has already passed over into a retrograde process; here is a void (see illus.).

Into this void, into what is being continuously destroyed, the soul and spirit enter. That is literally true: it is owing to our head that we have soul and spirit, because our head is already perishing. That is to say, in our head we are perpetually dying; and the undertone of willing, which is a quality of our thinking, lies in our head; but this undertone of willing is a continuous stimulus, a constant impulse to dying, to the overcoming of matter.

Now when we die, this willing really begins; and when our body is given over to the earth, that which played its role in our head between birth and death is carried on through our whole body, even physically in the earth-body. You carry your head on your shoulders, my dear friends, and in it the process goes on automatically which is accomplished when you are committed to the earth by fire or decomposition, only in life this process is constantly being revived, and hence obstructed, by what is sent up from the rest of the organism. After death the same process continues which you carry on in your body between birth and death. It is continued in the earth: the earth thinks according to the same principles as the thinking you do with your human head, owing to the fact that your body becomes decomposed in the earth, that corpses are put into it. When we pass through the gate of death, we carry into the physical earth, by means of our decomposing corpse, the process which we seize for ourselves during our life between birth and death. That is a truth of modern science, and people must know such truths in the future. The science of the present time is childish regarding such things, for it does not even think about them, investigate them.

And inversely, what we have in our head as evolution through destruction, is the continuation of that which existed before birth, or before conception. The destruction begins only with birth, for only then do we have a head—before that there was no destruction. Here we are really touching the edge of an extraordinarily significant mystery of cosmic existence. What exists in our head, through which we come into relation with other people and with external nature, is the continuation of something which exists in the spiritual worlds before we enter into the physical body. If anyone understands that perfectly, then he comes to comprehend how forces play into this physical world from the spiritual worlds. That is most clearly seen when these things are considered concretely, rather than in the abstract. Let me give an example:

In 1832 Goethe died. The period belonging to the first generation after his death, that is, up to 1865, was not such that many forces from his spirit influenced it. (This is merely a representative example; of course the forces of other men are active also.) Thus, up to the year 1865 anyone who directed his attention to Goethe's soul would have noticed little influence coming from his forces to the earth. Then after the first thirty-three years the forces began to come from him out of the spiritual worlds into our earth evolution; and they became stronger and stronger up to the year 1898. If we follow it further, beyond this period, we can say: The first period of influence of Goethe's super-sensible forces upon our earth civilization is, then, 1865 to 1898 (as I have said, up to 1865 it was insignificant, then it began). After thirty-three years we have in 1931 the end of a further period, which would be the second; and 1964 would be the end of the third period.

From such an example it can really be learned how relatively soon after a man has passed through the gate of death the forces which he then develops take part in what is going on here on earth. Only we must know how these forces take part. Anyone who works spiritually—really spiritually—knows how the forces of the spiritual worlds cooperate with the forces he uses. When I said day before yesterday that the middle of this century will be an important point of time, the statement was made—as in the example just given—on the basis of observations from which it can be seen how forces from the spiritual world pervade the physical world.

The middle of this century, however, will coincide with that point of time when the atavistic forces still remaining from before the middle of the 15th century will have fallen into the worst decadence; hence humanity must resolve before the middle of this century to turn toward the spiritual. We still meet many people today who say: “Why does misfortune come? Why do the Gods not help?” The fact is, we are in the period of humanity's evolution in which the Gods will immediately help if men turn to them, but in which the Gods are compelled by their laws to deal with free men, not with puppets.

Now I have reached the point to which I referred yesterday. When, let us say, a man with vision—even in the Greek epoch and up to the middle of the 15th century—alluded to the phenomena of birth and death, he could point to the divine world, he could point out that man's destiny between birth and death is woven out of the divine worlds. Today we must speak differently: we must say that man's destiny is determined by his previous earth-lives; and through the manner in which he is conditioned by his destiny he creates the forces through which the divine worlds can approach him. Our thinking must be the opposite of that of earlier times regarding the relation of man to the divine-spiritual worlds: we must learn to seek in man the sources from which the powers are developed which will enable one or another divine being to approach him. We have now reached this momentous point of time in earth-evolution. What takes place outwardly must today be understood as an expression of inner occurrence, which can be comprehended only from the point of view of spiritual-scientific insight. You see it is possible today for every person to observe, I might say the ultimate consequences of events. There have been plenty of people murdered in the last four or five years—at least ten or twelve million in the civilized world, probably more; three times as many have been made cripples in the different countries—our civilization has certainly done a grand job! But we must gradually come to recognize these things as the mouth of the stream, as it were, and we shall have to seek the source in what is going on in human souls in connection with that opposition to the will of the spiritual world to break into our world,—the spiritual world which would bear the being of man into the future. In our time everything must be observed from this point of view; that is, must be treated profoundly.

We might say that many events might perhaps be more correctly evaluated if we were to alter the viewpoint. Roughly speaking—and I say this now as something intended to give this lecture an entirely appropriate conclusion, as indeed the nuance has been given to these three lectures by the gratifying presence among us of a number of our English friends—we can speak today of victors and vanquished. It is an obvious point of view, but perhaps not the most important one. Perhaps there is another, a much more important point of view, which might be taken from the following.

I once read aloud here from this same platform a thesis of Fercher von Steinwand,² that German-Austrian poet, who in the sixth decade of the 19th century expressed his opinion about the future of the German people. The lecture is noteworthy because it was given before the ruling King of Saxony and his ministers. In this sixth decade—those who were there at the time heard it—Fercher van Steinwand said that his German people is predestined some time in the future to play a role somewhat like that which the Gypsies were playing then. It was a deep glimpse into the evolution of humanity which Fercher van Steinwand had. These things can be looked in the eye with complete objectivity; and if this is done, perhaps another point of view will be chosen than the one frequently taken today. It will be asked: What is to be said about the changed conditions—changed among the so-called vanquished, changed among the so-called victors? Well, the actual victor is Anglo-Americanism; and this Anglo-Americanism, through the forces which I have publicly characterized here is destined for world-dominion.

Now we can ask: Since the German people will be excluded from sharing the things by means of which the external world will be ruled in the future, what really happens in that case? The responsibility—not that of the individual, naturally—the people's responsibility for events concerning the whole of human society ceases. Not that of the individual, but the people's responsibility ceases among those who are down-trodden—for they are that. The responsibility ends, and it becomes all the greater on the other side; that is where the actual responsibility will rest. The outer dominion will be easily won; it is won by means of forces for which the victors can take no credit. The external passing over of the external dominion is accomplished as the final natural necessity; but the responsibility will be something of deep significance for souls. For the question is already written down in humanity's book of destiny: Will there be found among those upon whom the external dominion devolves as by an external necessity, a sufficiently great number of people who feel the responsibility, so that into this external, materialistic dominion, into this culmination of materialistic dominion, may be transplanted the impulses of the spiritual life? And that must not happen too slowly! The middle of this century will be a very significant point of time. The whole weight of the responsibility should be felt, if one is chosen, as it were by outer natural destiny, to enter upon the dominion of materialism in the external world,—for that is what it will be. For this dominion of materialism bears within it at the same time the seed of destruction. The destruction which has begun will not cease; and “entering upon external dominion” means taking over the forces of destruction, the forces of human illness, and living in them. That which will bear humanity into the future will come forth from the new seed of the spirit, and will have to be fostered. Therefore, the responsibility rests directly upon that side to which falls world-dominion.

Our thinking today must not be superficial concerning these things, but thorough; neither must we merely seem to be spiritual while in reality we are materialistic. Two things are very frequently heard in our time: One is, “Why talk of social ideas; no bread comes from ideas!” It is a cheap objection that is very often made. And the other is, “When the people are working again then everything will be all right; then the social question will have a different appearance.” Both statements are disguised materialism, for both have the purpose of denying the spiritual life.

In the first place, what differentiates us from the animal world? The animals go around and get their food, so far as there is any, according to their implanted instincts. If there is not enough, they must starve. In what way is man better off? He works on the production of food. At the moment he begins to work, thought begins; and only when thought begins, does the social question begin also. If a man is to work, he must have an incentive for it; and the incentives that have existed up to the present time will no longer exist in the future. New incentives will be required for work; and the question is not at all a matter of everything's being all right when the people work again—no; but when, arising from a feeling of world-responsibility, men shall have thoughts which sustain their souls, then the forces proceeding from these thoughts will be carried over from hand to will, and work will result. Everything depends upon thoughts, and thoughts themselves depend upon our opening our hearts to the impulses of the spiritual world. Of responsibility and of the significance of thoughts much must be said in our time. Therefore I wished in this lecture to lay stress upon just this aspect.

Since destiny is now such, my dear friends, that one really cannot get away when one wishes to travel, we shall still be here tomorrow. Therefore, at eight o'clock tomorrow night I will speak to you especially about the anthroposophical foundation, the spiritual-scientific, occult foundation of the social question. Thus I shall be able before leaving to speak to our friends on the social question, but I shall explain its deeper foundations from the spiritual-scientific point of view.

• 1. On November 10, 1919: The Spirit as Guide through the Sensible and Supersensible Worlds.
• 2. Compare: Entwickelungsgeschichtliche Unterlagen zur Bildung eines sozialen Urteils (not yet translated).

In my first lecture, I drew your attention to the essence of anthroposophical spiritual science. I mentioned how methods have been sought in spiritual science that enable the spiritual investigator to penetrate a supersensible world with the same clarity as natural science penetrates the outer, sense-perceptible world with the sense organs and the intellect, which systematizes and interprets the results of sensory impressions. I described these methods in my last lecture. And I emphasized that, in addition to today’s ordinary science, another science exists. This uses spiritual methods and, by its path of research and the inner experiences unfolding along it, furnishes full proof of our being surrounded by a supersensible world, just as, in the ordinary state of consciousness, we are surrounded by the sense world. I would now like to return to a prior point, elaborated during the last lecture, that, at least to a certain extent, will form the basis of what I have to say today.

The anthroposophical science of the spirit, referred to here, is not at all opposed to what has become—over the last three or four centuries—the natural-scientific world-view. As I already pointed out, this spiritual science is opposed only to viewpoints that do not take into account the results of modern natural science and thereby become more or less dilettantish. Spiritual science wishes to be an extension or continuation of natural-scientific thinking. Only, this spiritual-scientific continuation allows a person to acquire the kind of knowledge that can answer the deepest longings in the minds and the souls of modern human beings. Thus, through spiritual science, one really comes to know human beings.

Not so long ago, modern science, in a way fully recognized by spiritual science, gave us a wonderful survey of the gradual development of living organisms right up to human beings. And yet, when all is said and done, the human being stands there only as the end product of evolution.

Biology speaks of certain muscles that are found both in human beings and in various animal species. We also know that a human being has a certain number of bones and that this number corresponds with the bones of the higher animals. Altogether, we have grown accustomed to explaining the emergence of the entire bone structure of higher animals and human beings as a development from a lower stage to a higher one. But we have no idea of the essential characteristics that are uniquely and exclusively human. Anyone willing to look at the situation without prejudice has to admit the fact that we are ignorant of what constitutes a human being. In general, natural phenomena and all living organisms are scrupulously investigated up to and including homo sapiens, and the conclusion is then drawn that human beings are encompassed by what is to be found in external nature. But, generally, there is no really adequate idea of what is essentially human.

In ordinary, practical life, we find a similar situation, very much as a result of natural-scientific thinking and knowledge. We find its effects overshadowing modern life, causing a great deal of perplexity and distress. The consequence of not knowing the essential nature of human beings becomes all too obvious in what is usually referred to as the social question. Millions of people who belong to what is called the proletariat, whom the traditional religions and confessions have abandoned, believe that reality is no longer to be found in the human soul, but only in the material aspects of life, in the processes of production within the outer economic sphere. Morality, religion, science, and art, as cultivated by humanity throughout the ages, are regarded as nothing more than a kind of ideological superstructure, built on a solid material or even economic material substructure. The moral and cultural aspects of life appear almost as a kind of vapor, rising from the only reality—material reality. Here, again, what is truly the human soul and spirit—what is psychical-spiritual in human beings—has been eliminated.

Not to be able to reach knowledge of the human being and, consequently, to be debarred from beholding and experiencing the truth of human nature, and from bringing down human ideals into will impulses in the social sphere—these seem to be the characteristic features of modern times.

Anthroposophical spiritual science, on the other hand, is only too aware of what needs to be accomplished in this direction for the sake of the deepest, yet often unconscious, longing of the souls of some of the best of our contemporaries. It is to be accomplished, first, by true knowledge of the human being and, second, by an inner sense of fulfillment strong enough to enable one to carry into public life truly social impulses arising in the soul. For, without these impulses arising from the depths of our humanity, even the best of outer practical arrangements will not lead to what in the widest circles is regarded as unrealizable, but toward which many people are striving nevertheless, namely to a dignified human existence.

The path leading into the spiritual world as I described it here a few days ago could easily be understood as something that estranges one from life rather than leading one to the two weighty questions that I have put before you once again today. For this reason, it was of paramount importance that anthroposophical spiritual science be practiced in the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland. Despite the unfinished state of the building, spiritual science has the possibility of pursuing practical activities there, demonstrating how knowledge of human nature and human faculties can enter into the practical sphere of life.

One of the most important practical activities is surely education of the young.

Those who work in the field of educating children are basically dealing with what will enter the world with the next generation, and this means a very great deal. Raising and educating children are a direct way to work into the near future. In its quest for a method of understanding human nature, anthroposophical spiritual science finds itself able to understand the human being in its becoming—the child—in a wide, comprehensive manner. From such comprehensive knowledge of the growing child, spiritual science seeks to create a real art of education. For what spiritual science can provide in understanding and penetration of human nature does not end in abstractions or theories, but eventually develops into an artistic comprehension, first of the human form and then of the potential of the human soul and spirit. It is all very well to maintain that science demands what is often called a sober working with objective concepts. But, ladies and gentlemen, what if the whole world, if nature, did not work with such concepts at all? What if it were to scorn our wish to restrict its creativity to the kind of natural law into which we try to confine it? What if the creativity of the world were to elude our sober, merely external grasp and our rather lightweight logical concepts? We can certainly make our demands, but whether by doing so we will attain real knowledge depends on whether nature works and creates according to them.

At any rate, more recent scientific attitudes have failed to recognize the essence of human nature because they have failed to consider the following. In her upward climb, at each successive step of the evolutionary ladder—from the mineral kingdom, through the plant and animal kingdoms, to the human kingdom—nature’s creativity increasingly escapes our intellectual grasp and sober logic, forcing us to approach her workings more and more artistically. What ultimately lives in a human being is open to many interpretations and shows manifold aspects. And because spiritual science, in its own way, seeks the inner harmony between knowledge, religious depth, and artistic creativity, it is in a position to survey rightly—that is, spiritually—the enigmatic, admirable creation that is a human being and how it is placed in the world.

Last time, I spoke of how it is possible to look with scientific accuracy into the world where human beings live before they descend into physical existence at conception or birth. I indicated how, with mathematical clarity, the human spirit and soul, descending from the spiritual worlds, place themselves before the spiritual eyes of the anthroposophical investigator, showing themselves to be at work on the interior of the future earthly body and drawing only material substances from the stream of heredity bequeathed by previous generations.

Anyone who talks about such things today is quickly judged inconsistent. And yet the methods pursued by spiritual science are much the same as those employed by natural science. The main difference is that the work entailed in the various branches of natural science is done in the appropriate laboratories, clinics, or astronomical observatories, whereas the science of the spirit approaches human nature directly in order to observe it as methodically as a natural scientist observes whatever might belong to his or her particular field of study. In the latter case, however, the situation is more straightforward for it is easier to make one’s observations and to search for underlying laws in natural science than in spiritual science.

As a first step, I would like to draw your attention to what one can observe in a growing human being in a truly natural-scientific way. Of course, in the case of spiritual science, we must include in our observations the gradual development of the human being through several different life periods. One of those periods extends from birth to the change of the teeth; that is, until about the seventh year. To recognize a kind of nodal point around the seventh year might easily create the impression of an inclination toward mysticism which is not, however, the case. The following observations have as little to do with mysticism as the distinction between the seven colors of the rainbow has. They are simply an outcome of objective, scientific observation of the growing child. Even from a physical point of view, it is evident that a powerful change occurs when, in about a child’s seventh year, forces from within drive the second teeth out of the organism. This event does not recur, indicating that some kind of conclusion has been reached.

What is going on becomes clearer when we do not restrict our observations to the physical or change-of-teeth aspect of this seventh year, but extend them to parallel developments occurring alongside the physical changes. In this case, if we are capable of observing at all, we will see how a child’s entire soul life undergoes a gradual change during this period. We can observe how the child, who previously could form only blurred and indistinct concepts, now begins to form more sharply contoured concepts—how it is only now in fact that the child begins to form proper concepts at all. Furthermore, we notice how quite a different kind of memory is now unfolding. Formerly, when younger, the child might often have displayed signs of an excellent memory. That memory, however, was entirely natural and instinctive. Whereas there was before no need for any special effort in the act of remembering, the child who has passed this watershed must now make a mental effort to remember past events clearly. In short, it becomes obvious that, with the change of teeth around the seventh year, a child begins to be active in the realm of mental imagery, in forming simple thoughts, and in the sphere of conscious will activity.

But what is actually happening here? Where had this force been that we can now observe in the child’s soul and spirit, forming more clearly-defined mental images and thoughts? Where was that force before the child’s milk teeth were shed? This is the kind of question that remains unasked by our contemporary theorizing psychologists.

When physicists observe in a physical process an increase of warmth that is not due to external causes, they explain this phenomenon by the concept of “latent heat becoming liberated.” This implies that the heat that emerges must have existed previously within the substance itself. A similar kind of thinking must also be applied in the case of human life. Where were those forces of soul and spirit before they emerged in the child after the seventh year? They were latent in the child’s physical organism. They were active in its organic growth, in its organic structuring, until, with the pushing out of the second teeth, a kind of climax was reached, indicating the conclusion of this first period of growth, so particularly active during the child’s early years. Psychology today is quite abstract. People cogitate on the relationship of soul to body, and devise the most remarkable and grandiloquent hypotheses. Empty phrases, however, will not lead to an art of education. Spiritual science, for its part, shows that what we see emerging cognitively in a child after the seventh year was actively engaged in its inner organism before the second dentition. It shows that what appears in a child’s soul after the change of teeth was active before as an organic force that has now become liberated.

In a similar way, a true spiritual researcher observes in a concrete manner—not abstractly—the entire course of human life. To illustrate that concrete manner of observation, let us now consider a well-known and specific childhood phenomenon. Let us look at children at play, at children’s games. If we can do so without preconception and with dedicated interest in the growing human being, we know—although every game has a certain form and shares common, characteristic features—that, whatever the game, each child will play it with his or her own individual style. Now those who raise or educate young children can, to a certain extent, influence or guide how a child plays according to the child’s own nature. Also, depending on our pedagogical skills, we can try to steer our children’s play into more purposeful directions. And, if we pay attention to all this, we can clearly discriminate between the various individual styles of playing until the child reaches an age when they are no longer so clearly identifiable. Once a child enters school and other interests are crowding in, however, it becomes more difficult to see the future consequences of his or her characteristic style of playing. Nevertheless, if we do not observe superficially and, realizing that the course of life represents a whole, extend the range of our observations to span the entire earthly life, we might discover the following.

Around twenty-four or twenty-five—that is, when young adults must find their links with the outer world, and when they must fit themselves into the social fabric of the wider community—there will be those who prove themselves more skillful than others in dealing with all aspects and details of their tasks. Now, careful observation will reveal that the way in which people in their twenties adapt themselves to outer conditions of life, with greater or lesser skill, is a direct consequence of their play activity during early childhood.

Certain rivers, whose sources may be clearly traced, disappear below the earth’s surface during their course, only to resurface at a later stage. We can compare this phenomenon with certain faculties in human life. The faculty of playing, so prominent in a young child, is particularly well developed during the first years of life. It then vanishes into the deeper regions of the soul to resurface during the twenties, transmuted into an aptitude for finding one’s way in the world. Just think: by guiding the play of young children, we, as educators, are directly intervening in the happiness or unhappiness, the future destiny, of young people in their twenties!

Such insights greatly sharpen our sense of responsibility as educators. They also stimulate the desire to work toward a genuine art of education. Tight-fitting, narrow concepts cannot reach the core of human nature. To do so, a wide and comprehensive view is needed. Such a view can be gained if we recognize that such interconnections as I have mentioned affect human life. It will also make us realize that we must distinguish between definite life periods in human development, the first of which extends from birth to the change of teeth and has a character all its own.

At this point, I should mention that those who choose to become teachers or educators through anthroposophical spiritual science are filled with the consciousness that a message from the spiritual world is actually present in what they meet in such enigmatic and wondrous ways in the developing human being, the child. Such teachers observe the child with its initially indeterminate features, noticing how they gradually assume more definite forms. They see how children’s movements and life stirrings are undefined to begin with and how directness and purpose then increasingly enter their actions from the depths of their souls. Those who have prepared themselves to become teachers and educators through anthroposophical spiritual science are aware that something actually descending from the spiritual worlds lives in the way the features of a child’s face change from day to day, week to week, and year to year, gradually evolving into a distinct physiognomy. And they know too that something spiritual is descending in what is working through the lively movements of a child’s hands and in what, quite magically, enters into a child’s way of speaking.

To learn to recognize this activity of the spiritual world, which is so different from that of the physical world; to meet the child as an educator with such an inner attitude and mood as I have described: this means that we see in the vocation of teaching a source of healing. This vocation could be expressed as follows: The spiritual worlds have entrusted a human soul into my care. I have been called upon to assist in solving the riddles that this child poses. By means of a deepened knowledge of the human being—transformed into a real art, the art of education—it is my task to show this child the way into life.

Such deepened knowledge of human nature reveals that, in the first period of life, a child is what I would like to call an “imitating” being. (You will find a more detailed account of this characteristic feature in my booklet The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy.) Descending from the spiritual world, the child brings to outer expression—like an echo from the spiritual world—the last experiences undergone there. As anthroposophists, when we educate our children, we are aware that the way in which children imitate their surroundings is childish and primitive. They copy what is done before them with their movements. They learn to speak entirely and only through imitation. And, until they lose their milk teeth, they also imitate what happens morally in their environment.

What lies behind all of this can be rightly understood only with the help of spiritual science. Before conception or birth, a child lives in the spiritual world, the same spiritual world that can be known and consciously experienced if we strengthen the power of memory and develop the power of love in the ways I described during our last meeting. In that spiritual world, the relationship of one being to another is not one in which they confront one another outwardly; rather, each being is capable of living right into another—objectively, yet full of love. Children then bring this relationship of spiritual beings to one another down to earth. It is like a resonant echo of the spiritual world. We can observe here how children become creatures of imitation, how everything they learn and make their own during these first seven years, they learn through imitation. Any genuine art of education must fully respect this principle of imitation—otherwise, it is all too easy to misjudge our children’s behavior.

To illustrate this point, let me give you an example, just one of hundreds that could be chosen. The father of a boy, aged about five, once came to me and told me that a very sad thing had happened; namely, that his boy had been stealing. I suggested that we begin by carefully examining whether in fact the child had really stolen. The father told me that the boy had taken money from the drawer where his wife kept it and had then bought candy with it, which he shared with other children in the street. I asked the father what usually happened with the money kept in the drawer. He replied that the boy’s mother took the amount of money needed for the household that day out of her drawer every morning. Hearing this, I could reassure him that his boy had not stolen at all. I said, “The child is five years old. This means that he is still fully in the stage of imitation. Therefore, it is only good and proper that he should do what he sees done in his environment. His mother takes money out of the drawer every day, and so he naturally copies her. This is not stealing but merely behavior appropriate to the fundamental principle of a child’s development during the first seven-year period.”

A real teacher must know these things. During the first seven years of life, one cannot guide and direct a child by reprimands, nor by moral commands. During this period, one must guide a child by one’s own deeds and by setting an example. But there are of course imponderables to be reckoned with in human as in outer nature. We guide a child not only with external deeds, but also with inner thoughts and feelings. If children enjoy the company of grown-ups who never allow unworthy thoughts or feelings to enter into their lives, something noble and good could become of them. On the other hand, if adults allow themselves mean, ignoble thoughts or feelings when they are around young people, believing that such thoughts or feelings do not matter since everyone is safely ensheathed within an individual bodily structure, they are mistaken, for such things do work on children. Imponderables are at work.

Such imponderables also manifest themselves in the second period of life, which begins after the change of teeth—when the child enters school—and lasts until the age of puberty, around fourteen. When we were working out the fundamentals of a truly spiritual-scientific, spiritually artistic pedagogy for the Waldorf school in Stuttgart—founded by Emil Molt and directed by myself—we had to make a special study of this transition from the first life period, that of imitation, to the second period, from the change of teeth to puberty. For all teaching, education, and upbringing at the Waldorf School is to be based entirely upon anthroposophical insight into human nature. And because children change from the stage of imitation into quite a different stage—I shall say more about this presently—we had to make a special effort to study this time of transition.

During the second period, leading up to puberty, imitation alone no longer suffices to form the faculties, the child’s whole being. A new impulse now emerges from the depths of the child’s soul. The child now wishes to regard the teacher as a figure of undisputed authority. Today, when everything goes under the banner of democracy, the demand is easily made that schools, too, should be “democratized.” There are even those who would do away with the distinction between teacher and pupil altogether, advocating “community schools,” or whatever name these bright ideas are given. Such ideas are a consequence of party-political attitudes, not knowledge of human nature. But educational questions should not be judged from partisan positions; they should be judged only on their own merits. And, if you do this, you will find that, between second dentition and puberty, a child is no longer obliged to imitate, but now has a deep desire to learn what is right or wrong, good or evil, from a beloved and naturally respected authority figure.

Happy are those who throughout their lives can remember such childhood authorities and can say of themselves, “I had a teacher. When I went to visit her, opening the door to her room, I already felt full of awe. To me, it was perfectly natural that my teacher was the source of everything good and true.” Such things are not subject to argument on social or any other grounds. What is important is to gain the insight into human nature so that one can say, “Just as a young child’s urge to play, which manifests in individually different ways, resurfaces as more or less skill in fitting into life when the young person is in his or her twenties, so another, similar transformation also occurs regarding a child’s reverence for the teacher as a figure of authority. That is, only if faith in the authority of the adults in charge develops fully between the ages of approximately seven and fifteen will the right sense of freedom develop later, when the feeling for freedom must be the basis for all social life.”

People cannot become free as adults unless they found as children support in the natural authority of adults. Likewise, only those who during the first period of life are allowed to pass through the process of adjusting themselves to their environment through the inborn desire to imitate can be motivated as adults to take a loving interest in the social sphere. This ability to adjust based on imitation does not last; what is needed in later life is a social awareness, the development of which depends on how far educators of children under seven can become worthy models of imitation. We need people today who are able to place themselves into life with a genuine sense of freedom. They are those who were able to look up to their educators and teachers as persons of authority during the time between their second dentition and puberty.

If one has stated publicly—as I already did in my book Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path, published in 1892—that the sense of freedom and the feeling for freedom are the basic facts of social life, one is hardly likely to speak against freedom and democracy. But, just because of this positive attitude towards freedom, one must also acknowledge that the practice of education as an art depends on the sense of authority, developed by the child during the second period of life. During this same period, the child also has to make a gradual transition from living in mental images—or pictures—to a more intellectual approach, a process that moves through and beyond another important turning point.

A true art of education must be able to penetrate such important issues.

The turning point to be discussed now occurs around a child’s ninth year—but sometimes not before the tenth or even the eleventh year. When our teachers recognize that a child is passing this point, they accompany the change with an appropriate change in pedagogy. In early childhood, a child learns to speak, gradually learning to refer to itself as “I”. Up to the ninth year, however, the distinction between the child’s “I” and the surrounding world is still rather undefined. Those who can observe things carefully recognize that the period when a child learns to differentiate between self and surroundings—approximately between the ninth and the eleventh years—is critical. It is a time when the child is actually crossing a Rubicon. The way in which the teachers respond to this change is of greatest importance for a child’s future life. Teachers must have the right feeling for what is happening. They must realize that the child no longer experiences itself as an organic part of its environment—as a finger might experience itself as a part of the body if it had its own consciousness—but as a separate, independent entity. If they do so and respond in the right way as teachers, they can create a source of lasting joy and vitality in life. But if they fail to respond rightly, they open the way to barren and weary lives for their pupils later on. It is important to realize that, prior to this significant change, the child still lives in a world of pictures so closely related to its own nature that, unable to appreciate the difference between self and environment, it merges into its surroundings. Therefore, in assisting a child to establish its relationship to the world at this stage, a teacher must use a pictorial approach.

We receive the children into our school from their parental homes. Today, we live in an age when writing and reading have produced conventional symbols no longer bearing any direct inner relationship to the human being. Compare the abstract letters of our alphabet with the picture writing used in ages past. What was fixed into written forms in ancient times still bore a resemblance to people’s mental images. But writing nowadays has become quite abstract. If we introduce children directly to these abstract letters in reading and writing lessons, we introduce them to something alien to their nature, or at least something inappropriate for six-, seven-, or eight-year olds. For this reason, we use a different method in our Waldorf school.

Instead of beginning with the letters of the alphabet, we engage our young pupils in artistic activity by letting them paint and draw; that is, work with colors and forms. In this activity, not only the head is engaged—which would have a very harmful effect—but the child’s entire being is involved. We then let the actual letters emerge out of these color-filled forms. This is how our Waldorf pupils learn writing. They learn writing first. And only afterward do they learn to read, for printed letters are even more abstract than our handwritten ones. In other words, only gradually do we develop the abstract element, so necessary today, from the artistic element which is more closely allied to life. We proceed similarly in other subjects, too. And we work in this way toward a living, artistic pedagogy that makes it possible to reach the very soul of the child. As for the nature of what we usually think of as plant, mineral, and so forth, this can be fruitfully taught only after the child has passed the turning point just characterized and can differentiate itself from its surroundings.

Working along these lines, it might well happen that some of our pupils learn to read and write later than pupils in other schools. But this is no drawback. On the contrary, it is even an advantage. Of course, it is quite possible to teach young children reading and writing by rote and get them to rattle off what is put before their eyes, but it is also possible to deaden something in them by doing this, and anything killed during childhood remains dead for the rest of one’s life. The opposite is equally true. What we allow to live and what we wake into life is the very stuff that will blossom and give life vitality. To nurture this process, surely, is the task of a real educator.

You will doubtless have heard of those educational ideas already published during the nineteenth century that emphasize the importance of activating a child’s individuality. We are told that, instead of cramming children with knowledge, we should bring out their inherent gifts and abilities. Certainly, no one would wish to denigrate such great geniuses of education. Important things have certainly been said by the science of education. On the other hand, though one can listen carefully to its abstract demands, such as that the individuality of the child should be developed, positive results will be achieved only if one is able to observe, day by day, how a child’s individuality actually unfolds. One must know how, during the first seven years, the principle of imitation rules the day; how, during the following period from the seventh to the fourteenth year, the principle of authority predominates; and how this latter principle is twinned with the child’s gradual transition from mental imagery—which is essentially of a pictorial or symbolic nature and based on memory—to the forming of concepts by the awakening intellect: a process that begins in the eleventh to twelfth year. If we can observe all of this and learn from a spiritual-scientific and artistic way of observing how to respond as a teacher, we shall achieve much more than if we attempt to follow an abstract aim, such as educating a child out of its individuality. Spiritual science does not create abstractions, it does not make fixed demands; rather, it looks toward what can be developed into an art through spiritual perceptiveness and a comprehensive, sharpened sense of observation.

Last time, I was able to describe only briefly the kind of knowledge of the human being given by spiritual science that can form a basis for dealing with such practical matters as education. The pressing demands of society show clearly enough the need for such knowledge today. By complementing the outer, material aspects of life with supersensible and spiritual insights, spiritual science or anthroposophy leads us from a generally unreal, abstract concept of life to a concrete practical reality. According to this view, human beings occupy a central position in the universe. Such realistic understanding of human nature and human activities is what is needed today. Let me reinforce this point with a characteristic example.

Imagine that we wanted to convey a simple religious concept—for instance, the concept of the immortality of the human soul—to a class of young children. If we approach the subject pictorially, we can do this before a child’s ninth year. For example, we can say, “Look at the butterfly’s chrysalis. Its hard shell cracks open and the butterfly flutters out into the air. A similar thing happens when a human being dies. The immortal soul dwells in the body. But, when death breaks it open, just as the butterfly flies from the chrysalis into the air, so the soul flies away from the dead body into the heavenly world, only the human soul remains invisible.”

When we study such an example from the point of view of a living art of education, we come face to face with life’s imponderables. A teacher might have chosen such a comparison by reasoning somewhat as follows: “I am the one who knows, for I am much older than the child. I have thought out this picture of the caterpillar and the butterfly because of the child’s ignorance and immaturity. As someone of superior intelligence, I have made the child believe something in which I myself do not believe. In fact, from my own point of view, it was only a silly little story, invented solely for the purpose of getting the child to understand the concept of the immortality of the soul.” If this is a teacher’s attitude, he or she will achieve but little. Although to say this might sound paradoxical in our materialistic age, it is nevertheless true: if teachers are insincere, their words do not carry much weight.

To return to our example. If Waldorf teachers had chosen this comparison for their classes, the situation, though outwardly similar, would have been very different. For they would not have used it—nor, for that matter, any other picture or simile—unless they were convinced of its inherent truth. A Waldorf teacher, an anthroposophically oriented spiritual researcher, would not feel, “I am the intelligent adult who makes up a story for the children’s benefit,” but rather: “The eternal beings and powers, acting as the spiritual in nature, have placed before my eyes a picture of the immortal human soul, objectively, in the form of the emerging butterfly. Believing in the truth of this picture with every fibre of my being, and bringing it to my pupils through my own conviction, I will awaken in them a truly religious concept. What matters is not so much what I, as teacher, say to the child, but what I am and what my heartfelt attitude is.” These are the kinds of things that must be taken more and more seriously in the art of education.

You will also understand when I tell you that visitors to our Waldorf school, who come to see the school in action and to observe lessons, cannot see the whole. It is almost as if, for instance, you cut a small piece out of a Rembrandt painting, believing that you could gain an overall impression of the whole picture through it. Such a thing is not possible when an impulse is conceived and practiced as a comprehensive whole—as the Waldorf school is—and when it is rooted in the totality of anthroposophical spiritual science.

You might have been wondering which kind of people would make good teachers in such a school. They are people whose entire lives have been molded by the spiritual knowledge of which I spoke last time. The best way of learning to know the Waldorf school and of becoming familiar with its underlying principles is by gaining knowledge of anthroposophical spiritual science itself at least as a first step. A few short visits in order to observe lessons will hardly convey an adequate impression of Waldorf pedagogy.

Plain speaking in such matters is essential, because it points toward the character of the new spirit that, flowing from the High School of Spiritual Science centered in Dornach, is to enter all practical spheres of life—social, artistic, educational, and so forth.

If you consider thoroughly all that I have been telling you, you will no longer think it strange that those who enter more deeply into the spirit underlying this art of education find it absolutely essential to place themselves firmly upon the ground of a free spiritual life. Because education has become dependent on the state on the one hand and on the economic sphere on the other, there is a tendency for it to become abstract and programmatic. Those who believe in the anthroposophical way of life must insist on a free and independent cultural-spiritual life. This represents one of the three branches of the threefold social order about which I wrote in my book The Threefold Commonwealth.

One of the demands that must be made for spiritual life—something that is not at all utopian, that may be begun any day—is that those actively engaged in spiritual life (and this means, above all, those involved in its most important public domain; namely, education) should also be entrusted with all administrative matters, and this in a broad and comprehensive way.

The maximum number of lessons to be taught—plus the hours spent on other educational commitments—should allow teachers sufficient time for regular meetings, in both smaller and larger groups, to deal with administrative matters. However, only practicing teachers—not former teachers now holding state positions or retired teachers—should be called on to care for this side of education. For what has to be administered in each particular school—as in all institutions belonging to the spiritual-cultural life—should be only a continuation of what is being taught, of what forms the content of every word spoken and every deed performed in the classroom. Rules and regulations must not be imposed from outside the school. In spiritual life, autonomy, self-administration, is essential.

I am well aware that people who like to form logical “quickly tailored” concepts, as well as others who, somewhat superficially, favor a more historical perspective, will readily object to these ideas. But in order to recognize the necessity of making spiritual- cultural life into a free and independent member of the social organism, one really must be acquainted with its inherent nature. Anyone who has been a teacher at a working-class adult education center for several years—as I was in the school founded by Wilhelm Liebknecht, thereby gaining first-hand experience of the social question—knows only too well that this is not merely a matter of improving external arrangements or of dealing with dissatisfaction caused by unjust outer conditions. As I say, if one has taught in such circles, one knows that one word comes up repeatedly in proletarian circles, but extends far beyond proletarian life, namely, the word “ideology,” the meaning of which is set out in the first chapter of The Threefold Commonwealth. Now, what is hidden behind this?

Long ago, in the ancient East, people spoke of the great illusion or “maya.” According to this view—already decadent today and hence unsuited to our Western ways—maya refers to the external sensory world which offers us only semblance or outer appearance. To ancient sages, true reality of being—the reality that sustained human beings—lived and grew in the soul. All else, all that the outer senses beheld, was only maya.

We live today in an age that expresses—especially in its most radical philosophies—a total reversal of this ancient view. For most people today true reality resides in outer, physical nature and in the processes of production, while what can be found inwardly in the human soul as morality, art, religion, knowledge is maya, illusion. If we want to translate the word maya correctly, we must translate it as “ideology.” For modern humanity, all other translations fail. But ideology refers to exactly the opposite of what maya was for the ancient oriental. The widest circles of the population today call maya what the ancient oriental called the sole reality. And this reversal of the word’s meaning is of great significance for life today.

I have known people of the leading classes who lived under the influence of the philosophy that gave rise to ideology. I have learned to know the perplexity of people who reasoned thus: if we trust what natural science tells us, the entire origin of the cosmos can be traced to a primeval nebula. According to these theories, all of the different species of nature began during this stage. At that time, too, human beings densified out of the nebula. And, while this process continued, something not unlike soap bubbles unfolded in the human soul. According to natural science, what rises in the human soul as ethics, religion, science or art, does not represent reality. Indeed, if we look toward the end of earthly evolution as it is presented by science, all that is offered is the prospect of an immense cemetery. On earth, death would follow, due either to general glaciation, or to total annihilation by heat. In either case, the result would be a great cemetery for all human ideals—for everything considered to be the essence of human values and the most important aspect of human existence. If we are honest in accepting what natural science tells us—such people had to conclude—then all that remains is only a final extinction of all forms of existence.

I have witnessed the sense of tragedy and the deep-seated pain in the souls of such materialistically minded members of today’s leading circles, who could not escape the logical conclusions of the natural-scientific outlook and who were consequently forced to look on all that is most precious in the human beings as mere illusion. In many people, I have seen this pessimism, which was a result of their honest pursuit of the natural-scientific conception of the world.

This attitude took a special form in the materialism of the working class. There, everything of a spiritual nature is generally looked upon as a kind of a superstructure, as mere smoke or fog; in a word, as “ideology”. And what enters and affects the soul condition of modern people in this way is the actual source of the contemporary anti-social sentiment—however many other reasons might be constantly invented and published. They amount only to a form of self deception. It is the influence of this attitude which is the real origin of the dreadful catastrophes that are dawning—undreamt of by most people—in the whole East. So far, they have started in Russia, where they have already assumed devastating proportions. They will assume even greater dimensions unless steps are taken to replace an ideology by a living grasp of the spirit.

Anthroposophical spiritual science gives us not only ideas and concepts of something real but also ideas and concepts by which we know that we are not just thinking about something filled with spirit. Spiritual science gives us the living spirit itself, not just spirit in the form of thoughts. It shows human beings as beings filled with living spirit—just like the ancient religions. Like the ancient religions, the message of spiritual science is not just “you will know something,” but “you will know something, and divine wisdom will thereby live in you. As blood pulses in you, so by true knowing will divine powers too pulse in you.” Spiritual science, as represented in Dornach, wishes to bring to humanity precisely such knowledge and spiritual life.

To do so, we need the support of our contemporaries. Working in small ways will not lead to appropriate achievements. What is needed is work on a large scale. Spiritual science is free from sectarianism. It has the will to carry out the great tasks of our times, including those in the practical spheres of life. But to bring this about, spiritual science must be understood in a living way by contemporary society. It is not enough to open a few schools here and there, modeled on the Waldorf school, as some people wish. This is not the way forward, for it will not lead to greater freedom in spiritual life.

Often, I have had to suffer the painful experience of witnessing the conduct of certain people who, because of their distrust in orthodox, materialistic medicine, approached me, trying to tempt me into quackery. They wanted to be cured by creeping through the back door, as it were. I have experienced it to the point of revulsion. There was, for instance, a Prussian government official, who publicly supported materialistic medicine in parliament, granting it sole rights, only to enter by the back door to be treated by the very people whom he had opposed most violently in parliament.

The Anthroposophical Society—which could, from a certain point of view, be justly described as willing to make sacrifices and whose members have dedicated themselves to the cultivation of anthroposophical spiritual science—seeks a powerful impetus, capable of affecting and working into the world at large. What is at issue today is nothing less than the following—that a true spiritual life, such as our present society needs, can be created only by those interested in it, which fundamentally includes everyone, many of whom have children, and that these must bring about the right conditions in which children can mature into free human beings so that those children, in turn, can create an existence worthy of humanity. As far as spiritual- cultural life is concerned, everyone is an interested party and should do his or her share to work for what the future will provide in the form of spiritual-cultural life.

Thus, what I would like to call “a world school movement,” based on the ideas I have put forward today, should meet with approval in the widest quarters. What really ought to happen is that all those who can clearly see the need for a free spiritual-cultural life should unite to form an international world school movement. An association of that kind would offer a stronger and more-living impetus for uniting nations than many other associations being founded these days on the basis of old and abstract principles. Such a union of nations, spiritually implied in a world school movement, could be instrumental in uniting peoples all over the globe by their participation in this great task. The modern state school system superseded the old denominational schools relatively recently. It was good and right that this happened. And yet, what was a blessing at the time when the state took this step would cease to be one if state-controlled education were to become permanent; for then, inevitably, education would become the servant of the state. The state can train theologians, lawyers, or other professionals to become its civil servants, but if the spiritual life is to be granted full independence, all persons in a teaching capacity must be responsible solely to the spiritual world, to which they can look up in the light of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

A world school movement, as I envisage it, would have to be founded on an entirely international basis by all who understand the meaning of a truly free spiritual life and what our human future demands in social questions. Gradually, such a world school movement would give birth to the general opinion that schools must be granted independence from the state and that the teachers in each school must be given the freedom to deal with that school’s own administration. We must not be narrow minded or pedantic in these matters, as many are who doubt that enough parents would send their children to such schools. That is the wrong kind of thinking. One must be clear that freedom from state interference in education will be the call of the future. Even if there are objections from some parents, ways and means will have to be found for getting children to attend school without coercion by the state. Instead of opposing the founding of independent schools because of dissenting parents, ways and means will have to be found of helping free schools to come into existence despite possible opposition or criticisms—which must then be overcome in an appropriate way. I am convinced that the founding of a world school movement is of the greatest importance for the social development of humanity. Far and wide, it will awaken a sense for a real and practical free spiritual life. Once such a mood becomes universal, there will be no need to open Waldorf schools tucked away in obscure corners and existing at the mercy of governments, but governments will be forced into recognizing them fully and refraining from any interference, as long as these schools are truly founded in a free spiritual life.

What I have said so far about freedom in the cultural-spiritual sphere of life—namely that it has to create its own forms of existence—applies equally to the social sphere known by spiritual science as the sphere of economic life. Just as the sphere of cultural spiritual life must be formed on the basis of the capacities of every individual, so too must economic life be formed on the basis of its own principles, different though these are. Fundamentally, such economic principles derive from the fact that, in economics, a judgment made by an individual cannot be translated directly into deeds, into economic actions. In the cultural-spiritual sphere, we recognize that human souls strive for wholeness, for inner harmony. Teachers and educators must take that wholeness into account. They approach a child with that wholeness as their aim. In the economic sphere, on the other hand, we can be competent in a professional sense only in narrower, more specialized areas. In economics, therefore, it is only when we join together with people working in other areas that something fruitful may be achieved. In other words, just as free spiritual-cultural life emerged as one member of the threefold social organism, so likewise must economic life, based upon the associative principle, arise as another, independent member of this same threefold organism. In the future, economic life will be run on a basis quite different from what we are used to out of the past.

Economic life today is organized entirely according to past practices, for there is no other yardstick for earnings and profits. Indeed, people are not yet ready to contemplate a change in the economic system which is still entirely motivated by profit. I would like to clarify this by an example that, though perhaps not yet representing purely and simply the economic sphere, nevertheless has its economic aspects. It shows how the associative principle can be put into practice in the material realm.

There is, as you know, the Anthroposophical Society. It might well be that there are many people who are not particularly fond of it and regard it as sectarian, which it certainly is not. Or they may be under the impression that it dabbles in nebulous mysticism, which again is not the case. Rather, it devotes itself to the cultivation of anthroposophical spiritual science. Many years ago, this Society founded the Philosophic- Anthroposophic Publishing Company in Berlin. To be exact, two people who were in harmony with the Anthroposophical Society’s mode of thinking founded it. This publishing company, however, does not work as other profit-making companies, which are the offspring of modern economic thinking, do. And how do these profit-making enterprises work? They print books. This means that so and so many people have to be employed for processing paper; so and so many compositors, printers, bookbinders; and so on. But now I ask you to look at those strange and peculiar products that make their appearance every year and which are called “crabs” in the book trade. These are newly printed books, which have not been purchased by the book sellers and which, consequently, at the next Easter Fair wander back to the publishers to be pulped. Here we have a case where wares have been put on the market, the production of which had occupied a whole host of workers, but all to no avail.

Such unnecessary and purposeless expenditure of labor represents one important aspect of the social question. Nowadays, because one prefers to live with phrases rather than an objective understanding, there is too much talk about “unearned income.” It would be better to look at the situation more realistically, for similar situations arise in all branches of our external, material life. Until now, the Philosophic-Anthroposophic Publishing Company has not printed one single copy in vain. At most, there are a few books that were printed out of courtesy to our members. That was our conscious motive; they were printed as a kind of offering to those members. Otherwise there was always a demand for whatever we printed. Our books always sold out quickly and nothing was printed unnecessarily. Not a single worker’s time was wasted and no useless labor was performed within the social framework. A similar situation could be achieved in the whole economic sphere if one organized cooperation between consumers who have an understanding of needs and demands in a particular domain, traders who trade in certain products, and last, the actual producers. Consumers, traders, and producers would form an association whose main task would be the fixing of prices. Such associations would have to determine their own size; if they grew too large, they would no longer be cost effective. Such associations could then unite to form larger associations. They could expand into what might be called global or world-economic associations—for the characteristic feature of recent economics is its expansion of economies into a world economy.

A great deal more would have to be said to give an adequate account of what I can indicate here only in principle. I must, however, say that the concept of associative life implies nothing organizational. In fact, although I come from Germany (and have lived there frequently even though my main sphere of activity is now Dornach, Switzerland) the mere word “organization” produces a thoroughly distasteful effect in me. “Organization” implies an ordering from above, from a center. This is something that economic life cannot tolerate. Because the Middle-European states, penned in between the West and the East, were trying to plan their economies, they were actually working against a healthy form of economic life. The associative principle which must be striven for in economics leaves industry, as also industrial cooperatives, to their own devices. It only links them together according to levels of production and consumption regulated by the activity of the administrators of the various associations. This is done through free agreements among single individuals or various associations.

A more detailed description of this subject can be found in my book The Threefold Commonwealth, or in other of my writings, such as The Renewal of the Social Organism, which is supplementary to The Threefold Commonwealth.

Thus, in order to meet the needs of our times, anthroposophical spiritual science, based on practical life experience, calls for two independent members of the social organism—a free spiritual life and an associative economic life. Those two are essential in the eyes of anyone seriously and honestly concerned about one of the fundamental longings in the hearts of our contemporaries; namely, the longing for democracy.

Dear friends, I spent the first half of my life in Austria—thirty years—and have seen with my own eyes what it means not to take seriously society’s heartfelt demand for democracy. In the 1860s, the call for parliamentarianism was heard in Austria, too. But because it could not bring about the right social conditions, this land of political experimentation was the first to go under in the last great World War. A parliament was formed. But how was it constituted? It was composed of four assemblies: landowners, the chamber of commerce, the department of towns, markets and industrial areas, and, finally, the assembly of country parishes. In other words, only economic interests were represented. There were thus four departments, each dealing with various aspects of the national economy. Together, they constituted the Austrian Parliament, where they were supposed to come to decisions regarding political and legal matters as well as matters pertaining to general affairs of the state. This means that all decisions, reached by majority vote, represented only economic interests. Such majorities, however, can never make fruitful contributions to the social development of humanity. Nor are they the outcome of any expert knowledge. Truly, the call for democracy, for human freedom, demands honesty.

At the same time, however, one must also be clear that only certain issues are suitable for parliamentary procedures, and that democracy is appropriate only when the issues treated lie within the areas of responsibility of each person of voting age. Thus, between free spiritual life on one side and associative economic life on the other, the sphere of democracy becomes the third member of the threefold social organism. This democratic sphere represents the political sphere of rights within the social organism. Here each individual meets the other on equal terms. For instance, in such questions as the number of working hours and the rights of workers in general, each person of age must be considered competent to judge.

Let us move toward a future in which questions of cultural and spiritual life are decided freely and entirely within their own sphere, a future in which freedom in education is striven for so that schools can work out of the spirit and, consequently, produce skillful, practical people. Then, practical schools, too, will develop from such a free spiritual life. Let us move toward a future in which spiritual life is allowed to work within its own sphere and in which the powers of the state are limited to what lies within the areas of responsibility of each person of voting age; a future in which economic life is structured according to the principle of associations, where judgments are made collectively on the strength of the various members’ expertise and where agreements are made with others who are experts in their fields. If we approach the future with these aims in mind, we shall move toward a situation that will be very different from what many people, unable to adapt themselves to new conditions, imagine today.

There will be many who believe that a nebulous kind of cultural spiritual life, alienated from ordinary life, emanates from Dornach. But such is not the case at all. However absurd it may sound, according to the spirit prevailing in Dornach, no one can be a proper philosopher who does not also know how to chop wood or dig potatoes. In short, according to this spirit, one cannot be a philosopher if one cannot turn a hand to tasks requiring at least a modicum of practical skill. Spiritual science does not estrange people from practical life; on the contrary, it helps them develop skills in coping with life. It is not abstract. It is a reality, penetrating human beings with real strength. It therefore not only increases people’s thinking activity, it also makes them generally more skillful. At the same time, spiritual science is intimately connected to a sense of inner dignity and morality; that is, to morality, religion, and art. Visitors to the Goetheanum can convince themselves of this—although the building is not finished yet by any means. Indeed, in order to bring it even into its present state, people with an understanding for the impulse it embodies have already made many sacrifices. The Goetheanum is not a result of our employing the services of an architect and a builder to erect a building in a more or less conventional style—be it in Gothic, Renaissance, or any other style. The living quality of the science of the spirit spoken of here could not have tolerated that. Spiritual science had to evolve its own style in keeping with its own nature. This manifests in the various artistic forms. Just as the same growth forces that produce a nut’s kernel also form its shell—for the shell can be formed only by the same principle as also works in the kernel—so the outer shell of our building, the center of what is being willed in Dornach, can arise only from the same spiritual sources from which all of the teaching and researching in Dornach also flows. The words spoken there and the results of research conducted there all proceed from the same sources as the artistic forms of the building’s pillars and the paintings inside the cupolas. All of the sculpture, architectural design, and painting—and these are not empty symbolism or allegories—arise from the same spiritual impulses that underlie all of the teaching and researching. And, because all this is part of the one cultural-spiritual life that we hope to quicken in the human being, the third, religious element, is closely linked to the arts and to science, forming a unity with them.

In other words, what we are striving for as spiritual science—as it enters into the practical spheres of life as the “threefolding” (or tripartition) of the social organism—brings to realization the three great ideals that resound from the eighteenth century in such a heart-rending, spirit-awakening way. I refer to the threefold call to humanity: freedom, equality, brotherhood. Learned people in the nineteenth century pointed out repeatedly that it was impossible for those three ideals to be put into practice simultaneously under any one state or government. Such was their considered opinion and, from their point of view, justifiably so. But the apparent incongruity rests on false premises. Freedom, equality, and brotherhood do resound to us from the eighteenth century as the three great and justly-claimed ideals. The source of misunderstanding is the tacit assumption that the state must be given sole prerogative in matters pertaining to all three spheres of society. The thought never occurred that, in accord with its own nature, such a monolithic state should be membered into three social organisms: the free spiritual organism; the organism representing the sphere of politics and rights, built on equality; and the organism of the economic sphere, built on the principle of association.

Objections have been raised against these views by people who expect to be taken seriously in social questions and who maintain that, by demanding a tripartition of society, I seek to destroy its unity. But the unity of the human organism is not destroyed because it naturally consists of three parts. Nor is the unity of the human being disturbed because the blood, as it circulates rhythmically through the body, is sustained by a part of the organism different from the one in which the nerves are centered. Likewise, the unity of the social organism is enhanced rather than disturbed by recognition of its threefold nature (if the human head, apart from sending forth the nerves, would also have to produce the blood, then the unity of the human organism would certainly be destroyed). All of this is explained in much greater detail in my book Riddles of the Soul.

I would like to conclude these considerations about spiritual science and its practical application in social life by pointing out that, although the three great ideals of humanity—liberty, equality, fraternity—are not realizable within the framework of an all-powerful state monopoly—where any attempted implementation would be founded upon illusion—they can nevertheless penetrate human life in the form of a threefold ordering of society. Here, the following order would prevail: full freedom in the cultural-spiritual sphere; equality in the realm where each person of voting age shares in democratic rights and responsibilities on equal terms with fellow citizens of voting age; and brotherhood in the economic sphere which will be realized by means of the principle of associations. Unity will not be destroyed by this ordering, for every human being stands in all three spheres, forming a living link toward unity.

Basically, one may consider the meaning of world evolution to reside in the fact that the particular ways of its working and its underlying forces culminate in the human being as the apex of the entire world organism. Just as the forces of nature and the entire cosmos—the macrocosm—are to be found again on a minute scale in the microcosm, in the threefold human being, so the great ideals—liberty, equality, and fraternity—must come together again in the social organism. But this must not be brought about by external or abstract means: it must proceed in accordance with reality, so that these three ideals can work in harmony with the human nature in its integral unity. As free individuals, every human being can share in the free spiritual life to which all belong. Sharing equal rights with our fellow citizens, we can all participate in the democratic life of the state, based on the principle of equality. Finally, by participating in economic life, we share in the brotherhood of all human beings.

Liberty in the cultural spiritual sphere; equality in political life and the sphere of rights; fraternity in economic life. These three working together harmoniously will lead to the healing and further evolution of humanity—to new resources in the struggle against the forces of decline.

A combination of these three in a genuine social organism, a concurrence of freedom, equality, and brotherhood in integral human nature—this appears to be the magical password for the future of humanity.

Last week, I attempted to explain various aspects of the basis of the Waldorf School. I have already pointed out that this school did not appear out of the blue, that we must consider it in the context of modern education. However, we may put into the current stream of education only what conforms with our goals and our perceptions. I have suggested the difficulties that await a true art of education in our time. Today I will point out—of course, I can do this only in a general way—some things that will enable you to see the spirit from which an art of education may now develop. Quite possibly, due to people’s diverse backgrounds, a vague feeling, or even an almost conscious idea, already exists that our educational system is in need of change. The truly correct reformation of the social future of humanity depends upon the creation of a genuine art of education equal to the cultural tasks of the present and near future.

The primary concern is to have a suitable faculty, particularly for the younger age groups. What the teachers bring to the children, the impulse out of which they practice their art, is a very essential quality. Contemplating this more closely, we find much in the present time that resists the proper understanding of this quality. Of course, it is natural that the teachers, the educators, first attend the institutions of learning that have developed out of the more or less scientific consciousness of the present. However, this modern scientific consciousness is such that it does not provide any means of truly understanding the developing human. We find just in this point the first task necessary for founding the Waldorf School. I said in my last lecture here that we have already gathered the faculty of the Waldorf School, and that this future faculty is pursuing a pedagogical-didactic preparation. Our primary task is first to enable the teachers to find the proper attitude for understanding developing human nature and how it appears in childhood. Secondly, we want to bring them to the point where they can practice the art of education out of this insight. In the present time it is necessary to carve out a quite new—new for society at large—understanding and knowledge of humanity.

We, with our scientific mentality, are proud of our methods of experimentation and observation. These methods have led to great triumphs in the fields of natural science. However, many of our contemporaries who are close to the educational system feel that these same experimental and observational methods are incapable of finding an approach to education. Many people with a certain level of perception have asked, “What can we do to rightly use the developmental capacities that arise in the successive stages of the child’s life?” I need only point out a few things to show that some educators already have the desire to really understand the development of the child, but that due to the current scientific mentality they stand helplessly before such questions. Already in 1887, for example, the educator Sallwiirk drew attention to the discovery of a certain natural law that holds true during the development of an organism. According to this Recapitulation Theory, as it was named by the recently deceased Ernst Haeckel, the embryonic development of each individual human follows the history of development of the animal kingdom. During the first weeks of embryonic development, the human is similar to the lower animals, and then rises until it develops into a human. The individual development is a shortened repetition of a long development in the world at large. Educators have now asked themselves, “Can something similar also hold true for the mental development of the individual child? Also, can education find any help in a rule patterned after the Recapitulation Theory?”

You see, an effort already exists, not simply to begin teaching, but to gain insight into the development of the growing human. It was, for instance, obvious to say that all of humanity has gone through the time of the prehistoric cultures; then followed cultures such as those handed down to us through the writings of the ancient oriental cultures; then came the Greek and Roman cultures, followed by the developments of the Middle Ages, and so forth, right up to the present time.

Can we say that each human as a child repeats the stages of human cultural development during childhood? Can we, by observing the course of history, obtain an insight into the development of the individual child? Sallwiirk emphatically argued in his 1887 book Gesinnungsunterricht und Kulturgeschichte [The training of character and cultural history] that educators could not gain any help from such ideas. Even before that, the pedagogue Theodor Vogt, a follower of the Herbart school of thought, suggested that at present we are powerless to answer such pedagogical questions. In 1884 he said that if there were a science of comparative history in the sense of comparative linguistics, it could perhaps give us insight into child rearing comparable to the insight into the historical development of animals found in the Recapitulation Theory. However, he admitted that such a historical science did not exist. The pedagogue Rein echoed his words in 1887, and so things still lie in superficial pedagogy and the superficial art of education today.

Regarding such efforts and the discussions about such efforts, you can rightly say, “Yes, concerning what is necessary for the development of the growing child, shouldn't we, as educators, begin from the standpoint of a healthy human intuition, instead of allowing abstract science to dictate to us?” You would be right in raising such an objection. This objection also arises, if we consider the matter a bit more thoroughly, because the abstractions of that science based upon the methods of the present understanding of nature can tell us nothing concerning the development of the human spirit and the human soul. We work in vain if we attempt to use this. No one can become a true artist in education simply out of undeveloped human intellect and intuition. We need something that gives us insight. Just here we see that a new understanding of humans is needed as the foundation for a real future art of education. Normal science does not provide even the basis for such an understanding of humans. It must be gained by recognizing the human spirit and by recognizing the development of the human spirit within human history. We must have a much broader point of view than that of modern mechanistically oriented natural science.

If we observe the growing child, we first find—I have often remarked on this—that a relatively long developmental period lies between birth and the change of teeth, around seven years of age. If we compare what works during this time in the soul of the child with what develops in the time between the change of teeth and sexual maturity, a major difference is apparent. The child’s orientation until the change of teeth is to imitate what it sees, hears and perceives in its surroundings. In this period, the child is an imitator. From the age of seven until fifteen, from the change of teeth until sexual maturity, the child’s orientation is affected by the authority in its surroundings. For the most part, the child does not simply imitate, but wants to hear from adults what is right, what is good. He or she wants to believe in the judgment of adults; instinctively, the child wants authority. The child can develop only if he or she can develop this belief.

If we look further, however, we can see that shifts emerge during these major stages of life. We see, for example, that a clear shift occurs around three years of age, in the period between birth and the change of teeth, when children develop, for the first time, a clear feeling of their own selves. In later life, that event marks the earliest point they can remember; earlier experiences recede into the sleep of childhood. Much else appears around the same time in the development of the child, so we can say that, although the child is essentially an imitator in the first seven years of life, there is a turning point around the middle of this period that must be considered in early child rearing.

Two important phases lie in the period between the change of teeth and sexual maturity, that is, during that time in the child’s life when elementary education takes place. When the child approaches approximately nine years of age, those who are able will observe a great change in the child’s development. In the first seven years of life, the child is an imitator. Children tend toward a feeling for authority after the change of teeth, but some earlier desires to imitate remain. Thus, until the age of nine, the need to imitate their surroundings continues, but now it is mixed with the need to allow authority to take effect. If we observe which capacities in the child’s life arise out of the depths of human nature, then we find (as I said, I can merely touch upon these things today) through further consideration and observation, that the capacities that appear in this period between seven and nine years of age must be used to teach the child what naturally occurs as the beginnings of reading and writing. We should use these beginnings in the instruction of reading and writing so that only what is in harmony with the need to imitate and the need for authority is called upon. If we are artists in educating and can work, on the one hand, with the subject material and, on the other hand, with the emerging need for authority and the receding need to imitate, so that all of it harmonizes, then we create something in the child that has lasting power throughout life until death. We develop something that cannot be made up later, because each stage of life develops its own capacities. Certainly, you can say that many teachers have instinctively oriented themselves according to such laws. That is true, but it will not suffice in the future, for in the future, such things must be raised to consciousness.

Around the age of nine, everything that enables the child to go beyond people into an understanding of nature begins to develop. Before this time, the child is not very well suited to understand nature as such. We could say that until the age of nine, the child is well suited to observe the world in a moralizing manner. The teacher must meet this moralizing need of the child without becoming pedantic. Certainly, many teachers already act instinctively in this area.

If you examine the didactic instructions of the present, which should tend to relate the subject matter to human nature, then you could be driven to despair. A certain correct instinct is there, but these instructions are so narrow-minded and banal that they dreadfully harm the developing child. We would do well at this stage if we consider, for instance, animals or plants in a way such that a certain moralizing appears. For example, you can bring fables to children in a way that helps them to understand the animal world. You should be careful not to bring such “pablum” during the main lesson, as is so often done. Above all, you should take care not to tell a story to the children and then to follow it with all kinds of explanations. You destroy everything you want to achieve through telling the story by following it with interpretations. Children want to take stories in through feeling. Without outwardly showing it, they are dreadfully affected in their innermost being if they must listen afterwards to the often quite boring explanations.

What should we do in this situation, if we do not want to go into the real details of the art of storytelling? We might say, “Leave out the explanation and simply tell the children the story.” Fine. Then the children will not understand the story and will surely not enjoy it if they do not understand it. If we want to speak Chinese to people, we must first teach them Chinese; otherwise they cannot have the right relationship to what we tell them in Chinese. Thus, we gain nothing by saying, “Leave out the explanations.”

You must try to provide an explanation first. When you want to tell the children a story such as “The Wolf and the Lamb,” simply speak with the children about the wolf’s and the lamb’s characteristics. (We could also apply this to plant life.) As much as possible, speak of these characteristics in relationship to people. Gather everything that you feel will help the children form pictures and feelings that will then resonate when you read the story. If, in an exciting preliminary talk, you offer what you would give afterward as an explanation, then you do not kill the sensations as you would in giving that explanation afterward. On the contrary, you enliven them. If the children have first heard what the teacher has to say about the wolf and the lamb, then their sensations will be all the more lively, and they will have all the more delight in the story. Everything that is necessary for understanding should happen beforehand. The children should not hear the story first. When they hear the story, you must bring them to the heights of their souls for them to understand it. This process must conclude in reading the story, telling the tale, doing nothing more than allowing the children’s sensations, already evoked, to take their course. You must allow the children to take their feelings home.

Until the age of nine, it is necessary to form the instruction in this way, to relate everything to people. If we have the sensitivity to observe the transition that occurs around nine years of age, we will know that then the child is first capable of going out into the world of nature. However, the child still relates nature to people. If we describe nature without any relationship to people, it is not yet comprehensible to the nine-year-old child. We only deceive ourselves if we believe that the children understand the conventional descriptions offered as instruction in natural science. We must, of course, take up the study of nature when the child reaches nine years of age, but we must always relate it to people. Particularly in the study of nature, we should not begin with the idea of nature as something external to humans, but always begin with humanity itself; we should always put people in the center.

Let us assume that we want a child older than nine to understand the difference between lower animals, higher animals and people—then we begin with people. We compare the lower animals with the human; we compare the higher animals with the human. If we have described the human in terms of form, in terms of daily tasks, then we can apply what we know about humans to the lower and higher animals. The child understands that.

We should not worry too much that we are speaking above the child’s level of understanding. (Today we sometimes speak above the level of adult understanding.) We do not speak above the child’s level of understanding if, for example, we say—of course, with enthusiasm and with a real understanding of the subject—“Look at the lower animals!” Let’s say that we give the child the chance to see a squid. Then, always using the appropriate terms, we go on to show with which parts of the ideal human the squid is most closely related. The child can quickly understand that the squid is most closely related to the human head. It is in reality so; the lower animals have only simple forms, but the human head repeats the forms that find their simplest expression in the lower animals. The human head is only endowed in a more complicated way than the lower animals. What we find in the higher animals, for example, mammals, can only be compared with what we find in the human torso. We should not compare the higher animals with the human head, but with the torso. If we go on to the human limbs, then we must say, “Look at the human limbs; in their form they are uniquely human. The way the arms and hands are formed—as appendages to the body in which the soul-spirit in us can move freely—such a pair of limbs is not found anywhere in the entire animal kingdom!” If we speak of the monkey’s four hands, this is really an improper manner of speaking since their nature is to serve in holding, in moving the body along. In the human we see a remarkable differentiation of the hands and feet, the arms and legs. What makes a human really a human? Certainly not the head; it is only a more perfect form of what we find already in the lower animals. What we find in the lower animals is further developed in the human head. What makes a human, human, what puts the human far above the animal world, are the limbs.

Of course, you cannot bring what I have just shown you to children in the same form. You translate it so that the child by and by learns to feel such things out of experience. Then, through your teaching you can clear away endless amounts of what, for quite mysterious reasons, currently spoils our moral culture. Our present moral culture is so often spoiled because people are so proud and arrogant concerning the head. Whereas, people could be proud of their limbs—though they would not be if the limbs were better developed, and this can be proven—that serve to work, that serve to put them in the world of social order.

Natural scientific instruction concerning the animal world can, in an unconscious way, bring the correct feelings about the relationship of people to themselves and about social order into human nature. This shows that the pedagogical question has a much deeper meaning than we generally believe today, that it concerns the great, all-encompassing cultural questions. It also provides information about how to teach science to children after the age of nine. You can relate everything to humanity, but in such a way that nature appears everywhere alongside humans and humans appear as a great condensation of nature. Teachers can give the child much if they maintain this point of view until about the age of twelve.

Around twelve years of age, an important change begins in the development of the child. At the age of twelve, thirteen, fourteen—it is different in each child—that which sexual maturity expresses comes into play, namely, the ability to judge, judgment. Judgment comes into play and must work together with the reduction in the need for authority. The teacher must harmoniously handle the need for authority and judgmental powers during this age. We must treat the subject material in this way.

This is the time when we may begin to bring in those natural scientific and, in particular, physical facts that are completely independent of humans, for instance, the refraction of light and such. It is at this age that the understanding of how to use nature in relationship to humans begins. Until the twelfth year, the child, through inner necessity, wants to understand nature from the standpoint of a human, no longer moralizing, but in the way I just described to you. After the twelfth year, the child tends to observe what is independent of people, but to relate it back to people. You develop something that the child does not forget again when you, let us say, explain the refraction of light through a lens, and then continue on to its application to people, the refraction of light in the eye, the whole inner structure of the eye. You can teach this to a child of this age.

You see, the true curriculum results from an understanding of the stages of human life. The children themselves tell us, if we can really observe them, what they want to learn in a particular stage of life. However, we cannot derive these results from modern natural science. Using natural scientific facts, you simply do not come to the point of view that shows the immeasurable importance of that Rubicon in life that lies around the ninth year, or the other Rubicon in life that lies around the twelfth year. We must bring these things forth out of the entirety of human nature. This entirety of human nature includes body, soul and spirit; modern science, although it believes itself capable of saying something about soul and spirit, actually limits itself to the body. The way such things are often discussed today—whether to emphasize academics or morality in teaching, whether to teach people more according to their abilities, or to see that they learn more about science because it will be needed later for a job, or so that they can take their place in society—these questions appear childish when we get to know the deeper basis from which education must emanate. How the individual relates to all of human development is not understood by natural science. However a spiritual comprehension of human developmental history does understand it.

Let us consider the following law, which is just as much a law as the laws of natural science, but which the methods of modern science do not comprehend. If we go back—you will find these things fully developed in my writings—to the ancient times of humanity, we find that people remained capable of development into very old age, capable of development in the way that we are now capable only during our early childhood. If we go back to these ancient times, we find that people said to themselves, “When I am thirty-five years old,” or in still earlier times, “When I am forty-two years old, I will with certainty go through changes connected with the development of my body that will make me into another person.” Just as at the change of teeth we go through something connected with the development of the body which makes us into another person, just as at sexual maturity we go through something connected with the development of the body which makes us into another person, so in ancient times did people go through such things into very old age. In the course of time, human development has lost this. Today, in childhood we cannot look at an older person and say, to the same extent as was possible in ancient times, “I will be happy to be so old some day, because this person has experienced something that, due to my present stage of bodily development, is not yet possible for me.” The progress of human development is such that we bring a bodily development to ever fewer older stages of life.

Those able to observe such things know that, for example, in Greek times still, people in their thirties clearly perceived, as we today in our youth perceive, things not connected with the physical body. Today such perceptions are at most possible for people before the age of twenty-seven. In the future, this age will be even younger. This is the direction of human development, that the natural, the basic, development of the individual continues only to an ever-younger age. That is a fundamental law. Our cultural development is directly connected with this fundamental law, in that reading and writing appear at a particular age, whereas, in ancient times, they were not there. This is connected with humanity’s dependency upon ever-younger stages of natural development.

Those who can then look further for such clues concerning human development, which we can gain only from an inclusive knowledge, will know how the longings of a Theodor Vogt, a Rein, a Sallwiirk can be satisfied. The current mechanistic orientation of science does not have even the possibility of knowing something like this human life, in which natural development is condensed into ever younger stages of life. It does not have even the possibility of creating a truly comparative historical science that could give clues about how to recognize people’s relationship to cultural development. However, those who look further know that people, as they are born, have, of course, characteristics appropriate to their epoch, that they are part of a comprehensive human development. If we develop the aptitudes people already have, then, simply because these people are a part of human development, what we should develop is, in a formal sense, developed. If we recognize reality, then much of what causes such a furor today—whether to do things this way or that—becomes only an abstract rambling. This attitude of confrontation resolves itself in a true, a real, attitude of compromise.

This, you see, is what we would like to develop in the Waldorf School faculty, to create in at least one place something for the future. We hope that the teachers will correctly recognize people and the relationship of people to modern culture, and that they will be inspired by this knowledge, by this feeling, to a will to work together with the child. Then true educational artists will emerge. Upbringing is never a science, it is an art. Teachers must be absorbed in it. They can only use what they know as a starting point for the art of education.

We should not ramble on too much about the needs of teachers to have quite specific capabilities. These capabilities are more widespread than we think—only at present they are not very well developed. We need only the perseverance to develop them in the teachers in the right way, through a strong spiritual science. Then, we will find that what we call teaching ability is more widespread than we think.

You see, this is connected with something else again. Today, in theory, we are often warned against too much abstraction in instruction; but we still instinctively make these abstractions. It will concern those who see through these things that the plans and ideas for reform presently so common will make instruction more abstract than it is now. It will become worse in spite of all the beautiful ideas contained in these reform plans. If we study the stages of human development correctly—first, the long stages up to the change of teeth and to sexual maturity, and then the shorter stages up to the development of a feeling of self and the sense of people separate from nature—if we study these epochs correctly, so that we do not tritely define them, but obtain an artistic, intuitive picture of them, then we can first understand how greatly the developing child is damaged when intellectual education is steered in the wrong direction. We should always emphasize the need to educate people as whole beings. But we can only bring up people as whole beings if we know their separate parts, including the soul and spirit, and understand how to put them together. We can never educate people as whole beings if in education we allow thinking, feeling and willing to interact chaotically. We can educate people as whole beings only if we intuitively know what the characteristics of thinking, of feeling, of willing are. Then, we can allow these powers of the human being to interact correctly in the soul and the spirit.

When people today discuss such things, they tend to fall into extremes. When people realize that intellect is too prominent, that our intellects are too strongly developed, they become enthusiastic about eradicating this imbalance, and say, “Everything depends upon the development of will and feeling.” No, everything depends upon developing all three elements! We must develop people’s intellect, feeling and will in the right way, so that they can understand how to let those three elements of life interact correctly. If we are to develop the intellectual element correctly, then during the elementary school period we must give children something that can grow with them, that can develop as a whole. Understand me correctly, particularly on this point, for it is an important point. Think about it. You develop in children until the age of fourteen those ideas that you have carefully defined so the children know how they are to think them. But, just through the good definitions you have given them, you have often given them ideas that are quite stiff, that cannot grow with the person. People must grow from the age of fourteen to twenty, from the age of twenty to twenty-five, and so forth, and at the same time, their ideas must grow along with them. The ideas must be able to grow in parallel. If your definitions are too well formed, people grow, but their ideas do not grow with them. You guide intellectual development in the wrong direction. Then in cultural life, people will be unable to do anything except remember the ideas that you so carefully gave them. That would be wrong. Children’s ideas should grow in parallel with their own development. Their ideas should grow so that what they learned at the age of twelve is, at the age of thirty-five, as different from what it was when they first learned it, as people in their physical bodies at the age of thirty-five are different from what they were at the age of twelve. That is to say, in intellectual development, we must not bring something well-formed and dead, but teach something living, something that has life in it and can change. Thus, we will define as little as possible. If we want to bring ideas to a child, we will depict them from as many points of view as possible. We will not say, “What is a lion? A lion is such and such.” Rather, we will depict a lion from many different points of view—we will instill living, moving ideas that will then live with the child. In this regard, modern education does much damage.

People must live through their earthly existence, and often the ideas that we instill in them die and remain as soul corpses; they cannot live. We cannot get to the root of these things with the crude concepts developed by modern pedagogy. A very different spiritual impulse must imbue this pedagogy. That is something we strive for in the Waldorf School. We try to give pedagogy a new basis from which to consider such things psychologically. We are completely convinced that an understanding of human beings cannot arise out of the old principles, and that, therefore, these cannot be the principles of a pedagogy based upon psychology. We cannot form this psychology of the developing human with the methods that are so common today.

You see, when we can really, correctly, observe such things, then we throw light on many secondary concepts that we hold to be very important today. We can easily understand them once we understand the main concepts. There is today, for instance, so much nonsense concerning the importance of play in the education of children. In considering the importance of play, we often forget the most important thing, namely that if play is strongly regulated and children are made to direct their play toward a particular goal, then it is no longer play. The essence of play is that it is free. If, however, you make play really play, as is necessary for instruction, then you will not fall prey to the foolish expression, “Instruction should be just a game.” Then you will look more for the essential in the rhythm that comes into the life of the child when you allow play and work to alternate.

In training the mind and training feeling, we must give particular attention to the individual characteristics of the child. As teachers, we must be capable of forming the instruction so that the child does not simply receive something intellectual in the instruction, but enjoys the instruction in an aesthetic way. We cannot achieve this if the ideas appeal only to the intellect. We can do this if we, as teachers, relate to the children’s feelings in such varied ways that we actually elicit the children’s expectations of the subject, which we then fulfill. We can do this if we arouse hopes that, both large and small, we fulfill—if we develop every positive attribute of the children that can play a role in an aesthetic understanding of their surroundings. You can meet the child’s aesthetic needs if you bring yourself into a correct relationship to the child’s feelings, if you dont tritely “sell” nature studies, as is done nowadays: “Look, there is a mouse. The mouse runs. Was there ever a mouse at home? Have you ever seen a mousehole?” Of course, today instruction in nature study is not given in such extreme tastelessness, but similarly. People have no idea how much good taste, that is, the aesthetic experiencing of children, is damaged through what people nowadays call nature studies. We will develop taste only by steering the child’s interest to large, inclusive views. For the proper unfolding of the mind, of feeling, taste must rule in instruction and in the schools. Thus, we can develop a certain instinct for the essentials in education.

The intellect is at first the highest mental aspect in each of us; but if we develop it one-sidedly, without a concurrent development of feeling and will, then we also develop a tendency toward materialistic thinking. Although the intellect is our highest mental aspect during physical earthly life, intellect is directed toward materialism. Specifically, we should not believe that when we develop the intellect, we also develop people spiritually. As paradoxical as that sounds, it is nevertheless true that we develop people’s capacity to understand material things when we develop the intellect. By first tastefully, in an aesthetic way, developing the sensitivity, the feelings, we can direct the human intellect toward the soul aspects. We can give children a foundation for directing the intellect toward the spirit only insofar as we practice a development of will, even if we develop it only as physical dexterity. That so few people today tend to direct the intellect toward the spirit can only be a consequence of the fact that the will was so incorrectly trained during childhood.

How do we as teachers learn to develop will in the proper way? I recently pointed out that we learn to do it by allowing children to be artistically active. As early as possible, we should not only allow children to hear music, to see drawings and paintings, but also allow them to participate. Besides mere instruction in reading and writing—yes, we must develop instruction in reading and writing from artistic activities, writing from drawing, and so forth—besides all this, basic artistic activities must take place early in the education wherever possible. Otherwise, we will have weak-willed people. Directing youths toward what their later work will be comes in addition to this.

You see just how necessary it is in modern times that we come to a new understanding of humanity. This understanding can be the basis for a new way of educating, as much as this is possible within all the constraints that exist today. Because modern science does not comprehend these things, we must create something that leads in this direction through the Waldorf School.

It is urgently necessary that we do not allow ourselves to be deceived by much of what is said today. A week ago, I tried to explain the significance of the empty phrase for modern spiritual life. Empty phrases come into play particularly in educational reform plans. People feel good—and they believe that they are “very pedagogical’—when they repeatedly admonish others to raise people, not robots. But those who say this must first know what a real human is; otherwise this sentence becomes just an empty phrase. This is particularly so when the often-asked question, “To what end should we educate children?” is answered by, “To be happy and useful people.” Those who say this mean people who are useful in the way the speakers find useful and happy in the way the speakers mean happy.

It is especially important that we form a foundation that allows us to understand what human beings really are. However, this cannot be done with the old prejudices of our world view. It can only come from a new understanding of the world. A new form of education will not develop if we do not have the courage to come to a new scientific orientation. What we see most often today are people who want everything conceivable, but not what is necessary to arrive at a new orientation in understanding the world. We have been searching for this new orientation for years by means of spiritual science. If many people have distanced themselves from it, that is because they find it too uncomfortable, or because they do not have the courage. But what we need for a real art of education can emerge only from a properly founded spiritual world view.

Think about the importance of what the teacher represents to the growing child. Basically, we people here on earth, if we are not to become petrified in one of the stages in our life, must continually learn from life. But, first we must learn to learn from life. Children must learn to learn from life in school so that, in later life, their dead ideas do not keep them from learning from life; so that, as adults, they are not petrified. What keeps eating at people today is that school gave them too little. Those who see through our deplorable social conditions know that they are largely connected with what I have just described. People do not have that inner hold on life that can come only when the right material is taught at the right time in school. Life remains closed if school does not give us the strength to open it. This is only possible if, in the early school years the teacher is the representation of life itself. The peculiarity of youth is that the gulf still exists between people and life. We must bridge this gulf. The young senses, the young intellect, the young mind, the young will are not yet so formed that life can touch them in the right way. Children meet life through the teacher. The teacher stands before the child as, later, life stands there. Life must be concentrated in the teacher. Thus, an intensive interest in life must imbue the teachers. Teachers must carry the life of the age in themselves. They must be conscious of this. Out of this consciousness can radiate what lively instruction and conduct must communicate to the pupils. To begin such a thing, teachers must no longer be miserably confined to the realm of the school; they must feel themselves supported by the whole breadth of modern society and how this interacts with the future, a future in which precisely teachers have the greatest interest. Under the present conditions and despite the present obstacles, we should try to do this in the school, as well as it can be done by people who bring the necessary prerequisites from their present lives. We should not work out of any one-sided interest, out of a preference for this or that, but rather work out of what speaks loudly and clearly to us as necessary for the development of present and future humanity. What in human developmental progress we see as necessary for our time should enter and strengthen instruction through the founding of the Waldorf School.

Anyone who chooses to address the themes that I shall address tonight and again on the 27th knows that many people today long for a new element in contemporary spiritual life, an impulse that could revitalize and transform important aspects of our present civilization. Such longings live especially in those who try to look deeply into their own inner being, stirred by the various signs in contemporary society indicating that, unless present trends change, our civilization is heading for a general collapse. These signs themselves, of course, are a result of many characteristic features of the cultural stream of Western Europe over the last few centuries.

What may be said about the supersensible worlds today may therefore be said to every human soul. It may be said even to a hermit, a recluse, who has withdrawn from the world. Above all, however, it may be said to those who stand fully and firmly in life: for what we are talking about is every human being’s concern.

But this is not the only point of view from which I wish to speak today and again on the 27th. I want to talk about how, if we let them work upon our souls, the fundamental issues facing our civilization affect our attitudes. Those who feel called upon to lead their fellow human beings will find much that is inwardly disturbing here and much that makes them yearn for a renewal of certain aspects of spiritual and cultural life.

If we consider humanity’s present cultural, spiritual situation, we may trace it back to two fundamental issues. One shines out in contemporary science and in the way in which scientific life has developed during the last three or four hundred years. The other shines out from the practical sphere of life, which, naturally, has been largely influenced by modern science.

To begin with, let us look at what science has brought in its wake more recently. At this point, to avoid any misunderstanding, let me state clearly that anthroposophical spiritual science—as I shall represent it here—must in no way be thought of as opposing the spirit of modern science, whose triumphant and important successes the exponents of spiritual science fully recognize. Precisely because it wishes to enter without prejudice into the spirit of natural science, anthroposophical spiritual science must go beyond its confines and objectives. Natural science, with its scrupulous, specialized disciplines, provides exact, reliable information about much in our human environment. But, when a human soul asks about its deepest, eternal being, it receives no answer from natural science, least of all when science searches in all honesty and without prejudice. This is why we find many people today who out of an inner religious need—in some cases more, in others less—long for a renewal of the old ways of looking at the world.

The outer sciences, and anthropology in particular, already draw our attention to the fact that our forebears, centuries ago, knew nothing of what splits and fragments many souls today; namely, the disharmony between scientific knowledge on one hand and religious experience on the other. If we compare our situation today with what prevailed in ancient times, we find that the leaders of humanity who cultivated science then—however childlike their science might appear to us now—also kindled the religious spirit of their people. There was certainly no split between these two spiritual streams.

Today, many souls long for the return of something similar. Yet one cannot say that a renewal of ancient forms of wisdom—whether Chaldean, Egyptian, Indian, or any other—would benefit our present society. Those who advocate such a return can hardly be said to understand the significance of human evolution, for they overlook its real mission. They do not recognize that it is impossible today to tread the same spiritual paths that were trodden thousands of years ago. It is an intrinsic feature of human evolution that every age should have its own particular character. In every age, people must seek inner fulfillment or satisfaction in appropriate though distinctly different ways. Because we live and are educated in the twentieth century, our soul life today needs something different from what people living in distant antiquity once needed for their souls. A renewal of ancient attitudes toward the world would hardly benefit our present time, although knowledge of them could certainly help in finding our bearings. Familiarizing ourselves with such attitudes could also help us recognize the source of inner satisfaction in ancient times. Now, this inner satisfaction or fulfillment was, in fact, the result of a relationship to scientific knowledge fundamentally different from what we experience today.

There is a certain phenomenon to which I would like to draw your attention. To do so is to open myself to the accusation of being either paradoxical or downright fantastical. However, one can say many things today that, even a few years ago, would have been highly dangerous to mention because of the situation that prevailed then. The last few catastrophic years [1914–1918] have brought about a change in people’s thinking and feeling about such things. Compared with the habits of thought and feeling of the previous decade, people today are readier to accept the idea that the deepest truths might at first strike one as being paradoxical or even fantastical.

In the past, people spoke of something that today—especially in view of our scientific knowledge—would hardly be acceptable. This is something that will be discussed again in a relatively short time, probably even in educated, cultured circles. I refer to the Guardian of the Threshold. This guardian stands between the ordinary world of the senses, which forms the firm ground of orthodox science and is where we lead our daily lives, and those higher worlds in which the supersensible part of the human being is integrated into the spiritual world. Between the sensory world—whose phenomena we can observe and in which we can recognize the working of natural laws with our intellect—and that other world to which we belong with our inner being, between these two worlds, the ancients recognized an abyss. To attain true knowledge, they felt, that abyss had first to be crossed. But only those were allowed to do so who had undergone intensive preparation under the guidance of the leaders of the mystery centers. Today, we have a rather different view of what constitutes adequate preparation for a scientific training and for living in a scientific environment. In ancient times, however, it was firmly believed that an unprepared candidate could not possibly be allowed to receive higher knowledge of the human being. But why should this have been the case?

An answer to that question can be found only if insight is gained into the development of the human soul during the course of evolution. Such insight goes beyond the limits of ordinary historical research. Basically, present historical knowledge draws only on external sources and disregards the more subtle changes that the human psyche undergoes.

For instance, we do not usually take into account the particular condition of soul of those ancient peoples who were rooted in the primeval oriental wisdom of their times, decadent forms of which only survive in the East today. Fundamentally speaking, we do not realize how differently such souls were attuned to the world. In those days, people already perceived external nature through their senses as we do today. To a certain extent, they also combined all of the various sense impressions with their intellect. But, in doing so, they did not feel themselves separated from their natural surroundings. They still perceived an element of soul and spirit within themselves. They felt their physical organization permeated by soul and spirit. At the same time, they also experienced soul and spirit in lightning and in thunder, in drifting clouds, in stones, plants, and beasts. What they could divine within themselves, they could also feel out in nature and in the entire universe. To these human beings of the past, the whole universe was imbued with soul and spirit.

On the other hand, they lacked something that we, today, possess to a marked degree, that is, they did not have as pronounced and intensive a self-consciousness as we do. Their self-awareness was dimmer and dreamier than ours today. That was still the case even in ancient Greece. Whoever imagines that the condition of soul—the psychic organization—of the ancient Greeks was more or less the same as our own can understand only the later stages of Greek culture. During its earlier phases, the state of the human soul was not the same as it is today, for in those days there still existed a dim awareness of humanity’s kinship with nature. Just as a finger, if endowed with some form of self awareness, would feel itself to be a part of the whole human organism and could not imagine itself leading a separate existence—for then it would simply wither away—so the human being of those early times felt closely united with nature and certainly not separate from it.

The wise leaders of the ancient mystery schools believed that this awareness of humanity’s connection with nature represented the moral element in human self-consciousness, which must never be allowed to conceive of the world as being devoid of soul and spirit. They felt that if the world were to be conceived of as being without soul and spirit—as has now happened in scientific circles and in our daily lives—human souls would be seized by a kind of faintness. The teachers of ancient wisdom foresaw that faintness or swooning of the soul would occur if people adopted the kind of world-view we have today.

You might well wonder what the justification for saying such things is. To illustrate that there is a justification, I would like to take an example from history—just one out of many others that could have been chosen.

Today, we feel rightfully satisfied with the generally accepted system of the universe that no longer reflects what the eye can observe outwardly in the heavens, as it still did in the Middle Ages. We have adopted the Copernican view of the universe, which is a heliocentric one. During the Middle Ages, however, people believed that the earth rested in the center of the planetary system—in fact, in the center of the entire starry world—and that the sun, together with the other stars, revolved around the earth. The heliocentric system of the universe meant an almost complete reversal of previously held views. Today, we adhere to the heliocentric view as something already learned and believed during early school days. It is something that has become part of general knowledge and is simply taken for granted.

And yet, although we think that people in the Middle Ages and in more ancient times believed uniquely in the geocentric view as represented by Ptolemy, this was by no means always the case. We only need to read, for instance, what Plutarch wrote about the system of Aristarchus of Samos, who lived in ancient Greece in the pre-christian era. Outer historical accounts mention Aristarchus’ heliocentric view. Spiritual science makes the situation clear.

Aristarchus put the sun in the center of our planetary system, and let the earth circle around it. Indeed, if we take Aristarchus’ heliocentric system in its main outlines—leaving aside further details supplied by more recent scientific research—we find it in full agreement with our present picture of the universe. What does this mean? Nothing more than that Aristarchus of Samos merely betrayed what was taught in the old mystery centers. Outside these schools, people were left to believe in what they could see with their own eyes. And why should this have been so? Why were ordinary people left with the picture of the universe as it appears to the eyes? Because the leaders of those schools believed that before anyone could be introduced to the heliocentric system, they had to cross an inner threshold into another world—a world entirely different from the one in which people ordinarily live. People were protected from that other world in their daily lives by the invisible Guardian of the Threshold, who was a very real, if supersensible, being to the ancient teachers. According to their view, human beings were to be protected from having their eyes suddenly opened to see a world that might appear bereft of soul and spirit.

But that is how we see the world today! We observe it and create our picture of the realms of nature—the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms—only to find this picture soulless and spiritless. When we form a picture of the orbits and the movements of the heavenly bodies with the aid of calculations based on telescopic observations, we see a world empty of soul and spirit. The wise teachers of the mystery centers knew very well that it was possible to see the world in that way. But they transmitted such knowledge to their pupils only after the pupils had undergone the necessary preparations, after they had undergone a severe training of their will life. Then, they guided their pupils past the Guardian of the Threshold—but not until they were prepared. How was this preparation accomplished? Pupils had not only to endure great deprivations, but for many years they were also taught by their teachers to follow a moral path in strict obedience. At the same time, their will life was severely disciplined to strengthen their self-consciousness. And only after they had thus progressed from a dim self-consciousness to a more conscious one were they shown what lay ahead of them on the other side of the threshold: namely, the world as it appears to us in outer space according to the heliocentric system of the universe. At the same time, of course, they were also taught many other things that, to us, have merely become part of our general knowledge of the world.

Pupils in ancient times were thus carefully prepared before they were given the kind of knowledge that today is almost commonplace for every schoolboy and schoolgirl. This shows how times and whole civilizations have changed. Because external history knows nothing of the history of the development of the human soul, we tend to be under a misapprehension if we go only by what we read in history books.

What was it then, that pupils of the ancient mystery centers brought with them before crossing the threshold to the supersensible world? It was knowledge of the world that, to a certain extent, had arisen from their instinctual life, from the drives of their physical bodies. By means of those drives or instincts, they saw the external world ensouled and filled with spirit. That is now known as animism. They could feel how closely a human being was related to the outer world. They felt that their own spirit was embedded in the world spirit. At the same time, in order to look on the world as we learn to do already during our early school days, those ancient people had to undergo special preparations.

Nowadays, one can read all kinds of things about the Guardian of the Threshold—and the threshold to the spiritual world—in books whose authors take it upon themselves to deal with the subject of mysticism, often in dilettantish ways, even if their publications have an air of learnedness about them. Indeed, one often finds that, the more nebulous the mysticism, the greater attraction it seems to exert on certain sections of the public. But what I am talking about here, what is revealed to the unbiased spiritual investigator concerning what the ancients called the threshold to the spiritual world, is not the kind of nebulous mysticism that many sects and orders expound today and many people seek on the other side of the threshold. Rather, it is the kind of knowledge which has become a matter of general education today.

At the same time, we can see how we look at the world today with a very different self-consciousness than people did in more ancient times. The teachers of ancient wisdom were afraid that, unless their pupils’ self-consciousness had been strengthened by a severe training of the will, they would suffer from overwhelming faintness of soul when they were told, for example, that the earth was not stationary but revolved around the sun with great speed, and that they too were circling around the sun. This feeling of losing firm ground from under their feet was something that the ancients would not have been able to bear. It would have reduced their self-consciousness to the level of a swoon. We, on the other hand, learn to stand up to it already in childhood.

We almost take for granted now the kind of world-view into which the people of ancient times were able to penetrate only after careful preparation. Yet we must not allow ourselves to have nostalgic feelings for ancient ways of living, which can no longer fulfill the present needs of the soul. Anthroposophical science of the spirit, of which I am speaking, is a renewal neither of ancient Eastern wisdom nor of old Gnostic teachings, for if such teachings were to be given today, they would have only a decadent effect. Spiritual science, on the other hand, is something to be found by an elementary creative power that lives in every human soul when certain paths that I will describe presently are followed. First, however, I want to draw attention to the fact that ordinary life, and science in general, already represents a kind of threshold to the supersensible world or, at any rate, to another world.

People living in ancient times had a quite different picture of life on the other side of the threshold. But what do we hear, especially from our most conscientious natural scientists, who feel thoroughly convinced of the rightness of their methods? We are told that natural science has reached the ultimate limits of knowledge. We hear such expressions as “ignorabimus,” “we shall never know,” which—I hasten to add—is perfectly justified as long as we remain within the bounds of natural science. Ancient peoples might have lacked our intense self-consciousness, but we are lacking in other ways.

To what do we owe our intense self-consciousness? We received it through the ways of thinking and looking at the world that entered our civilization with people like Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Bruno, and others. The works of such thinkers not only provided us with a certain amount of knowledge but, through them, modern humanity underwent a distinct training of soul life. Everything that the mode of thinking developed by these personalities has achieved in more recent times tends to cultivate the powers of intellect. There is also a strong emphasis on scientific experimentation and on accurate, conscientious observation. With instruments such as the telescope, the microscope, X-rays, and the spectroscope, we examine the phenomena around us and we use our intellect mainly in order to extract from those phenomena their fundamental and inherent natural laws. But what are we actually doing when we are engaged in observing and experimenting? Our methods of working allow only the powers of reasoning and intellect to speak.

It is simply a fact that, during the last centuries, it has been primarily the intellect that has been tapped to promote human development. And a characteristic feature of the intellect is that it strengthens human self-consciousness, hardening it and making it more intense. Due to this hardening, we are able to bear what an ancient Greek could not have born; namely, the consciousness of being moved around the sun on an earth that has no firm ground to uphold it. At the same time, because of this strengthened self-consciousness that has led to the picture of a world devoid of soul and spirit, we are deprived of the kind of knowledge for which our souls nevertheless yearn. We can see the world with its material phenomena—its material facts—as the ancients could never have seen it without appropriate preparation in the mystery centers, but we can no longer perceive a spiritual world surrounding us. This is why conscientious scientists confess “ignorabimus” and speak of limits to what we can know.

As human beings, we stand in the world. And, if we reflect on ourselves, we must inevitably realize that, whenever we ponder various things or draw conclusions based on experiment and observation, something spiritual is acting in us. And we must ask ourselves, “Is that spirit likely to live in isolation from the world of material phenomena like some kind of hermit? Does that spirit exist only in our physical bodies? Can it really be that the world is empty of soul and spirit, as the findings of the physical and biological sciences would have us believe and, from their point of view, quite rightly so?”

This is the situation in which we find ourselves at the present time. We are facing a new threshold. Although that circumstance has not yet penetrated the consciousness of humanity as a whole, awareness of it in human souls is not completely absent either. People might not be thinking about it but, in the depths of their souls, it lives nevertheless as a kind of presentiment. What goes on in the realm of the soul remains mostly unconscious. But out of that unconsciousness arises a longing to cross the threshold again, to add knowledge of the spiritual world to present self-consciousness.

No matter what name we might wish to give these things—that in most cases are felt only dimly—they nevertheless belong to the deepest riddles of our civilization. There is a sense that a spiritual world surrounding all human beings must be found again and that the soulless, spiritless world of which natural science speaks cannot be the one with which the human soul can feel inwardly united.

How can we rediscover the kind of knowledge that also generates a religious mood in us? That is the great question of our present time. How can we find a way of knowing that also, at the same time, fulfills our deepest need for an awareness of the eternal in the human soul? Modern science has achieved great and mighty things. Nevertheless, any unprejudiced person must acknowledge that it has not really produced solutions, but rather—one would almost have to say—the very opposite. Yet we should accept even this both willingly and gladly.

What can we do with the help of modern science? Does it help us to solve the riddles of the human soul? Hardly, but at least it prompts us to ask our questions at a deeper level. Contemporary science has put before us the material facts in all purity; that is, free from what a personal or subjective element might introduce in the form of soul and spirit. But, just because of this, we are made all the more intensely aware of the deep questions living in our souls. It is a significant achievement of contemporary science to have confronted us with new, ever deepening riddles. The great question of our time is therefore: what is our attitude toward these deepened riddles? What we can learn from the spirit of a Haeckel, Huxley, or Spencer does not make it possible to solve these riddles; it does, however, enable us to experience the great questions facing contemporary humanity more intensely than ever before.

This is where spiritual science—the science of the spirit—comes into its own, for its aim is to lead humanity, in a way that corresponds to its contemporary character, over the new threshold into a spiritual world. How this is possible for a modern person—as distinct from the man or woman of old—I should now like to indicate, if only in brief outline. You can find more detailed descriptions in my books How to Know Higher Worlds and Occult Science, and in other publications of mine.

First, I would like to draw attention to the point of departure for anyone who wishes to engage in spiritual research or become a spiritual researcher. It is an inner attitude with which, due to present circumstances, a modern person is not likely to be in sympathy at all. It is an attitude of soul that I would like to call intellectual modesty or humility. Despite the fact that the intellect has developed to a degree unprecedented in human evolution during the past three or four hundred years, a wouldbe spiritual researcher must nevertheless achieve intellectual humility or modesty. Let me clarify what I mean by using a comparison. Imagine that you put a volume of Shakespeare’s plays into the hands of a five-year-old. What would the child do? The child would play with the book, turn its pages, perhaps tear them. He or she would not use the book as it was meant to be used. But, ten-to-fifteen years later, that young person would have a totally different relationship to the same volume. He or she would treat the book according to its intended purpose. What has happened? Faculties that were dormant in the child have meanwhile developed through natural growth, upbringing, and education. During those ten to fifteen years, the child has become an altogether different soul being.

Now, an adult who has achieved intellectual humility, despite having absorbed the scientific climate of the environment by means of the intellect, might say: my relationship to the sense world may be compared with the relationship of a five-year-old child to a volume of Shakespeare’s plays. Faculties that are capable of further development might lie dormant within me. I too could grow into an altogether different being as far as my soul and spirit are concerned and understand the sense world more deeply.

Nowadays, however, people do not like to adopt an attitude of such intellectual modesty. Habits of thought and the psychological response to life as it is steer us in a different direction. Those who have gone through the usual channels of education might enter higher education, where it is no longer a question of deepening inner knowledge and of developing faculties of will and soul. For, during a scientific training of that kind, a person remains essentially at the level of his or her inherited capacities and what ordinary education can provide. Certainly, science has expanded tremendously by means of experimentation and observation, but that expansion has only been achieved by means of those intellectual powers that already exist in what is usually called modern culture. In furthering knowledge, the aim of science has not been to cultivate new faculties in the human being. The thought would never have occurred that anyone already in possession of our present means of knowledge, as given both by ordinary life and by science, might actually be confronting the world of nature in a way similar to how a five-year old responds to a volume of Shakespeare. Allowance has not been made for the possibility that new faculties of cognition could develop that would substantially alter our attitude toward the external world. That such new faculties are possible, however, is precisely the attitude required of anyone who wishes to investigate the spiritual world of which anthroposophy, the science of the spirit, speaks. Here, the aim is to develop human faculties inherent in each person. However, in order to bring these potentials to a certain stage of development, a great deal must be experienced first.

I am not talking about taking extraordinary or even superstitious measures for the sake of this soul development. Rather, I am talking about the enhancement of quite ordinary, well known faculties that play important roles both in daily life and in the established sciences. However, although those faculties are being applied all the time, they are not developed to their full extent during the life between birth and death. There are many such faculties, but I would like to characterize today the further development of only two of them. More detailed information can be found in the books mentioned previously.

First of all, there is the faculty of remembering or memory, which is an absolute necessity in life. It is generally realized—as anyone with a particular interest in these matters will know from books on psychology and pathology—how important it is for a healthy soul life that a person’s memory should be unimpaired and that our memory should allow us to look back over our past life right down to early childhood. There must not exist periods in our past from which memory pictures cannot rise to bring events back again. If someone’s memory were to be completely erased, the ego or I of such a person would be virtually destroyed. Severe soul sickness would befall such an individual. Memory gives us the possibility for past experiences to resurface, whether in pale or in vivid pictures. It is this faculty, this force, that can be strengthened and developed further. What is its characteristic quality? Without it, experiences flit by without leaving any lasting trace. Also, without memory, the concepts formed through such experiences would be only fleeting ones. Our memory stores up such experiences for us (here, I can give only sketchy indications; in my writings and published lectures you will find a scientifically built-up treatment of memory).

Memory gives duration to otherwise fleeting impressions. This quality of memory is grasped as a first step in applying spiritual-scientific methods. It is then intensified and developed further through what I have called meditation and concentration in the books that I have mentioned. To practice these two activities, a student, having sought advice from someone experienced in these matters or having gained the necessary information from appropriate literature, will focus consciousness on certain interrelated mental images that are clearly defined and easy to survey. They could be geometrical or mathematical patterns that one can clearly view and that one is certain are not reminiscences from life, emerging from one’s subconscious.

Whatever is held in consciousness in this way must result from a person’s free volition. One must in no way allow oneself to become subject to auto suggestion or dreaming. One contemplates what one has chosen to place in the center of one’s consciousness and holds it for a longer period of time in complete inner tranquility. Just as muscles develop when engaged in a particular type of work, so certain soul forces unfold when the soul is engaged in the uncustomary activity of arresting and holding definite mental images. It sounds simple enough. But, in fact, not only are there people who believe that, when speaking about these things, a scientist of the spirit is drawing on obscure influences, but there are others who believe it simple to achieve the methods that I am describing here, methods that are applied in intimate regions of one’s soul life.

Far from it! These things take a long time to accomplish. Of course, some find it easier to practice these exercises, but others have to struggle much harder. Naturally, the depth of such meditation is far more important than the length of time spent over it. Whatever the case might be, however, one must persevere in one’s efforts for years. What one practices in one’s soul in this way is truly no easier than what one does in a laboratory, in a lecture hall for physics, or an astronomical observatory. It is in no way more difficult to fulfill the demands imposed by external forms of research than it is to practice faithfully, carefully, and conscientiously what spiritual research requires to be cultivated in the human soul over a period of many years.

Nevertheless, as a consequence of such practice, certain inner soul forces, previously known to us only as forces of memory, eventually gain in strength and new soul powers come into existence. Such inner development enables one to recognize clearly what the materialistic interpretation is saying about the power of memory when it maintains that the human faculty of remembering is bound to the physical body and that, if there is something wrong with the constitution of the nervous system, memory is weakened, as it is likewise in old age. Altogether, spiritual faculties are seen to depend on physical conditions. As far as life between birth and death is concerned, this is not denied by spiritual science. For whoever develops the power of memory as I have described knows through direct insight how ordinary memory, which conjures up pictures of past experiences before the soul, does indeed depend on the human physical body. On the other hand, the new soul forces now being developed become entirely free and independent of the physical body. The student thereby experiences how it becomes possible to live in a region of the soul in such a way that one can have supersensible experiences, just as one has sense-perceptible experiences in the physical body.

I would now like to give you an explanation of the nature of these supersensible experiences.

Human life undergoes rhythmical changes between waking and sleeping. The moments of falling asleep and awakening, and the time spent in sleep, are interspersed with waking life. What happens in this process? When we fall asleep, our consciousness is dimmed down, in most cases to a zero point. Dreams sometimes “bubble up” from half-conscious depths. Obviously, we are alive during this condition for, otherwise, as sleepers, we would have to pass away every night and come to life again every morning. The human soul and spirit are alive but, during sleep, our consciousness is diminished. This diminution of consciousness has to do with our inability to employ our senses between when we fall asleep and when we wake up, and also with our lack of access to impulses that derive from our physical organs of will.

This dimming down of consciousness can be overcome by those who have developed the new higher faculty of which I have spoken of their given faculty of memory. Such people reach a condition, as they do in sleep, in which they no longer need eyes in order to see, nor ears in order to hear. They no longer need to feel the physical warmth of their environment, nor to use will impulses that under ordinary conditions work through the muscles and through the human physical organization generally. They are able to switch off everything connected with the physical body. And yet their consciousness does not diminish as is usually the case in sleep. On the contrary, they are able to surrender themselves in full consciousness to conditions normally pertaining only to the sleeping state. A spiritual researcher remains completely conscious. Just as a sleeping person is surrounded by a dark world of nothingness, so a spiritual researcher is surrounded by a world that has nothing to do with the sense world but is nevertheless as full and intense as the sense world. In the waking state, we confront the sense world with our senses. But when they are able to free themselves from the physical body in full consciousness—that is, when they can enter, fully consciously, the state normally gone through between falling asleep and waking up—spiritual researchers confront a supersensible world.

They thus learn to recognize that a supersensible world always surrounds us, just as the sense world surrounds us in ordinary life. Yet there is a significant difference. In the sense world, we perceive outer facts through our senses and, through those facts, we also become aware of the existence of other beings. Outer facts predominate while beings or existences make their presence felt within the context of these outer facts. But, when the supersensible world is opened to us, we first encounter beings. As soon as our eyes are opened to behold the supersensible world, real beings surround us. To begin with, we cannot call this world of concrete and real supersensible beings in which we now find ourselves a world of facts. We must gain such facts for ourselves by means of yet something else.It is an achievement of the modern anthroposophical science of the spirit that it enables human beings to cross a threshold once more and enter a world different from what usually surrounds us.

After one has learned to experience the state of independence from the physical body, one finally comes to realize not only that the soul during sleep lifts itself out of the body only to return to it upon awakening, but also that this return is caused by the soul’s intense desire for the physical body. Supersensible cognition enables us to recognize the true nature of the soul, whose re-entry into the physical body upon awakening is due to a craving for the body as it lies asleep. Furthermore, if one can make this true conception of falling asleep and awakening one’s own, one’s understanding expands to such an extent that one eventually learns to know the soul before it descends—through conception and birth—from the spiritual world into the physical body offered by heredity.

Once one has grasped the nature of the human soul, and has learned to follow it outside the body between falling asleep and waking up—at the same time recognizing the less powerful forces pulling it back into the body lying in the bed—then one also begins to know what happens to the soul when it is freed from the body and passes through the portal of death. One learns to understand that the reason why the human soul has only a dim consciousness during sleep is because it has a strong desire to return to the body. It is this craving for the body that can dull human consciousness into a state of total impotence during the time between falling asleep and awakening. On the other hand, once the soul has passed through death, this desire for the physical body is no longer there.

And once, through the newly developed faculty of enhanced memory, we have learned to know the human soul, we can follow its further progress beyond the portal of death. One then learns to recognize that, since it is no longer bound to a physical body and is therefore freed from the desire to return to it, the soul is now in a position to retain a consciousness of its own while in the spiritual world, a consciousness that differs from what is given through the instrument of the physical body. One comes to recognize that there were forces in the soul before birth that drew it toward a physical body while it was still in the spiritual world. That physical body, however, was as yet quite indeterminate; it cast a certain light toward the descending soul. Then one begins to see how the soul develops a strong desire to re-enter physical, earthly life. One learns to know—but in a different language—the eternal being of the human soul. This being becomes clear and, through it, one learns to understand something else as well.

One learns to cognize in pictures the soul’s eternal being as it goes through births and deaths. I have called those pictures imaginations. And one comes to recognize that, just as the body belongs to the sensory world, so too does the soul belong to a supersensible world; and that, just as one can describe the sense world with the help of the physical body, so can one likewise describe the supersensible world with its spirituality. One comes to know the supersensible world in addition to the sensory world. But, in order to attain this faculty, it is necessary to cultivate another soul quality, the mere mention of which—as a way of gaining higher knowledge—is enough to make a modern scientist wince. Certainly, one can fully respect the reasons for this, but what I have to tell you about the enhancement of this second soul faculty is nevertheless true.

As I said, the first power to be developed is the faculty of memory, which then becomes an independent force. The second power to be developed is the power of 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 sublime moments does something of this love free itself from human corporeality. In those moments, we experience being freed from our narrow selves. Such love is a state of true freedom, in which one does not surrender to inborn instincts, but rather forgets the ordinary self and orients one’s actions and deeds toward outer needs and facts. It was because of this intimate connection between love and freedom that I dared to state publicly in my book, Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path (first published in 1892 and in which I tried to found a new sociology in philosophical terms), that, far from making people blind, love makes them see; that is, free. Love leads us beyond what otherwise blinds us by making us dependent on personal needs. Love allows us to surrender to the outer world. It removes whatever would hinder our acting in full freedom. The modern spiritual investigator must therefore develop such love—love that shines actively into ordinary life in truly free deeds. Gradually, love must be spiritualized, in the same way as the faculty of remembering had to be spiritualized. Love must become purely a power of the soul. It must make the human individual as a soul being entirely independent of the body, so that he or she can love free from blood ties and from the physical organization as a whole. Love of this kind brings about a fusion of the self with the external world, with one’s fellow human beings. Through love, one becomes one with the world.

This newly developed power of love has another consequence. It makes us “co-workers” in the spiritual world that we have been able to enter through the newly developed faculty of memory. At this point, we learn to know real beings as spiritual facts. When describing the external world, we now no longer speak of our present planetary system as having originated from some primeval cosmic nebula and of its falling into dust again—or into the sun again—in some remote future. We do not contemplate nature as being thus alienated from the world of spirit. And, if people today are honest, they cannot help becoming aware of the dichotomy between what is most precious in them on one hand, and the interpretation of the world given by natural science on the other. How often has one come across oppressed souls saying, “Natural science speaks of a world of pure necessity. It tells us that the world originated from a primeval mist. This condensed into the natural kingdoms—the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms and, finally, also the human kingdom. And yet, deep inside us, something rises that surely is of fundamental importance and value, namely, our moral and religious world. This stands before our souls as the one thing that makes us truly human. But an honest interpretation of the world of natural science tells us that this earth, on which we stand with our moral ideas like hermits in the universe, will disintegrate, will fall back again into the sun, it will end up as one vast cinder. A large cemetery is all that will be left and all of our ideals will be buried there.”

This is the point at which spiritual science enters, not just to grant new hope and belief, but resting entirely on its own sure knowledge, developed as I have already described. It states that the natural-scientific theory of the world offers only an abstract point of view. In reality, the world is imbued with spirit, and permeated by supersensible beings. If we look back into primeval times, we find that the material substances of the earth originated in the spiritual world, and also that the present material nature of the earth will become spirit again in future times. Just as, at death, the human being lays aside the physical body to enter, consciously, a spiritual world, so will the material part of the earth fall away like a corpse and what then is soul and spirit on earth and in human beings will arise again in future times, even though the earth will have perished. Christ’s words—taken as a variation of this same theme—ring true: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” Human beings thus can say, “Everything that our eyes can see will perish, just as the body, the transient part of the human individuality, does. But there will rise again from this dying away what lived on earth as morality. Human beings will perceive a spiritual world around them; they will live themselves into a spiritual world.”

In this way, deepening knowledge with spirit, anthroposophical spiritual science meets the needs of our present civilization differently from external science. It deepens knowledge and cognition to the level of deeply felt piety, of religious consciousness, giving human beings spiritual self-awareness.

Fundamentally speaking, this is the great question faced by contemporary civilization. But, as long as human beings lack the proper inner stability, as long as they feel themselves to be material entities floating about in some vacuum, they cannot develop a strong inner being, nor play a vigorous part in social life. Outer planning and organization, directly affecting social conditions, must be created by people themselves. Such outer social conditions are of great significance to the questions of present and future civilization—questions that lead us to search for true consciousness of our humanity. But only those with inner stability, which has been granted them through being anchored in the spirit, will be able to take their proper place in social life.

Thus, a first question is, how can people place themselves into present social conditions with inner firmness and certainty regarding matters of daily life? A second question concerns human relationships or what we could call our attitude toward our fellow human beings: the way in which each person meets his or her fellow human being. Here we enter a realm where, no less than in the realm of knowledge, modern civilization has brought us new riddles rather than new solutions. Only think of how the achievements of modern natural science have expanded the scope of technology! The technology, commerce, and transportation that surround us every hour of the day are all offspring of this new, grandiose way of looking at the sense-perceptible world. And yet we have not been able to find an answer in this age of technology to what has become a new, vital question; namely, how are we, as human beings, to live in this complex technical, commercial and traffic-ridden world? This question has become a by-product of modern civilization itself. The fact that it has not yet been resolved can be seen in the devastating political movements, the destructiveness of which increases the farther east we go, even right into Asia. Due to a working out of human instincts, nothing noble or elevating is being put into the world there. Rather, because the burning questions of our day have not been solved, havoc and destruction rule the day. There is no doubt that modern civilization would perish if what is emerging in the East were to spread worldwide. What is lurking there, intent on bringing about the downfall of modern civilization, is far more horrific than people living in the West can imagine. But it also testifies to the fact that something else is needed for the solution of the problem of contemporary civilization.

It is not enough for us to work within the bounds of modern technology, which is a child of the modern world outlook. We must also work toward attainment of another possibility. Human beings have become estranged from their old kinship to nature. In their practical activities and in their professional lives, they have been placed into a soulless, spiritually empty, mechanistic world. From cooperating with nature, they have been led to operating machines and to dealing with spiritless and mechanical means of transportation. We must find the way again to give them something to take the place of the old kinship to nature. And this can only be a world-view that speaks to our souls with a powerful voice, making us realize that there is more to human life than what can be experienced outwardly. Human beings must become inwardly certain that they belong to a supersensible world, to a world of soul and spirit, that always surrounds them. They must see that it is possible to investigate that world with the same scientific accuracy as the physical world, which is being studied and explored by outer science and which has led to this technological age. Only such a new science of the supersensible can become the foundation for a new, right relationship between people. Such a science not only will allow them to see in their fellow human beings what appears during the life between birth and death, but will make them recognize and respect what is immortal and eternal in human beings through their humanity’s close links with a spiritual world. Such a deepened knowledge will surely bring about a change for the better in how one individual perceives another.

Here is yet a third point of importance. It is the recognition that human life is not fully exhausted within the boundaries of birth and death, as the “ideology of the proletariat” would have us believe. Rather, what we are doing every moment here on earth is of significance not only for the earth, but for the whole of the universe. When the earth will have passed away, what we have carried into our daily tasks out of moral, soul-and-spiritual depths will arise to live in another world. Transformed, it will become part of a general spiritualization. Thus anthroposophical spiritual science approaches the problems of our time in a threefold way. It enables us to become aware of our spirituality. It helps us see in our fellows other beings of soul and spirit. And it helps us recognize that our earthly deeds, however humble and practical, have a cosmic and universal spiritual meaning.

In working towards these aims, spiritual science has been active not only in theory; it has also entered the sphere of practical life. In Stuttgart, there is the Waldorf school, which was founded by Emil Molt and which I was asked to direct. It is a school whose pedagogical principles and methods are based on insights gained through the science of the spirit I am speaking of here. Furthermore, in Dornach, near Basel, lies the Goetheanum, which houses our High School of Spiritual Science. This Goetheanum in Dornach is still incomplete, but we were already able to hold a large number of courses in the unfinished building during the autumn of last year.

Some time ago, on a previous occasion, I was also asked to speak about spiritual science here in Holland. At that time, I could say only that it existed as a new method of research and that it was something inherently alive in every human being. Since then, spiritual science has taken on a different form. It has begun to establish its own High School in Dornach. Last spring, I was able to show how what I could only sketch tonight as the beginning of spiritual-scientific research can be applied in all branches of science. On that occasion, I showed doctors and medical students how the results of spiritual science, gained by means of strict and exact methods, can be applied to therapeutics. Medical questions, which can often touch on other problems related to general human health, are questions that every conscientious doctor recognizes as belonging to the facts of our present civilization. They have become riddles because modern science will not rise from observing only what is sense perceptible and widen its investigations to include the supersensible, the spiritual world. During that autumn course, specialists drawn from many fields—including law, mathematics, history, sociology, biology, physics, chemistry, and pedagogy—tried to show how all branches of science can be fructified by anthroposophical spiritual science. Representatives of the arts were also present to demonstrate how spiritual science was inspiring them to discover new developments in their professions. Then there were others, too, drawn from such spheres of practical life as commerce and industry. These could show that spiritual science not only lifted them out of the old routines that led the world into the catastrophe of the last war, but also that it can help relate people to practical life in a higher sense. The courses were meant to show how spiritual science, far from fostering dilettantism or nebulous mysticism, is capable of entering and fructifying all of the sciences and that, in doing so, it is uplifting and linking each separate branch to become a part of a comprehensive spiritual-supersensible conception of the human being.

I shall have more to say next time about the practical applications of spiritual science, particularly with regard to education and the social question. Once I have done so, you will appreciate that anthroposophical spiritual science is not striving for some vague mysticism, removed from daily life, but wishes to grasp the spirit consciously. It wishes to do so for two main reasons—first, because it is essential for human beings to become aware of how they are related to their true spiritual origin and, second, because spiritual powers are intent on intervening in the practical and material affairs of daily life. Anyone, therefore, who tends to combine a life devoid of spirit with a truly practical life, or combine a spiritual attitude with isolation from daily life, has certainly not grasped the real nature of anthroposophical spiritual science, nor recognized the paramount needs of our present age.

We have found people who understand what the High School of Spiritual Science seeks to accomplish for the benefit of humanity along the lines already indicated. We have found people who appreciate the necessity of working in this way in view of the great problems facing our present civilization. Yet, due to difficult local circumstances, the completion of the Goetheanum has been greatly delayed. This building is still in an unfinished state and its completion will largely depend on continued help from friends who have the heart and the understanding to give their support for the sake of human evolution, so needed today. Nevertheless, despite these difficulties, more than a thousand people were assembled at the opening of our courses. Visitors can see in Dornach that spiritual science seeks to work out of the whole human being, that it does not wish to appeal only to the head. They can witness that it seeks to move ahead not only through what can be gained by experimentation and observation, but also by striving for truly artistic expression, free from empty symbolism or pedantic allegory. This is the reason why we could not possibly use just any arbitrary style for our building in Dornach. Its architecture, too, had to flow from the same sources from which spiritual science itself flows. Because it endeavors to draw on the whole human being, spiritual science is less one-sided than the other sciences, which work only on the basis of experimentation and observation. It is as exact as any other science could be and, in addition, wants to speak to the whole human being.

About the practical aspects, I shall have more to say next time. Today, I wanted to prepare the ground by showing how spiritual research leads us right into our present situation. When dealing with the practical side, I hope to show how our times are in need of what anthroposophical spiritual science has to offer. Such spiritual science seeks to complement the conscientious and methodical research into the world of matter, which it acknowledges more than any other spiritual movement. It is also capable of leading to a religious deepening and to artistic impulses, as did the old, instinctive science of the mystery centers, renewal of which, however, would no longer serve our present needs.

When dealing with the practical aspects, I shall have to show that spiritual science is in no way either antireligious or anti- Christian. Like all other true and religious aspirations toward an inner deepening, spiritual science strives toward the spirit.

This gives us the hope that those who still oppose spiritual science will eventually find their way into it because it strives toward something belonging to all people. It strives toward the spirit, and humanity needs the spirit.

In the course of these lectures we have seen that the middle of the nineteenth century is an important time in the development of Western humanity. Attention was called to the fact that in a sense the culmination of the materialistic way of thinking and the materialistic world view occurred during this time. Yet it also had to be pointed out that this trend that has emerged in the human being since the fifteenth century was really something spiritual. Thus, it can be said that the characteristic of this developmental phase of recent human evolution was that simultaneously with becoming the most spiritual, the human being could not take hold of this spirituality. Instead, human beings filled themselves only with materialistic thinking, feeling, and even with materialistic will and activity. Our present age is still dominated by the aftereffects of what occurred in so many people without their being aware of it, and then reached its climax in mankind's development. What was the purpose of this climax? It occurred because something decisive was meant to take place in regard to contemporary humanity's attainment of the consciousness soul stage.

In focusing on the evolution of humanity from the third post-Atlantean epoch until approximately the year 747 (see sketch) before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find that a process runs its course that can be called the development of the sentient soul in humanity. Then the age of the rational or mind soul begins and lasts roughly until the year 1413. It reaches its high point in that era of which external history has little to report. It must be taken into consideration, however, if European development is to be comprehended at all. This culmination point occurs approximately in the year 333 after Christ. Since the year 1413, we are faced with the development of the consciousness soul, a development we are still involved in and that saw a decisive event around the year 1850, or better, 1840.

A.D. 333

 ----------747-----------/-------------1413----------1840 Sentient Soul........Rational Soul....Consciousness Soul 

For mankind as a whole, matters had reached a point around 1840 where, insofar as the representative personalities of the various nations are concerned, we can say that they were faced with an intellect that had already assumed its most shadowy form. (Following this, we shall have to consider the reaction of the individual nations.) The intellect had assumed its shadowlike character. I tried yesterday to characterize this shadow nature of the intellect. People in the civilized world had evolved to the extent that, from then on it was possible on the basis of the general culture and without initiation to acquire the feeling: We possess intellect. The intellect has matured, but insofar as its own nature is concerned, it no longer has a content. We have concepts but these concepts are empty. We must fill them with something.

This, in a sense, is the call passing through humanity, though dimly and inaudibly. But in the deep, underlying, subconscious longings of human beings lives the call, the wish to receive a content, substance, for the shadow nature of rational thinking. Indeed, it is the call for spiritual science.

This call can also be comprehended concretely. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the human organization, in the physical part of which this shadowy intellect is trained, had simply progressed to the point where it could cultivate this empty shadowy intellect particularly well. Now, something was required for this shadowy intellect; it had to be filled with something. This could only happen if the human being realized: I have to assimilate something of what is not offered to me on the earth itself and does not dwell there, something I cannot learn about in the life between birth and death. I actually have to absorb something into my intellect that, although it was extinguished and became obscured when I descended with the results of my former earth lives out of spiritual soul worlds into a physical corporeality, nevertheless rests in the depths of my soul. From there, I have to bring it up once again, I have to call to mind something that rests within me simply by virtue of the fact that I am a human being of the nineteenth century.

Earlier, it would not have been possible for human beings to have practiced self-awareness in the same manner. This is why they first had to advance in their human condition to the point where the physical body increasingly acquired the maturity to perfect and utilize the shadowy intellect completely. Now, at least among the most advanced human beings, the physical bodies had reached the point where one could have said, or rather, since then it is possible to say: I wish to call to mind what it is that I am seeking to bring up from the depths of my soul life in order to pour a content into this shadowy intellect. This shadowy intellect would have been filled with something and in this way the consciousness soul age would have dawned. Therefore, at this point in time, the occasion arose where the consciousness soul could have unfolded.

Now you will say: Yes, but the whole era prior to that, beginning with the year 1413, was the age of the consciousness soul. Yes, certainly, but at first it has been a preparatory development. You need only consider what basic conditions existed for such a preparation particularly in this period as compared to all earlier times. Into this period falls, for example, the invention of the printing press; the dissemination of the written word. Since the fifteenth century, people by and by have received a great amount of spiritual content by means of the art of printing and through writing. But they absorb this content only outwardly; it is the main feature of this period that an overwhelming sum of spiritual content has been assimilated superficially. The nations of the civilized world have absorbed something outwardly which the great masses of people could receive only by means of audible speech in earlier times. It was true of the period of rational development, and in the age of the sentient soul it was all the more true that, fundamentally speaking, all dissemination of learning was based on oral teaching. Something of the psycho-spiritual element still resounds through speech. Especially in former days, what could be termed “the genius of language” definitely still lived in words. This ceased to be when the content of human learning began to be assimilated in abstract forms, through writing and printed works. Printed and written words have the peculiarity of in a sense extinguishing what the human being brings with him at birth from his pre-earthly, heavenly existence.

It goes without saying that this does not mean that you should forthwith cease to read or write. It does mean that today a more powerful force is needed in order to raise up what lies deep within the human being. But it is necessary that this stronger force be acquired. We have to arrive at self-awareness despite the fact that we read and write; we have to develop this stronger faculty, stronger in comparison to what was needed in earlier times. This is the task in the age of the development of the consciousness soul.

Before taking a look at how the influences of the spiritual world have now started to flow down in a certain way into the physical, sensory world, let us pose the question today, How did the nations of modern civilization actually meet this point of time in 1840?

From earlier lectures we know that the representative people for the development of the consciousness soul, hence for what matters particularly in our age, is the Anglo-Saxon nation. The Anglo-Saxon people are those who through their whole organization are predisposed to develop the consciousness soul to a special degree. The prominent position occupied by the Anglo-Saxon nation in our time is indeed due to the fact that this nation is especially suited for the development of the consciousness soul. But now let us ask ourselves from a purely external viewpoint, How did this Anglo-Saxon nation arrive at this point in time that is the most significant one in modern cultural development?

It can be said that the Anglo-Saxon nation in particular has survived for a long time in a condition—naturally with the corresponding variations and metamorphoses—that could perhaps be described best by saying, Those inner impulses, which had already made way for other forms in Greek culture, were preserved in regard to the inner soul condition of the Anglo-Saxon people. The strange thing in the eleventh and tenth centuries B.C. is that the nations experienced what is undergone at different periods, that the various ages move, as it were, one on top of the other. The problem is that such matters are extraordinarily difficult to notice because in the nineteenth century all sorts of things already existed—reading, writing—and because the living conditions prevailing in Scotland and England were different from those in Homeric times.

And yet, if the soul condition of the people as a nation is taken into consideration, the fact is that this soul condition of the Homeric era, which in Greece was outgrown in the tragic age and changed into Sophoclism, has remained. This age, a kind of patriarchal conception of life and existence, was preserved in the Anglo-Saxon world up until the nineteenth century. In particular, this patriarchal life spread out from the soul condition in Scotland. This is the reason why the influence proceeding from the initiation centers in Ireland did not have an effect on the Anglo-Saxon nation. As was mentioned on other occasions, that influence predominantly affected continental Europe. On the British isle itself, the predominant influence originated from initiation truths that came down from the north, from Scotland. These initiation truths then permeated everything else. But there is an element in the whole conception of the human personality that, in a sense, has remained from primordial times. This still has aftereffects; it lingers on even in the way, say, the relationship between Whigs and Tories develops in the British Parliament. The fact is that fundamentally we are not dealing with the difference between liberal and conservative views. Instead, we have to do with two political persuasions for which people today really have no longer any perception at all.

Essentially, the Whigs are the continuation of what could be called a segment of mankind imbued with a general love of humanity and originating in Scotland. According to a fable, which does have a certain historical background, the Tories were originally Catholicizing horse thieves from Ireland. This contrast, which then expressed itself in their particular political strivings, reflects a certain patriarchal existence. This patriarchal existence retained certain primitive forces, which can be observed in the kind of attitude exhibited by the owners of large properties toward those people who had settled on these lands as their vassals.

This relationship of subservience actually lasted until the nineteenth century; nobody was elected to Parliament who did not possess a certain power by virtue of being a landowner. We only have to consider what this implies. Such matters are not weighed in the right manner. Just think what it signifies, for example, that it was not until the year 1820 that English Parliament repealed the law according to which a person was given the death penalty for having stolen a pocket watch or having been a poacher. Until then, the law decreed that such misdeeds were capital offenses. This certainly demonstrates the way in which particular, ancient, and elementary conditions had remained. Today, people observe life in their immediate surroundings and then extend the fundamental aspects of present-day civilization backwards, so to speak. In regard to the most important regions of Europe, they are unaware of how recently these things have developed from quite primitive conditions.

Thus, it is possible to say that these patriarchal conditions survived as the foundation and basis of a society that was subsequently infused with the most modern impulse, unimaginable in the social structure without the development of the consciousness soul. Just consider all the changes in the social structure of the eighteenth century due to the technological metamorphosis in the textile industry and the like. Note how the mechanical, technological element moved into this patriarchal element. Try to form a clear idea of how, owing to the transformation of the textile industry, the nascent modern Proletariat pushes into the social structure that is based on this patriarchal element, this relationship of landowner to subjects. Just think of this chaotic intermingling, think how the cities develop in the ancient countryside and how the patriarchal attitude takes a daring plunge, so to say, into modern, socialistic, proletarian life.

To picture it graphically, we can actually say that this form of life develops in the way it existed in Greece approximately until the year 1000 B.C. (see drawing). Then it makes a daring jump and we suddenly find ourselves in the year A.D. 1820. Inwardly, the life of the year 1000 B.C. has been retained, but outwardly, we are in the eighteenth century, say 1770 (see arrows). Now everything that then existed in modern life, indeed, even in our present time, pours in. But it is not until 1820 that this English life makes the connection, finds it necessary to do so (see drawing); it is not until then that these matters even became issues, such as the abolition of the death penalty for a minor theft. Thus we can say that, here, something very old has definitely flown together with the most modern element. Thus, the further development then continues on to the year 1840.

Now, what had to occur specifically among the Anglo-American people during this time period, the first half of the nineteenth century? We have to recall that only after the year 1820, actually not until after 1830, it became necessary to pass laws in England according to which children under twelve years of age were not allowed to be kept working in factories for more than eight hours a day, no more than twelve hours a day in the case of children between thirteen and eighteen years of age. Please, compare that with today's conditions! Just think what the broad masses of working people demand today as the eight-hour day! As yet, in the year 1820, boys were put to work in mines and factories in England for more than eight hours; only in that year was the eight-hour day established for them. The twelve-hour day still prevailed, however, in regard to children between twelve and eighteen.

These things must certainly be considered in the attempt to figure out the nature of the elements colliding with each other at that time. Basically, it could be said that England eased its way out of the patriarchal conditions only in the second third of the nineteenth century and found it necessary to reckon with what had slowly invaded the old established traditions due to technology and the machine. It was in this way that this nation, which is preeminently called upon to develop the consciousness soul, confronted the year 1840.

Now take other nations of modern civilization. Take what has remained of the Latin-Roman element; take what has carried over the Latin-Roman element from the fourth post-Atlantean cultural period, what has brought over the ancient culture of the intellectual soul as a kind of legacy into the epoch of the consciousness soul. Indeed, what had remained of this life of the intellectual soul reached its highest point, its culmination, in the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. We note that the ideals, freedom, equality, and brotherhood appear all at once in the most extreme abstraction. We see them taken up by skeptics such as Voltaire,¹ by enthusiasts such as Rousseau;² we see them emerge generally in the broad masses of the people. We see how the abstraction, which is fully justified in this sphere, affects the social structure

It is a completely different course of events from the one over in England. In England, the vestiges of the old Germanic patriarchal life are permeated by what the element of modern technology and modern materialistic, scientific life could incorporate into the social structure. In France, we have tradition everywhere. We could say that the French Revolution has been enacted in the same manner in which a Brutus or a Caesar once acted in the most diverse ways in ancient Rome. Thus, here also, freedom, equality and brotherhood surfaced in abstract forms. Unlike in England, the old existing patriarchal element was not destroyed from the outside. Instead, the Roman juridical tradition, the adherence to the ancient concept of property and ownership of land, inheritance laws, and so on, what had been established in the Roman-juristic tradition was corroded by abstraction, driven asunder by abstraction.

We need only consider the tremendous change the French Revolution brought to all of European life. We only need remind ourselves that prior to the French Revolution those who, in a sense, distinguished themselves from the masses of the nation also had legal privileges. Only certain people could aspire to particular positions in government. What the French Revolution demanded based on abstraction and the shadowlike intellect was to make breaches into that system to undermine it. But it did bear the stamp of the shadowy intellect, the abstraction. Therefore, the demands that were being made fundamentally remained a kind of ideology. For this reason, we can say that anything that is of the shadowy intellect immediately turns into its opposite.

Then we observe Napoleonism; we watch the experimentation in the public and social realm during the course of the nineteenth century. The first half of the nineteenth century was certainly experimentation without a goal in France. What is the nature of the events through which somebody like Louis-Philippe, for example, becomes king of France, and so on—what sort of experimenting is carried out? It is done in such a way that one can recognize that the shadowy intellect is incapable of truly intervening in the actual conditions. Everything basically remains undone and incomplete; it all remains as legacy of ancient Romanism. We are justified in saying that even today the relationship to, say, the Catholic Church, which the French Revolution had quite clearly defined in abstraction, has not been clarified in France in external, concrete reality. And how unclear was it time and again in the course of the nineteenth century! Abstract reasoning had struggled up to a certain level during the Revolution; then came experimentation and the inability to cope with external conditions. In this way, this nation encountered the year 1840.

We can also consider other nations. Let us look at Italy, for instance, which, in a manner of speaking, still retained a bit of the sentient soul in its passage through the culture of the intellect. It brought this bit of the sentient soul into modern times and therefore did not advance as far as the abstract concepts of freedom, equality, and brotherhood attained in the French Revolution. It did, however, seek the transition from a certain ancient group consciousness to individual consciousness in the human being. Italy faced the year 1840 in a manner that allows us to say, The individual human consciousness trying to struggle to the fore in Italy was in fact constantly held down by what the rest of Europe now represented. We can observe how the tyranny of Habsburg weighed terribly on the individual human consciousness that tried to develop in Italy. We see in the 1820's the strange Congress of Verona³ that tried to determine how one could rise up against the whole substance of modern civilization. We note that there proceeded from Russia and Austria a sort of conspiracy against what the modern consciousness in humanity was meant to bring. There is hardly anything as interesting as the Congress of Verona, which basically wished to answer the question: How does one go about exterminating everything that is trying to emerge as modern consciousness in mankind?

Then we see how the people in the rest of Europe struggled in certain ways. Particularly in Central Europe, only a small percentage of the population was able to attain to a certain consciousness, experiencing in a certain manner that the ego is now supposed to enter into the consciousness soul. We notice attempts to achieve this at a certain high mental level. We can see it in the peculiar high cultural level of Goethe's age in which a man like Fichte was active;⁴ we see how the ego tried to push forward into the consciousness soul. Yet we also realize that the whole era of Goethe actually was something that lived only in few individuals. I believe people study far too little what even the most recent past was like. They simply think, for example the Goethe lived from 1749 until 1832; he wrote Faust and a number of other works. That is what is known of Goethe and that knowledge has existed ever since.

Until the year 1862, until thirty years after Goethe's death, with few exceptions, it was impossible for people to acquire a copy of Goethe's works. They were restricted; only a handful of people somehow owned a copy of his writings. Hence, Goetheanism had become familiar only to a select few. It was not until the 1860's that a larger number of people could even find out about the particular element that lived in Goethe. By that time, the faculty of comprehension for it had disappeared again. An actual understanding of Goethe never really came about, and the last third of the nineteenth century was not suited at all for such comprehension.

I have often mentioned that in the 1870's Hermann Grimm gave his “Lectures on Goethe” at the University of Berlin.⁵ That was a special event and the book that exists as Hermann Grimm's Goethe is a significant publication in the context of central European literature. Yet, if you now take a look at this book, what is its substance? Well, all the figures who had any connection with Goethe are listed in it but they are like shadow images having only two dimensions. All these portrayals are shadow figures, even Goethe is a two-dimensional being in Hermann Grimm's depiction. It is not Goethe himself. I won't even mention the Goethe whom people at the afternoon coffee parties of Weimar called “the fat Privy Councillor with the double chin.” In Hermann Grimm's Goethe, Goethe has no weight at all. He is merely a two-dimensional being, a shadow cast on the wall. It is the same with all the others who appear in the book; Herder—a shadow painted on a wall. We encounter something a little more tangible in Hermann Grimm's description of those persons coming from among the ordinary people who are close to Goethe, for example, Friederike von Sesenheim who is portrayed there so beautifully, or Lilli Schoenemann from Frankfurt—hence those who emerge from a mental atmosphere other than the one in which Goethe lived. Those are described with a certain “substance.” But figures like Jacobi and Lavater are but shadow images on a wall. The reader does not penetrate into the actual substance of things; here, we can observe in an almost tangible way the effects of abstraction. Such abstraction can certainly be charming, as is definitely the case with Hermann Grimm's book, but the whole thing is shadowy. Silhouettes, two-dimensional beings, confront us in it.

Indeed, it could not be otherwise. For it is a fact that a German could not call himself a German in Germany at the time when Hermann Grimm, for example was young. The way one spoke of Germans during the first half of the nineteenth century is misunderstood, particularly at present. How “creepy” it seems to people in the West, those of the Entente, when they start reading Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation today and find him saying: “I speak simply to Germans, to Germans as such.” In the same way, the harmless song “Germany, Germany above all else”^T1 is interpreted foolishly, for this song means nothing more than the desire to be a German, not a Swabian, a Bavarian, an Austrian, a Franconian, or Thuringian. Just as this song referred only to Germans as such, so Fichte wished simply to address himself to Germans, not to Austrians, Bavarians, those from the province of Baden, Wuerttemberg, Franconia, or Prussia; he wanted to speak “to Germans.” This is naturally impossible to understand, for instance, in a country where it has long since become a matter of course to call oneself a Frenchman. However, in certain periods in Germany, you were imprisoned if you called yourself German. You could call yourself an Austrian, a Swabian, a Bavarian, but it amounted to high treason to call yourself a German. Those who called themselves Germans in Bavaria expressed the sentiment that they did not wish to look up merely to the Bavarian throne and its reign within Bavaria's clearly defined borders, but implied that they also wished to look beyond the borders of Bavaria. But that was high treason! People were not permitted to call themselves Germans.

It is not understood at all today that these things that are said about Germans and Germany, refer to this unification of everything German. Instead, the absurd nonsense is spread that, for example, Hoffmann's song refers to the notion that Germany should rule over all the nations of the world although it means nothing else but: Not Swabia, not Austria, not Bavaria above all else in the world, but Germany above all else in the world, just as the Frenchman says: France above all else in the world. It was, however, the peculiar nature of Central Europe that basically a tribal civilization existed there. Even today, you can see this tribal culture everywhere in Germany. A Wuerttembergian is different from a Franconian. He differs from him even in the formulation of concepts and words, indeed, even in the thought forms disseminated in literature. There really is a marked difference, if you compare, say, a Franconian, such as cloddy Michael Conrad—using modern literature as an example—with something that has been written at the same time by a Wuerttembergian, hence in the neighboring province.

Something like this plays into the whole configuration of thoughts right into the present time. But everything that persists in this way and lives in the tribal peculiarities remains untouched by what is now achieved by the representatives of the nations. After all, in the realm commonly called Germany something has been attained such as Goetheanism with all that belongs to it. But it has been attained by only a few intellectuals; the great masses of people remain untouched by it. The majority of the population has more or less maintained the level of central Europe around the year A.D. 300 or 400. Just as the Anglo-Saxon people have stayed on the level of around the year 1000 B.C., people in Central Europe have remained on the level of the year A.D. 400. Please do not take this in the sense that a terrible arrogance might arise with the thought that the Anglo-Saxons have remained behind in the Homeric age, and we were already in the year A.D. 400. This is not the way to evaluate these matters. I am only indicating certain peculiarities.

In turn, the geographic conditions reveal that this level of general soul development in Germany lasted much longer than in England. England's old patriarchal life had to be permeated quickly with what formed the social structure out of the modern materialistic, scientific, and technological life first in the area of the textile industry, and later also in the area of other technologies. The German realm and Central Europe in general opposed this development initially, retaining the ancient peculiarities much longer. I might say, they retained them until a point in time when the results of modern technology already prevailed fully all over the world. To a certain extent, England caught up in the transformation of the social structure in the first half of the nineteenth century. Everything that was achieved there definitely bypassed central Europe.

Now, Central Europe did absorb something of abstract revolutionary ideas. They came to expression through various movements and stirrings in the 1840's in the middle of the nineteenth century. But this region sat back and waited, as it were, until technology had infused the whole world. Then, a strange thing happened. An individual—we could also take other representatives—who in Germany had acquired his thinking from Hegelianism, namely, Karl Marx, went over to England, studied the social structure there and then formulated his socialist doctrines. At the end of the nineteenth century, Central Europe was then ready for these social doctrines, and they were accepted there. Thus, if we tried to outline in a similar manner what developed in this region, we would have to say: The development progressed in a more elementary way even though a great variety of ideas were absorbed from outside through books and printed matter.

The conditions of A.D. 400 in central Europe continued on, then made a jump and basically found the connection only in the last third of the nineteenth century, around the year 1875. Whereas the Anglo-Saxon nation met already the year 1840 with a transformation of conditions, with the necessity of receiving the consciousness soul, the German people continued to dream. They still experienced the year 1840 as though in a dream. Then they slept through the grace period when a bridge could have been built between leading personalities and what arose out of the masses of the people in the form of the proletariat. The latter then took hold of the socialist doctrine and thereby, beginning about the year 1875, exerted forcible, radical pressure in the direction of the consciousness soul. Yet even this was in fact not noticed; in any case it was not channeled in any direction, and even today it is basically still evaluated in the most distorted way.

In order to arrive at the anomalies at the bottom of this, we need only call to mind that Oswald Spengler, who wrote the significant book The Decline of the West, also wrote a booklet concerning socialism of which, I believe, 60,000 copies or perhaps more have been printed. Roughly, it is Spengler's view that this European, this Western civilization, is digging its own grave. According to Spengler, by the year 2200, we will be living on the level of barbarism. We have to agree with Spengler concerning certain aspects of his observations; for if the European world maintains the course of development it is pursuing now, then everything will be barbarized by the time the third millennium arrives. In this respect Spengler is absolutely correct. The only thing Spengler does not see and does not want to see is that the shadowy intellect can be raised to Imaginations out of man's inner being and that hence the whole of Western humanity can be elevated to a new civilization.

This enlivening of culture through the intentions of anthroposophical spiritual science is something a person like Oswald Spengler does not see. Rather, he believes that socialism—the real socialism, as he thinks, a socialism that truly brings about social living—has to come into being prior to this decline. The people of the Occident, according to him, have the mission of realizing socialism. But, says Oswald Spengler, the only people called upon to realize socialism are the Prussians. This is why he wrote the booklet Prussianism and Socialism. Any other form of socialism is wrong, according to Spengler. Only the form that revealed its first rosy dawn in the Wilhelminian age, only this form of socialism is to capture the world. Then the world will experience true, proper socialism.

Thus speaks a person today whom I must count among the most brilliant people of our time. The point is not to judge people by the content of what they say but by their mental capacities. This Oswald Spengler, who is master of fifteen different scientific disciplines, is naturally “more intelligent than all the writers, doctors, teachers, and ministers” and so on. We can truly say that with his book about the decline of the West he has presented something that deserves consideration, and that, by the way, is making a most profound impression on the young people in Central Europe. But next to it stands this other idea that I have referred to above, and you see precisely how the most brilliant people can arrive today at the strangest notions. People take hold of the intellect prevalent today and this intellect is shadowy. The shadows flit to and fro, one is caught up in one shadow, then one tries to catch up with another—nothing is alive. After all, in a silhouette, in a woman's shadow image cast on the wall, her beauty is not at all recognizable. So it is also with all other matters when they are viewed as shadow images. The shadow image of Prussianism can certainly be confused with socialism. If a woman turns her back to the wall and her shadow falls on it, even the ugliest woman might be considered beautiful. Likewise, Prussianism can be mistaken for socialism if the shadowlike intellect inwardly pervades the mind of a genius.

This is how we must look at things today. We must not look at the contents, we must aim for the capacities; that is what counts. Thus, it has to be acknowledged that Spengler is a brilliant human being, even though a great number of his ideas have to be considered nonsense. We live in an age when original, elementary judgments and reasons must surface. For it is out of certain elementary depths that one has to arrive at a comprehension of the present age and thus at impulses for the realities of the future.

Naturally, the European East has completely slept through the results of the year 1840. Just think of the handful of intellectuals as opposed to the great masses of the Russian people who, because of the Orthodox religion, particularly the Orthodox ritual, are still deeply immersed in Orientalism. Then think of the somnolent effect of men like Alexander I, Nicholas I, and all the other “I's” who followed them! What has come about today was therefore the element that aimed for this point in which the consciousness soul was to have its impact on European life.

We shall say more tomorrow.

• 1. Francois de Voltaire (actually d'Arouet), 1694–1778, French philosopher of the Enlightenment.
• 2. Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1778, French philosopher and pedagogue.
• 3. Congress of Verona: Congress of the “Holy Alliance” (1822) to which all the European powers belonged with the exception of England and the Vatican. Under Metternich, it pursued a clearly reactionary course.
• 4. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762–1814, German philosopher.
• 5. Hermann Grimm, 1828–1901, German art historian and literary critic.
• T1. “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” the German national anthem.

[ 1 ] The concept “tree” is conditioned for our knowledge by the percept “tree.” When faced with a determinate percept I can select only one determinate concept from the general system of concepts. The connection of concept and percept is mediately and objectively determined by thinking in conformity with the percept. The connection between a percept and its concept is recognized after the act of perception, but the relevance of the one to the other is determined by the thing itself.

[ 2 ] The procedure is different when we examine knowledge, or rather the relation of man to the world which arises within knowledge. In the preceding chapters the attempt has been made to show that an unprejudiced observation of this relation is able to throw light on its nature. A correct understanding of this observation leads to the insight that thinking may be intuitively apprehended in its self-contained nature. Those who find it necessary, for the explanation of thinking as such, to invoke something else, e.g., physical brain-processes, or unconscious spiritual-processes lying behind the conscious thinking which they observe, fail to grasp the facts which an unprejudiced observation of thinking yields. When we observe our thinking, we live during the observation immediately within the essence of a spiritual, self-sustaining activity. Indeed we may even affirm that if we want to grasp the essential nature of Spirit in the form in which it immediately presents itself to man, we need but look at our own self-sustaining thinking.

[ 3 ] For the study of thinking two things coincide which elsewhere must always appear apart, viz., concept and percept. If we fail to see this, we shall be unable to regard the concepts which we have elaborated in response to percepts as anything but shadowy copies of these percepts, and we shall take the percepts as presenting to us reality as it really is. We shall, further, build up for ourselves a metaphysical world after the pattern of the perceived world. We shall, each according to his habitual thought-pictures, call this world a world of atoms, or of will, or of unconscious spirit, and so on. And we shall fail to notice that all the time we have been doing nothing but erecting hypothetically a metaphysical world modeled on our perceived world. But if we clearly apprehend what thinking consists in, we shall recognize that percepts present to us only a portion of reality, and that the complementary portion which alone imparts to reality its full character as real, is experienced by us in the permeation of percepts by thinking. We shall regard that which enters into consciousness as thinking, not as a shadowy copy of reality, but as a self-sustaining spiritual essence. We shall be able to say of it, that it is revealed to us in consciousness through intuition. Intuition is the purely spiritual conscious experience of a purely spiritual content. It is only through an intuition that we can grasp the essence of thinking.

[ 4 ] Only if one wins through, by means of unprejudiced observation, to the recognition of this truth of the intuitive essence of thinking will one succeed in clearing the way for a conception of the psycho-physical organization of man. One recognizes that this organization can produce no effect whatever on the essential nature of thinking. At first sight this seems to be contradicted by patent and obvious facts. For ordinary experience, human thinking occurs only in connection with, and by means of, such an organization. This dependence on psycho-physical organization is so prominent that its true bearing can be appreciated by us only if we recognize, that in the essential nature of thinking this organization plays no part whatever. Once we appreciate this, we can no longer fail to notice how peculiar is the relation of human organization to thinking. For this organization contributes nothing to the essential nature of thought, but recedes whenever the activity of thinking appears. It suspends its own activity, it yields ground. And the ground thus set free is occupied by thinking. The essence which is active in thinking has a two-fold function: first it restricts the human organization in its own activity; next, it steps into the place of it. Yes, even the former, the restriction of the physical organization, is an effect of the activity of thinking, and more particularly that part of this activity which prepares the manifestation of thinking. This explains the sense in which thinking has its counterpart in the organization of the body. Once we perceive this, we can no longer misapprehend the significance for thinking of this physical counterpart. When we walk over soft ground our feet leave impressions in the soil. We shall not be tempted to say that the forces of the ground, from below, have formed these footprints. We shall not attribute to these forces any share in the production of the footprints. Just so, if without prejudice we observe the essential nature of thinking, we shall not attribute any share in that nature to the traces in the physical organism which thinking produces in preparing its manifestation through the body.¹

[ 5 ] An important question, however, emerges here. If the human organization has no part in the essential nature of thinking, what is the function of this organization within the whole nature of man? The effects of thinking upon this organization have no bearing upon the essence of thinking, but they have a bearing upon the origin of the I-consciousness, through this thinking. Thinking, in its own character, contains the real “I,” but it does not contain, as such, the I-consciousness. To see this we have but to observe thinking with an open mind. The “I” is to be found in thinking. The “I-consciousness” arises through the traces which, in the sense above explained, the activity of thinking impresses upon our general consciousness. (The I-consciousness thus arises through the bodily organization. This view must not, however, be taken to imply that the I-consciousness, once it has arisen, remains dependent on the bodily organization. Once arisen it is taken up into thinking and shares henceforth the spiritual being of the latter.)

[ 6 ] The “I-consciousness” is built upon the human organization. The latter is the source of the acts of will. Following out the direction of the preceding exposition, we can gain insight into the connection of thinking, conscious I, and act of will, only by studying first how an act of will issues from the human organization.²

[ 7 ] In a particular act of will we must distinguish two factors: the motive and the spring of action. The motive is a factor of the nature of concept or representation; the spring of action is the factor in will which is directly conditioned in the human organization. The conceptual factor, or motive, is the momentary determining cause of an act of will; the spring of action is the permanent determining factor in the individual. The motive of an act of will may be a pure concept, or else a concept with a definite relation to perception, i.e., a representation. General and individual concepts (representations) become motives of will by influencing the human individual and determining him to action in a particular direction. One and the same concept however, or one and the same representation, influence different individuals differently. They impel different men to different actions. An act of will is, therefore, not merely the outcome of the concept or the representation, but also of the individual make-up of human beings. This individual make-up we will call, following Eduard von Hartmann, the “characterological disposition.” The manner in which concept and representation act on the characterological disposition of a man gives to his life a definite moral or ethical stamp.³

[ 8 ] The characterological disposition is formed by the more or less permanent content of the individual's life, that is, of the content of his representations and feelings. Whether a representation which enters my mind at this moment stimulates me to an act of will or not, depends on its relation to the rest of my representations, and also to my peculiar modes of feeling. The content of my representations in turn, is conditioned by the sum total of those concepts which have, in the course of my individual life, come in contact with percepts, that is, have become representations. This sum, again, depends on my greater or lesser capacity for intuition, and on the range of my observations, that is, on the subjective and objective factors of my experiences, on my inner nature (development) and place in life, and on my environment. My life of feeling more especially determines my characterological disposition. Whether I shall make a certain representation or concept the motive for action will depend on whether it gives me pleasure or pain.

These are the elements which we have to consider in an act of will. The immediately present representation or concept, which becomes the motive, determines the aim or the purpose of my will; my characterological disposition determines me to direct my activity towards this aim. The representation of taking a walk in the next half-hour determines the aim of my action. But this representation is raised to the level of a motive only if it meets with a suitable characterological disposition, that is, if during my past life I have formed the representations of the wholesomeness of walking and the value of health; and, further, if the representation of walking is accompanied in me by a feeling of pleasure.

[ 9 ] We must, therefore, distinguish (1) the possible subjective dispositions which are likely to turn given representations and concepts into motives, and (2) the possible representations and concepts which are capable of so influencing my characterological disposition that an act of will results. The former are for morality the springs of action, the latter its aims.

[ 10 ] The springs of action in the moral life can be discovered by finding out the elements of which individual life is composed.

[ 11 ] The first level of individual life is that of perception, more particularly sense-perception. This is the stage of our individual lives in which a perceiving translates itself into will immediately, without the intervention of either a feeling or a concept. The spring of action here involved may be called simply instinct. Our lower, purely animal, needs (hunger, sexual intercourse, etc.), find their satisfaction in this way. The main characteristic of instinctive life is the immediacy with which the percept releases the act of will. This kind of determination of the will, which belongs originally only to the life of the lower senses, may, however, become extended also to the percepts of the higher senses. We may react to the percept of a certain event in the external world without reflecting on what we do, without any special feeling connecting itself with the percept. We have examples of this especially in our ordinary conventional intercourse. The spring of this kind of action is called tact or moral good taste. The more often such immediate reactions to a percept occur, the more the agent will prove himself able to act purely under the guidance of tact; that is, tact becomes his characterological disposition.

[ 12 ] The second level of human life is feeling. Definite feelings accompany the percepts of the external world. These feelings may become springs of action. When I see a hungry man, my pity for him may become the spring of my action. Such feelings, for example, are shame, pride, sense of honour, humility, remorse, pity, revenge, gratitude, piety, loyalty, love, and duty.⁴

[ 13 ] The third and last level of life is to think and to form representations. A representation or a concept may become the motive of an action through mere reflection. Representations become motives because, in the course of my life, I regularly connect certain aims of my will with percepts which recur again and again in a more or less modified form. Hence it is that with men who are not wholly without experience, the occurrence of certain percepts is always accompanied also by the consciousness of representations of actions, which they have themselves carried out in a similar case or which they have seen others carry out. These representations float before their minds as determining models in all subsequent decisions; they become parts of their characterological disposition. We may give the name of practical experience to the spring of action just described. Practical experience merges gradually into purely tactful behaviour. That happens, when definite typical pictures of actions have become so closely connected in our minds with representations of certain situations in life, that, in any given instance, we omit all deliberation based on experience and pass immediately from the percept to the action.

[ 14 ] The highest level of individual life is that of conceptual thinking without reference to any definite perceptual content. We determine the content of a concept through pure intuition from the ideal sphere. Such a concept contains, at first, no reference to any definite percepts. When an act of will comes about under the influence of a concept which refers to a percept, i.e., under the influence of a representation, then it is this percept which determines our action indirectly by way of the conceptual thinking. But when we act under the influence of intuitions, the spring of our action is pure thinking. As it is the custom in philosophy to call the faculty of pure thinking “reason,” we may perhaps be justified in giving the name of practical reason to the moral spring of action characteristic of this level of life. The clearest account of this spring of action has been given by Kreyenbuehl (Philosophische Monatshefte, Vol. xviii, No. 3).⁵ In my opinion his article on this subject is one of the most important contributions to present-day philosophy, more especially to Ethics. Kreyenbuehl calls the spring of action, of which we are treating, the practical a priori, i.e., a spring of action issuing immediately from my intuition.

[ 15 ] It is clear that such a spring of action can no longer be counted in the strictest sense as a characterological disposition. For what is here effective in me as a spring of action is no longer something purely individual, but the ideal, and hence universal, content of my intuition. As soon as I regard the validity of this content as the basis and starting-point of an action, I pass over into willing, irrespective of whether the concept was already in me beforehand, or whether it only enters my consciousness immediately before the action, that is, irrespective of whether it was present in the form of a disposition in me or not.

[ 16 ] A real act of will results only when a present impulse to action, in the form of a concept or representation, acts on the characterological disposition. Such an impulse thereupon becomes the motive of the will.

[ 17 ] The motives of moral conduct are representations and concepts. There are Moralists who see in feeling also a motive of morality; they assert, e.g., that the aim of moral conduct is to secure the greatest possible quantity of pleasure for the acting individual. Pleasure itself, however, cannot become a motive; only its representation can. The representation of a future feeling, but not the feeling itself, can act on my characterological disposition. For the feeling does not yet exist in the moment of action; it has first to be produced by the action.

[ 18 ] The representation of one's own or another's well-being is, however, rightly regarded as a motive of the will. The principle of producing the greatest quantity of pleasure for oneself through one's action, that is, to attain individual happiness, is called Egoism. The attainment of this individual happiness is sought either by thinking ruthlessly only of one's own good, and striving to attain it even at the cost of the happiness of other individuals (Pure Egoism), or by promoting the good of others, either because one anticipates indirectly a favourable influence on one's own person through the happiness of others, or because one fears to endanger one's own interest by injuring others (Morality of Prudence). The special content of the egoistical principles of morality will depend on the representations which we form of what constitutes our own, or others', happiness. A man will determine the content of his egoistical striving in accordance with what he regards as one of life's good things (luxury, hope of happiness, deliverance from different evils, etc.).

[ 19 ] Further, the purely conceptual content of an action is to be regarded as yet another kind of motive. This content has no reference, like the representation of one's own pleasures, solely to the particular action, but to the deduction of an action from a system of moral principles. These moral principles, in the form of abstract concepts, may guide the individual's moral life without his worrying himself about the origin of his concepts. In that case, we feel merely the moral necessity of submitting to a moral concept which, in the form of law, overhangs our actions. The justification of this necessity we leave to those who demand from us moral subjection, that is, to those whose moral authority over us we acknowledge (the head of the family, the state, social custom, the authority of the church, divine revelation). We meet with a special kind of these moral principles when the law is not proclaimed to us by an external authority, but comes from our own inner life (moral autonomy). In this case we hear the voice, to which we have to submit ourselves, in our own souls. This voice expresses itself as conscience.

[ 20 ] It is a great moral advance when a man no longer takes as the motive of his action the commands of an external or the internal authority, but tries to understand the reason why a given maxim of action ought to be effective as a motive in him. This is the advance from morality based on authority to action from moral insight. At this level of morality, a man will try to discover the demands of the moral life, and will let his action be determined by this knowledge. Such demands are (1) the greatest possible happiness of humanity as a whole purely for its own sake; (2) the progress of civilization, or the moral development of mankind towards ever greater perfection; (3) the realization of individual moral aims conceived by an act of pure intuition.

[ 21 ] The greatest possible happiness of humanity as a whole will naturally be differently conceived by different people. The above-mentioned maxim does not refer to any definite representation of this happiness, but rather means that everyone who acknowledges this principle strives to do all that, in his opinion, most promotes the good of the whole of humanity.

[ 22 ] The progress of civilization is seen to be a special application of the moral principle just mentioned, at any rate for those to whom the goods which civilization produces bring feelings of pleasure. They will only have to pay the price in the decay and annihilation of several things which also contribute to the happiness of humanity. It is, however, also possible that some men look upon the progress of civilization as a moral necessity, quite apart from the feelings of pleasure which it brings. If so, the progress of civilization will be a new moral principle for them, different from the previous one.

[ 23 ] Both the principle of the public good, and that of the progress of civilization alike, are based on the representation, i.e., on the way in which we apply the content of our moral Ideas to particular experiences (percepts). The highest principle of morality which we can think of, however, is that which contains, to start with, no such reference to particular experiences, but which springs from the source of pure intuition and does not seek until later any connection with percepts, i.e., with life. The determination of what ought to be willed issues here from an arbiter very different from that of the previous two principles. Who accepts the principle of the public good will in all his actions ask first what his ideals contribute to this public good. The upholder of the progress of civilization as the principle of morality will act similarly. There is, however, a still higher mode of conduct which, in a given case, does not start from any single limited moral ideal, but which sees a certain value in all moral principles, always asking whether this or that principle is more important in a particular case. It may happen that a man considers in certain circumstances the promotion of the public good, in others that of the progress of civilization, and in yet others the furthering of his own good, to be the right course, and makes that the motive of his action. But when all other grounds of determination take second place, then we rely, in the first place, on conceptual intuition itself. All other motives now yield place, and the ideal content of an action alone becomes its motive.

[ 24 ] Among the levels of characterological disposition, we have singled out as the highest that which manifests itself as pure thinking, or practical reason. Among the motives, we have just singled out conceptual intuition as the highest. On nearer consideration, we now perceive that at this level of morality the spring of action and the motive coincide, i.e., that neither a predetermined characterological disposition, nor an external moral principle accepted on authority, influences our conduct. The action, therefore, is neither a merely stereotyped one which follows certain rules, nor is it automatically performed in response to an external impulse. Rather it is determined solely through its ideal content.^*

[ 25 ] For such an action to be possible, we must first be capable of moral intuitions. Whoever lacks the capacity to experience for himself the moral principle that applies in each particular case, will never rise to the level of genuine individual willing.

[ 26 ] Kant's principle of morality: Act so that the principle of your action may be valid for all men—is the exact opposite of ours. His principle would mean death to all individual impulses of action. The norm for me can never be what all men would do, but rather what it is right for me to do in each special case.

[ 27 ] A superficial criticism might urge against these arguments: How can an action be individually adapted to the special case and the special situation, and yet at the same time be ideally determined by pure intuition? This objection rests upon a confusion of the moral motive with the perceptual content of an action. The latter, indeed, may be a motive, and is actually a motive when we act for the progress of culture, or from pure egoism, etc., but in action based on pure moral intuition it never is a motive. Of course, my “I” takes notice of these perceptual contents, but it does not allow itself to be determined by them. The content is used only to construct a cognitive concept, but the corresponding moral concept is not derived from the object. The cognitive concept of a given situation which faces me, is a moral concept also only if I adopt the standpoint of a particular moral principle. If I base all my conduct on the principle of the progress of civilization, then my way through life is tied down to a fixed route. From every occurrence which I perceive and which attracts my interest there springs a moral duty, viz., to do my tiny share towards using this occurrence in the service of the progress of civilization. In addition to the concept which reveals to me the connections of events or objects according to the laws of nature, there is also a moral label attached to them which contains for me, as a moral agent, ethical directions as to how I have to conduct myself. Such a moral label is justified on its own ground; at a higher level it coincides with the Idea which reveals itself to me prompted by the concrete instance.

[ 28 ] Men vary greatly in their capacity for intuition. In some, Ideas bubble up like a spring, others acquire them with much labour. The situations in which men live, and which are the scenes of their actions, are no less widely different. The conduct of a man will depend, therefore, on the manner in which his faculty of intuition works in a given situation. The aggregate of Ideas which are effective in us, the concrete content of our intuitions, constitute that which is individual in each of us, notwithstanding the universal character of the world of Ideas. In so far as this intuitive content has reference to action, it constitutes the moral content of the individual. To let this content express itself in his life is the highest moral spring of action and at the same time, the highest motive of the man who regards all other moral principles as subordinate. We may call this point of view Ethical Individualism.

[ 29 ] The decisive factor of an intuitively determined action in any concrete instance, is the discovery of the corresponding purely individual intuition. At this level of morality, there can be no question of general moral concepts (norms, laws), except in so far as these result from the generalization of the individual impulses. General norms always presuppose concrete facts from which they can be deduced. But facts have first to be created by human action.

[ 30 ] When we investigate the leading principles (the conceptual principles guiding the actions of individuals, peoples, epochs), we obtain a science of Ethics which is, however, not a science of moral norms, but rather a natural science of morality. Only, the laws discovered in this way are related to human action as the laws of nature are related to a particular phenomenon. These laws, however, are very far from being identical with the impulses on which we base our actions. If we want to understand how a man's action arises from his moral will, we must first study the relation of this will to the action. For this purpose we must single out for study those actions in which this relation is the determining factor. When I, or another, subsequently review my action we may discover what moral principles come into play in it. So long as I am acting, I am influenced by the principle of morality in so far as it lives in me intuitively; it is united with my love for the object which I want to realize through my action. I ask of no man and of no moral code, whether I shall perform this action or not. I carry it out as soon as I have formed the Idea of it. This alone makes it my action. If a man acts only because he accepts certain moral norms, his action is the outcome of the principles which compose his moral code. He merely carries out orders. He is a superior kind of automaton. Inject some stimulus to action into his mind, and at once the clockwork of his moral principles will begin to work and run its prescribed course, so as to issue in an action which is Christian, or humane, or seemingly unselfish, or calculated to promote the progress of culture. It is only when I follow solely my love for the object, that it is I, myself, who act. At this level of morality, I acknowledge no lord over me, neither an external authority, nor my so-called inner voice. I acknowledge no external principle of my action, because I have found in myself the ground for my action, viz., my love of the action. I do not examine with my intellect whether my action is good or bad; I perform it, because I am in love with it. My action is “good” when my intuition, immersed in love, inserts itself in the right way into the world-nexus as I experience it intuitively; it is “bad” when this is not the case. Neither do I ask myself how another man would act in my position. I act as I, this unique individuality, feel impelled to act. No general usage, no common custom, no general maxim current among men, no moral norm is my immediate guide, but my love for the action. I feel no compulsion, neither the compulsion of nature which dominates me through my instincts, nor the compulsion of the moral commandments. My will is simply to realize what in me lies.

[ 31 ] Those who defend general moral norms will reply to these arguments that, if everyone strives to live his own life and do what he pleases, there can be no distinction between a good action and a crime; every fraudulent impulse in me has the same right to issue in action as the intention to serve the general good. It is not the mere fact of my having conceived the Idea of an action which ought to determine me as a moral being, but the examination of whether it is a good or an evil action. Only if it is good shall I carry it out.

[ 32 ] This objection is easily intelligible, and yet it had its root in what is but a misapprehension of my meaning. My reply to it is this: If we want to get at the essence of human volition we must distinguish between the path along which volition attains to a certain degree of development, and the unique character which volition assumes as it approaches its goal. It is on the path towards the goal that the norms play a legitimate part. The goal consists of the realization of moral aims which are apprehended by pure intuition. Man attains such aims in proportion as he is able to rise at all to the level at which intuition grasps the Idea-content of the world. In any particular volition, other elements will, as a rule, be mixed up, as springs of action or motives, with such moral aims. But, for all that, intuition may be, wholly or in part, the determining factor in human volition. What one should do, that one does. One supplies the stage upon which, what one should do, becomes action. One's own action is what one lets come forth from oneself. The impulse, here, can only be wholly individual. And, in fact, only an action which issues out of intuition can be individual. To regard evil, the deed of a criminal, as a manifestation of the human individuality in the same sense as the embodiment of pure intuition, is a confusion which only becomes possible when blind instincts are reckoned as part of the human individuality.

[ 33 ] But the blind impulse which drives a man to a criminal act does not spring from intuition, and does not belong to what is individual in him, but rather to that which is most general in him, to that which is equally present in all individuals and from which man finds his way out with the help of his individual part. The individual part in me is not my organism with its instincts and feelings, but rather the unified world of Ideas which reveals itself through this organism. My instincts, cravings, passions, justify no further assertion about me than that I belong to the general species man. The fact that something ideal expresses itself in a particular way through these instincts, passions, and feelings, provides the foundation of my individuality. My instincts and cravings make me the sort of man of whom there are twelve to the dozen. The unique character of the Idea, by means of which I distinguish myself within the dozen as “I,” makes of me an individual. Only a being other than myself could distinguish me from others by the difference in my animal nature. Through my thinking, i.e., by the active grasping of the Ideal-element working itself out through my organism, I distinguish myself from others. Hence it is impossible to say of the action of a criminal that it issues from the Idea within him. Indeed, the characteristic feature of criminal actions is precisely that they spring from the non-ideal elements in man.

[ 34 ] An act the grounds for which lie in the ideal part of my individual nature is felt to be free. Every other part of an act, whether done under the compulsion of nature or under the obligation imposed by a moral norm, is felt to be unfree.

[ 35 ] Man is free in so far as, in every moment of his life, he is able to obey only himself. A moral act is my act only when it can be called free in this sense. So far we are concerned here with the presuppositions under which an act of will is felt to be free; the sequel will show how this purely ethical Idea of freedom becomes realized in the essential nature of man.

[ 36 ] Action on the basis of freedom does not at all exclude, but includes, the moral laws. Only, it shows that it stands on a higher level than actions which are dictated by these laws. Why should my act serve the general good less well when I do it from pure love of it, than when I perform it only because I feel it is a duty to serve the general good? The concept of mere duty excludes freedom, because it will not acknowledge the individual element, but demands the subjection of the latter to a general norm. Freedom of action is conceivable only from the standpoint of Ethical Individualism.

[ 37 ] But how about the possibility, of social life for men, if each aims only at asserting his own individuality? This question expresses yet another objection on the part of Moralism wrongly understood. The Moralist believes that a social community is possible only if all men are held together by a commonly fixed moral order. This shows that the Moralist does not understand the identity of the world of Ideas. He does not grasp that the world of Ideas which inspires me is no other than that which inspires my fellow-man. This unity is, indeed, but a result of the experience of the world. It cannot be anything else. For if we could recognize it in any other way than by observation, it would follow that not individual experience, but universal norms, were dominant in its sphere. Individuality is possible only if every individual being knows of others only through individual observation. I differ from my neighbour, not at all because we are living in two entirely different spiritual worlds, but because from our common world of Ideas we receive different intuitions. He desires to live out his intuitions, I mine. If we both draw our intuitions really from the world of Ideas, and do not obey mere external impulses (physical or spiritual), then we cannot but meet one another in striving for the same aims, in having the same intentions. A moral misunderstanding, a clash is impossible between men who are morally free. Only the morally unfree who follow their natural instincts or the accepted commands of duty, turn their backs on their neighbours, if these do not obey the same instincts and the same laws as themselves. To live in love of action and to let live in understanding of the other's volition, this is the fundamental maxim of the free man. He knows no other “ought” than that with which his will intuitively puts itself in harmony. How he shall will in any given case, that will be determined for him by his faculty of conceiving Ideas.

[ 38 ] If sociability were not deeply rooted in human nature, no external laws would be able to inoculate us with it. It is only because human beings are one in spirit that they can live out their lives side by side. The free man lives out his life in the full confidence that all other free men belong to one spiritual world with himself, and that their intentions will harmonize with his. The free man does not demand accord from his fellow-man, but he expects it none the less, because it is inherent in human nature. I am not referring here to the necessity for this or that external institution. I refer to the disposition, the attitude of soul, through which a man, aware of himself among his fellow-men for whom he cares, comes nearest to living up to the ideal of human dignity.

[ 39 ] There are many who will say that the concept of the free man which I have here developed, is a chimera nowhere to be found realized, and that we have got to deal with actual human beings, from whom we can expect morality only if they obey some moral law, i.e., if they regard their moral task as a duty and do not simply follow their inclinations and loves. I do not doubt this. Only a blind man could do that. But away with all this hypocrisy of morality if this is the final conclusion! Let us then say simply that human nature must be compelled to act as long as it is not free. Whether the compulsion of man's unfree nature is effected by physical force or through moral laws, whether man is unfree because he indulges his unmeasured sexual desire, or because he is bound tight in the bonds of conventional morality, is quite immaterial from a certain point of view. Only let us not assert that such a man can rightly call his actions his own, seeing that he is driven to them by a force which is not his own. But in the midst of all this network of compulsion, there arise free spirits who, in all the welter of customs, legal codes, religious observances, etc., learn to find themselves. They are free in so far as they obey only themselves; unfree in so far as they submit to control. Which of us can say that he is really free in all his actions? Yet in each of us there dwells some deeper being in which the free man finds expression.

[ 40 ] Our life is made up of free and unfree actions. We cannot, however, form a final concept of human nature without coming upon the free spirit as its purest expression. After all, we are men in the fullest sense only in so far as we are free.

[ 41 ] This is an ideal, many will say. Doubtless; but it is an ideal which is a real element in us working its way to the surface of our nature. It is no ideal born of mere imagination or dream, but one which has life, and which announces itself clearly even in the least perfect form of its existence. If men were nothing but beings of nature, the search for ideals, that is, for Ideas which as yet are not actual but the realization of which we demand, would be an impossibility. In dealing with external objects the Idea is determined by the percept. We have done our share when we have recognized the connection between Idea and percept. But with the human being the case is different. The content of his existence is not determined without him. His true concept as a moral being (free spirit) is not a priori united objectively with the percept-picture “man,” so that knowledge need only register the fact subsequently. Man must by his own act unite his concept with the percept “man.” Concept and percept coincide with one another in this instance only in so far as man himself makes them coincide. This he can do only if he has found the concept of the free spirit, that is, if he has found his own concept. In the objective world, a boundary-line is drawn by our organization between percept and concept. Knowledge breaks down this barrier. In our subjective nature this barrier is no less present. Man overcomes it in the course of his development, by unfolding his concept in his outward existence. Hence man's intellectual as well as his moral life lead alike to his two-fold nature, perception (immediate experience) and thinking. The intellectual life overcomes his two-fold nature by means of knowledge, the moral life succeeds through the actual realization of the free spirit. Every being has its inborn concept (the law of its existence and action), but in external objects this concept is indissolubly bound up with the percept, and separated from it only in our spiritual organization. In man concept and percept are, at first, actually separated, to be just as actually reunited by him.

Someone might object that to our percept of a man there corresponds at every moment of his life a definite concept, just as with every other object. I can form for myself the concept of an average man, and I may also find such a man given to me as percept. Suppose now I add to this the concept of a free spirit, then I have two concepts for the same object.

[ 42 ] Such an objection is one-sided. As object of perception I am subject to perpetual change. As a child I was one thing, another as a youth, yet another as a man. Moreover, at every moment I am different, as a percept-picture, from what I was the moment before. These changes may take place in such a way that either it is always only the same (average) man who exhibits himself in them, or that they represent the expression of a free spirit. To such changes my action, as object of perception, is subjected.

[ 43 ] In the perceptual object “man” there is given the possibility of transformation, just as in the plant-seed there lies the possibility of growth into a fully developed plant. The plant transforms itself in growth, because of the objective law which is inherent in it. The human being remains in his imperfected state, unless he takes hold of the material for transformation within him and transforms himself through his own force. Nature makes of man merely a natural being; society makes of him a being who acts according to law; only he himself can make a free man of himself. At a definite stage in his development nature releases man from her fetters; society carries his development a step farther; he alone can give himself the final polish.

[ 44 ] From the standpoint of free morality, then, it is not asserted that the free spirit is the only form in which a man can exist. The freedom of the spirit is looked upon only as the last stage in man's evolution. This is not to deny that conduct according to norms has its legitimate place as a stage in development. The point is that we cannot acknowledge it to be the absolute standpoint in morality. For the free spirit transcends norms, in the sense that he recognizes as motives not commands alone, but he regulates his conduct in accordance with his impulses (intuitions).

[ 45 ] When Kant apostrophizes duty: “Duty! Thou sublime and mighty name, that dost embrace nothing charming or insinuating, but requirest submission,” thou that “holdest forth a law ... before which all inclinations are dumb, even though they secretly counter-work it,” ⁶ then the free spirit replies: “Freedom! thou kindly and humane name, which dost embrace within thyself all that is morally most beloved, all that my manhood most prizes, and which makest me the servant of nobody, which settest up no mere law, but waitest what my moral love itself will recognize as law, because it feels itself unfree in presence of every law that is forced upon it.”

[ 46 ] This is the contrast of morality according to law and according to freedom.

[ 47 ] The philistine who looks upon an external code as embodied morality is sure to look upon the free spirit even as a danger to society. But that is only because his view is narrowly focused on a limited period of time. If he were able to look beyond, he would soon find that the free spirit needs to go beyond the laws of his state as seldom as the philistine himself, and that he never needs to confront them with any real contradiction. For the laws of the state, one and all, have had their origin in the intuitions of free spirits, just like all other objective laws of morality. There is no traditional law enforced by the authority of a family, which was not, once upon a time, intuitively conceived and laid down by an ancestor. Similarly the conventional laws of morality are first of all established by particular men, and the laws of the state are always born in the brain of a statesman. These free spirits have set up laws over the rest of mankind, and only he is unfree who forgets this origin and makes them either extra-human commands, or objective moral duties independent of the human content, or—falsely mystical—the compelling voice of his own conscience.

He, on the other hand, who does not forget the origin of laws, but looks for it in man, will respect them as belonging to the same world of Ideas which is the source also of his own moral intuitions. If he thinks his intuitions better than those already existing, he will try to put them into the place of the latter. If he thinks the latter justified, he will act in accordance with them as if they were his own intuitions.

[ 48 ] We must not coin the formula: Man exists only in order to realize a moral world-order which is independent of him. Anyone who maintains that he does stands, in his science of man, still at that same point at which natural science stood when it believed that a bull has horns in order that it may butt. Scientists, happily, have cast the concept of objective purposes in nature into the limbo of dead theories. For Ethics, it is more difficult to achieve the same emancipation. But just as horns do not exist for the sake of butting, but butting because of horns, so man does not exist for the sake of morality, but morality exists through man. The free man acts morally because he has a moral Idea, he does not act in order that morality may come into being. Human individuals, with the moral Ideas belonging to their nature, are the presupposition of a moral world-order.

[ 49 ] The human individual is the fountain of all morality and the centre of earthly life. State and society exist only because they have necessarily grown out of the life of individuals. That state and society, in turn, should react upon the lives of individuals, is no more difficult to comprehend, than that the butting which is the result of the existence of horns, reacts in turn upon the further development of the horns of the bull, which would become atrophied by prolonged disuse. Similarly, the individual must degenerate if he leads an isolated existence outside human society. That is just the reason why the social order arises, viz., that it may react favourably upon the individual.

• 1. The way in which the above view has influenced psychology, physiology, etc., in various directions has been set forth by the author in works published after this book. Here he is concerned only with characterizing the results of an unbiased observation of thinking itself.
• 2. The passage from p. 111 down to this point was added, or rewritten for the Revised Edition (1918).
• 3. Students of modern science may care to turn at once to the Editor's Note on p. 135.
• 4. A complete catalogue of the principles of morality (from the point of view of Metaphysical Realism) may be found in Eduard von Hartmann's Phaenomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins.
• 5. Ethical-Spiritual Activity in Kant
• *. Editor's Note: The distinction here drawn by Dr. Steiner between “motive” and “spring of action” is of fundamental importance and is implicit in the common English usage of these terms. But because this distinction has been blurred in recent scientific works the word “motive” has come to have a different technical usage which may confuse some readers of this book.
  An example of the psychological usage is R. Woodworth's definition of “motive” as “a state or set of the individual which disposes him for certain behaviour and for seeking certain goals.” This does not bring out the important difference, to which Steiner draws attention, between having a goal, purpose or task, which a man finds by the characteristically human activity of thinking and adopts as the right thing to do in the particular circumstances, and being stimulated by a percept or feeling to an impulsive or emotional act. Steiner uses the term “motive” only when the act of will comes about under the influence of a concept or representation, and he traces a progressive ascent in this direction to the point where action is determined by the content of pure intuition.
  An instance of contemporary ethical usage is A. C. Ewing's alternative definitions of “motive” as “(i) Desires causing action or (ii) Circumstances relevant to an action to which attention is directed at the time.” Here, also, recognition of the unique character of a motive grasped out of pure intuition is precluded.
  In the first part of this book Dr. Steiner has shown how a concept can be grasped by the Ego from the thought-content of the world in a fully conscious act of intuition. In this chapter and the subsequent discussion of moral imagination he shows how such a freely grasped concept can be imprinted on the world as deed without losing the element of freedom. Thus it is shown how the spirit can work creatively in a human act of free will.
  Upon the recognition of this fact depends a clear understanding of the essential difference between man, who can develop the power to create freely out of the spirit, and the animal.
• 6. Translation by Abbott, Kant's Theory of Ethics, p. 180; Critique of Practical Reason, chap. iii.

Over the past four years, we have often heard that events as terrible for mankind as those that have just taken place have not occurred in the entire period covered by human historical thought. It is less common to hear this sentiment countered by the idea that the terrible events that have befallen mankind should at least be countered by attempts to reorganize social coexistence, which differ in their conceptual foundations just as thoroughly from what we are accustomed to think as the terrible events of recent years differ from what we have experienced in the course of human development. Indeed, when such an attempt arises to develop thoughts that run counter to ingrained habits of thought, then today one usually hears such an attempt met with reproach: Well, another utopia! - However, in the course of more recent times, we have already had some experience with the attitude on which such an accusation is based. It was precisely those people who think like those who speak of “utopia” in the case alluded to, who would have considered a description of the catastrophic events that affected us as late as the spring of 1914 to be a dream, a fantasy. They call themselves practitioners, these people. How did they talk back then, before the world-shattering catastrophe struck? Let's take a look at some of them. We need only look at some of the leading statesmen of Europe at that time, in the spring of 1914. They were almost verbatim when they said: “Such practitioners, such despisers of what they call utopias, spoke at that time something like this: the relations between the great European powers, thanks to the efforts of the cabinets, give a certain guarantee that world peace cannot be shaken for the foreseeable future. - Such talk is not an invention, it can be read in the parliamentary reports; it is contained there in the most diverse variations.

However, anyone who could not follow the thinking of such people in the inner state of his soul at that time, but who tried to maintain an unbiased view of events, perhaps spoke in the same way as the person who had to speak to a meeting in Vienna in April 1914, who is also speaking to you today. At that time, my intellectual conscience and my powers of observation forced me to say: with regard to the development of our social and international relations, we are in the midst of something that can only be described as a carcinoma, a cancerous disease in the life of nations, which must break out in a terrible way in a very short time. - Perhaps the force of events will force people to regard as utopians less those who speak out of this state of mind than those who, in what they say, are so well in tune with events as I have just indicated. Today, on the other hand, you can hear the practitioners, who are poring over some of what they call utopias, saying: “We cannot climb the highest mountain peaks of a new order in human society right now, we have to move forward step by step. Certainly some thoughts - say such people - are nice, and perhaps we will come to such things centuries from now; but today it is up to us to take the next steps.

Now it is quite certainly simply a matter of course that one must first take the very next steps, but he will climb a mountain badly who has no idea at all, when he takes the next step, which direction he should take; who has no idea at all in which direction the summit actually lies. And those who do not think in the sense of these utopia-despisers, but perhaps think in a realistic sense, will perhaps have to start today from a different comparison with what lies hidden in the germ and could also erupt in a terrible way. He will perhaps not have to start from the carcinoma that has broken out in the war catastrophe of recent years. But he will have to point out that many people are now thinking like those who live in a house that has cracks and fissures, who are threatening the house with collapse, but who cannot decide to do anything to rebuild the house, but who enter into all kinds of discussions about how to connect the individual rooms that they live in with each other through doors, so that they can help each other more easily through these doors. - The help that can be afforded through these doors will be of little help when the leaps have grown to a corresponding strength!

Thinking such things, it seems, is probably due to the development of the facts, which today speak a louder and clearer language than people are often inclined to hear today.

Now, out of the horrors that had to be lived through, this world war catastrophe has released a sentiment that has gradually crystallized in such views as are now again the basis of the significant meeting that is being held here in Bern as a League of Nations Conference. The call for a League of Nations has developed out of the terrible events of recent years. It must be said, however, that it might be justified to approach the call for a League of Nations with different feelings than some people do today. For perhaps it is more important to ask not only: What could be done for this League of Nations? What measures could be taken to bring it about in the best way imaginable? Rather, the question could perhaps be raised: What foundations exist in the life of the peoples for the establishment of such a League of Nations? For only if one looks at the forces that exist in the life of nations can one perhaps recognize from these forces to what extent one is in a position to achieve something fruitful with such a League of Nations. And does it not seem necessary, I would say, to shift the question somewhat in this direction, since the important conception of this League of Nations, which is particularly plausible to the world, arose together with an idea whose realization can no longer be spoken of today? In 1917, in a speech by Wilson to the American Senate, a thought emerged which, in connection with another thought, went something like this: What one could strive for with this League of Nations had a certain precondition, namely the precondition that in the events of the war neither one side nor the other would achieve what one would have to call victory or defeat in the decisive sense. - Wilson was looking towards an outcome that was not that of victory or defeat for one party. And from the direction of thought towards such an outcome he derived the feelings that urged him towards this League of Nations.

To be sure, the thought had a reality in itself; but the reality that was thought of then can no longer be spoken of today; for today the decisive victory on the one side is the decisive defeat on the other. Indeed, perhaps it is precisely for this reason that the question of the League of Nations, for example, must be posed in a completely different way.

I think it is particularly natural for me to ask the question about the League of Nations myself and to dare to discuss it in front of people today, to ask this question in a very special way. As a member of the people on whose side the decisive defeat is, it is not possible today to pose the question as if its answer could only emerge from a free agreement of those peoples who might wish to unite in such a League of Nations, and to whom, according to their innermost feelings, the Central European peoples most certainly also belong. The events in Paris basically rule out such a question for the Germans today, and one should have no illusions about this. But that is not how I want to pose this question either. My aim is to find a question and formulate a corresponding answer in which even those who may be excluded from participation in this League of Nations for the foreseeable future can have their say. In other words, the question will have to be posed in this way: Whatever agreements are reached at the moment, what can each individual nation contribute from its own resources, regardless of whether it has suffered victory or defeat, to a real League of Nations that can bring humanity what it longs for?

But since a League of Nations will undoubtedly have to deal with international affairs, it will have to turn its attention above all to the most important international affairs, which will concern all peoples in the near future under all circumstances.

When dealing with such matters today, we first look in two directions, as is customary in this day and age. On the one hand, we look at the state, and on the other hand, we look at economic life. Those people who today want something with regard to the coexistence of people look first of all to the state with regard to the guidelines of this will, asking: What should the state do in this or that matter for which a change has become ripe? - Or else, in order to arrive at an explanation, people look today, as if, I might say, with hypnotized eyes, to economic life; for economic conditions seem to be the only ones that cause today's conflicts, the greatest conflicts at least of the present day.

In these considerations, which are based on these two points of view, one thing is usually ignored. Even if one assures oneself that one wants to take account of the circumstances of the present day and, above all, focus on the human being, this is rarely done in reality. Here I would like to try not to shy away from looking at what we find when we look at the state on the one hand and at economic life on the other. But above all, I do not want to neglect to ask a question in a very energetic way, starting from the point of view of man as such: What do the states have to do in order to unite in a league of nations? That is what is asked first and foremost. And many things - do not think that I wish to criticize or condemn - many quite good things will come about in the near future if this question is posed in this way, by attempting to find from the construction of the states, from the individual customs of the states, something that transcends the states, as it were, such as a world federation or a world parliament. -- But today I would like to contrast the question: What should the states do? - the other question: What should states refrain from doing for the good of mankind? - In many respects we have learned through the terrible events of recent years what the states have accomplished with their actions; they have led mankind into this terrible catastrophe. We cannot deny it, it is the states that have led humanity into this terrible catastrophe!

Shouldn't it make sense to consider whether a person, when he has seen that he is causing all kinds of harm with his actions, should always ask himself: How do I do things differently? - Might it not be more useful to say: perhaps I should leave what I have done badly to someone else to do? - Then, you see, the question might be led down a completely different track.

It may be necessary to turn to the most important international questions if we want to obtain fruitful documentation on what can be said to be the cracks and fissures in the house that present-day humanity inhabits, consisting of various states. One must perhaps ask: Where do these cracks and fissures come from? Where does it come from that the states have driven people into this terrible catastrophe of war?

Two things have certainly become international in the course of modern times; apart from many others, they are capitalism and human labor. Undoubtedly, we had a “League of Nations” or something similar to it: the League based on international capital. And another “League of Nations” was also in the making, and it is very much in evidence today: it is the one based on the international of human labor. And we will have to fall back on these two things if we want to arrive at the fruitful germs of such a League of Nations, which can now really be built on the affairs of man as such.

With regard to capital, we see that a large number of people regard the way in which it has been administered over the course of time and what has led to so-called capitalism as that which is most contrary to the interests of a large part of humanity, and which, moreover, through much that lies within it, has led us to such terrible events. And the call is being raised from many sides - which is expressed in opposition to this capitalism - the radical call that the entire social order based on capitalism must be changed, that the private management of capitalism must give way to what we are now used to calling socialization. This, combined with a feeling about human labor power, gives international life its coloring today. It must be repeated again and again: however little it is clearly expressed in the consciously expressed thoughts of the proletarian world population, it lives unconsciously in the subsoil of a mass of people numbering in the millions that in the course of capitalist development it is precisely human labor power that has taken on a character that it should not continue to have.

Let us first look in these two directions. Capital, the capitalist administration of economic life, must, if we wish to see through it clearly, be quite distinctly separated from what it is connected with today. Two things are connected today with what is called capitalism: the one points to something that cannot be separated from capitalism; the other is something that must be distanced from it. Today, economic enterprises based on capital and private ownership of capital are combined into one. But the question must be asked: Can these two things be separated? For the private management of economic enterprises, which is built on the greater or lesser intensity of individual human abilities, this private management, which requires an auxiliary means, capital, for its operation, cannot be abolished. Anyone who somehow makes an impartial effort to ask under what conditions the social organism is viable will always have to say to himself: This social organism is not viable if it is deprived of its most important source, namely that which flows into it through the individual abilities that one person or another can acquire on different scales. What works in the direction of capital must also work in the direction of individual human abilities. This indicates that in no way can the necessary addition to social life, which comes from individual human abilities, be separated from its means, capital, in the future state.

However, the private possession of capital, the ownership of private capital, is something else. This ownership of private capital has a different social function from the management of the enterprises for which capital is necessary, by individual human capacities. The fact that someone acquires or has acquired private capital, by whatever means, gives him a certain power over other people. This power, which will mostly be an economic power, cannot be regulated in any other way than by bringing it into connection with the legal relations of the social organism. That which supplies the social organism with really fruitful forces is the work which the individual faculties perform through capital. But that which harms the social organism is when people who cannot perform such work themselves through their individual abilities are nevertheless in permanent possession of capital through some kind of relationship. For such people have economic power. What does it mean then? To have capital? - Having capital means having a number of people work according to your intentions, having power over the work of a number of people.

Health can only be brought about by ensuring that everything that has to be achieved in the social organism by means of capital is not separated from the human personality with its individual abilities behind it. But it is precisely through the possession of capital on the part of those persons who do not put their individual abilities into the use of capital that the fruitfulness of the effect of capital is again and again detached in the social organism from that which capital is in general, and which can also have very, very harmful consequences for the social coexistence of people. That is to say, at the present historical moment of mankind we are faced with the necessity of separating the possession of capital from the administration of capital. That is one question. Let us leave it at that for the moment. We shall see shortly afterwards what possible solution can be found to this question.

The second is the question of the social significance of human labor. This social significance of human labor can be seen if we can follow what has passed through the minds of the proletarian population over the last few decades, if we have seen the impact on these minds of what Karl Marx and those who worked in his direction have said about this human labor. What Karl Marx said in his theory of surplus value struck a chord in the souls of the proletariat! Why? Because there were feelings in them that brought this question about human labor power together with the deepest questions about human dignity and about an existence worthy of human beings in general. Marx had to put into such words what he had to say about the social significance of human labor power, which said that human labor power had not yet been freed by the modern capitalist economic order from the character of being a commodity. In the economic process commodities circulate; but in the modern economic process not only commodities circulate; not only commodities follow the dictates of supply and demand, but human labor is also offered on the commodity market, which in this case must be called the labor market, and it is paid for, just as commodities are otherwise paid for. The person who has to carry his human labor power to the market feels, despite the existence of the modern labor contract, the degradation of his human value when he sees his labor power turned into a commodity. For this modern labor contract, it is concluded on the condition that the labor manager - in this case the entrepreneur - takes the worker's labor power from him in return for a compensation that proves necessary on the economic market. In short: labor power is turned into a commodity.

But this question can only be solved by not stopping at what Karl Marx said. Today it will be a vital question for what is to be achieved - whether on the part of the proletarian population or on the part of the leading bourgeois circles - to bring about liberation on this very point by learning in the right way to go beyond what Karl Marx was able to teach the proletarian population in this field. Wherever there are people today who believe that their social will is entirely in the direction of the proletariat, they are always and forever based on the feeling that those who are otherwise propertyless, who have only their labor power, must go out for wages; that is, they must turn their labor power into a commodity. How can labor-power best be made into a commodity? this is how the question is formulated, how can it be made most profitable? - This question will never be solved in such a way that it cannot give rise to new social upheavals unless the opposite demand is made: How can human labor power be stripped of the character of a commodity? How is a social organization possible in which human labour power is no longer a commodity? - After all, the fact of labor in the actual sense results in the following. Through the joint - let us now call it work -, through the joint work of the manual worker and the intellectual leader, a product is created. The question is this: How can this joint production of a product for the commodity market be brought into a satisfactory relationship with what is today called the employee and with what is today called the employer?

These are the two most important questions that can and must be raised today across the entire international community: What is there in the use of capital in human social life? What, on the other hand, is there in the flow of human labor power into this social human life?

The worker today - let us consider his situation - even if he does not express this, even if Marx did not learn to think in this direction to the end, the worker can feel: I manufacture my product together with the entrepreneur. That which is produced at the workplace comes from both of us. It can only be a question of: what division occurs between what is today called the entrepreneur and what is today called the manual worker? And such a division must occur, which can be satisfactory to both sides in the immediate concrete case.

What is the actual relationship today between the employer and the employee? I do not want to fall into agitational phrases. But let us look at this whole relationship soberly, soberly, as it is formulated by today's proletarians - though not even in clear terms - but as it is deeply and intensely rooted in the subconscious feelings of these proletarians. Since the economic power of the entrepreneur does not enable the worker to conclude a contract about what they jointly produce as a commodity, or what the joint yield of this commodity is, about how much accrues to one and how much to the other, since he is only in a position to conclude a labor contract, the worker gets into a state of mind which gives him the feeling that basically no labor power can ever be compared with any commodity. And yet today we speak of exchanging commodity for commodity or its representative, money, in the economic process. And we also speak of exchanging goods or their representative, money, for human labor power. So the worker today gets the impression that although he works together with the entrepreneur on the production of goods, he is actually being cheated because he does not get the part he is entitled to.

This already points to the fact that the individual human abilities that have to make use of capital are actually running on a slippery slope. For what these individual human faculties accomplish by managing capital out of human mental or physical strength is perceived by a large part of humanity as overreaching, as a kind of fraud. Whether this is justified or not is not something we want to investigate at the moment, but it is perceived as such. And in the perception it forms the basis for the vocal facts of the present.

This, however, points to the fact that the individual abilities of human beings must be rooted in something that is, or at least can be, placed in the social organism today in a skewed way. This utilization of man's individual abilities is connected today in the modern capitalist economy with the appropriation of the ownership of the means of production; it is thus connected with the appropriation of a certain economic power, an economic superiority. But that which can express itself in a power, which can express itself in this superiority of one person over another, is nothing other than what constitutes a legal relationship in human life.

Whoever now takes a look at how a legal relationship is strangely intertwined with the application of individual human abilities will perhaps, as happened to the person speaking to you here, have to direct his gaze to something that is more deeply rooted in the entire nature of the social organism than the things that are very often sought today. It is obvious to ask from such premises: How is right and how is the use of individual human abilities, which must always be productive anew, which must always emerge anew from their original source in man, how is the utilization of individual abilities in the social organism justified?

Whoever has retained an unbiased view of human life will gradually come to the realization that three quite different, original sources of human life can be distinguished in a social organism. These three original sources of human life flow together quite naturally in the social organism, they work together. But the way in which they work together can only be fathomed if we are able to look at the reality of the human being as such, who must be a unity, a unified being within the social trinity.

In the social organism these individual human faculties are first of all present. And we can trace their domain from the highest spiritual achievements of man in art, in science, in religious life, down to that form of the application of individual human faculties as they are more or less grounded in the spiritual or in the physical, down to that application of individual human faculties which must be used in the most ordinary, in the materialistic process, which is based on capitalism, right into the economic process, which is usually called with a derogatory word the material sphere. Up to this point a uniform current can be traced down from the other intellectual achievements. Within this area everything is based on the corresponding, on the fruitful application of that which must always be lifted anew from the primal sources of human nature if it is to flow in the right way into the healthy social organism.

In the healthy social organism everything that is based on law lives quite differently. For this right is something that takes place between man and man simply because man is generally man. We must have the opportunity to develop our individual abilities in social life. The better we develop them, the better for the generality of the social organism. The more freedom we have in bringing out and utilizing our individual abilities, the better for the social organism. For anyone who does not start out from theories and dogmas, who is able to observe real life, everything that must play out as law between people stands in stark contrast to this in real life. There is nothing else to be considered but that in which all men are equal to each other.

A third thing that plays a role in human social coexistence, which in turn is totally different from the other two - the individual human faculties that come from the inequalities of human nature, the right that comes from the consciousness of right - is the human need that comes from the natural foundations of physical and spiritual life, and which must find its satisfaction in the cycle of economic life through production, circulation and consumption.

This threefold structure of the social organism has not been brought about by some abstract thinking, this threefold structure is there. And the question can only be: How can this threefold structure be regulated in such a way that the result is not a sick but a healthy social organism? An unbiased view of the social organism - and of course I can only cite results in these allusions - leads one to say: It is precisely the misjudgment of this radical difference between the three sources of social life in the course of recent historical development that has led to the discussion in which we are already involved today, and in which we will find ourselves more and more. In the course of modern times, these three currents of human interaction have been mixed up in an unlawful way.

What started it? When, in more recent times, economic life, I would like to say, took up the view as if hypnotized, it was found justified in the progress of mankind to merge with the purely political state - which has to do with that in which all men are equal, with the actual right - at first certain branches of the economy, especially telegraphy, railroads and so on, i.e. those branches of the economy which appeared to be the most suitable for merging with the state, on which, as on economic life, the human gaze was hypnotized. And what does the socialist thinker of today actually do? He is merely inheriting the legacy of bourgeois thinking in this respect. He does not merely want certain individual branches of the economy that seem suitable to be nationalized or socialized. He wants to socialize either the entire property or the entire business. He just wants to draw the final consequences of what has been done.

Now one could cite many things. One need only mention in the external political sphere the role played by what I need only call the “Baghdad Railway” among the disastrous causes of war that have been preparing for years. Hundreds and hundreds of such things could be mentioned. What do such things mean? Such things mean a merging of economic interests with the pure interests of the state. So that in the end the result is that the administrators of state life must give themselves up to rendering the services that are possible to them by virtue of their power, following economic interests. And in this way the political interests of the states are drawn into the conflicts of economic interests. The whole configuration of states in recent times has shown this intermingling of economic life with political life.

Anyone who has been able to observe Central European life from this point of view - as the person who is speaking to you today has been able to observe it in Austria - knows that much of what has wiped the Austrian state out of the circle of the existing state has contributed to what people think of least. When, in the sixties, people in Austria thought of establishing a constitutional life, this constitutional life was based on the fact that the mere economic life was actually used for the configuration of the state. For the Austrian Imperial Council, voting was organized in such a way that four electoral curiae voted: that of the large landowners, that of the chambers of commerce, that of the cities, markets and industrial towns, and that of the rural communities, all economic communities. What was elected out of these economic communities became law in Austria. What emerged as law from purely economic interests could not, of course, come to terms with something that came from the spiritual and individual foundations of humanity: the interests of the people of the so-called Austrian state. And so things became entangled in such a way that what the people elected by the four economic curiae wanted to make law in a sham state out of their economic interests was made law. This, in turn, confounded itself with what one particularly likes to confound out of the sentiments of modern times, that confounded itself with the spiritual interests and aspirations of mankind, with all that which one can call the whole scope of spiritual life.

If, on the one hand, economic life has been incorporated into modern state life, then, on the other hand, the entire spiritual life has been incorporated into this state life. We have also seen in this that which is precisely in the spirit of modern human progress. The ideal was to gradually make all spiritual life a part of the political life of the state. How much has remained free today? Individual branches of the arts and individual branches of science, which are carried on by those who may not be employed by a state, and the like. Today there is still no sense of the fact that spiritual life can only integrate its reality into the social organism in the right way if this spiritual life is completely emancipated from all other life, if it can give itself its own administration, its own structure. While in recent times more and more efforts have been made to nationalize the entire school system, it is within the developmental powers of modern man to bring about a complete reversal in this area. Just imagine: If the lowest teacher is not the servant of the state, but if the lowest teacher knows how to place himself in a freely organized spiritual life, knows how to place himself in a spiritual organism, how differently he can then integrate what he is able to achieve into the unity of the human social organism, how differently than if the state demands of him what he must or must not do, what he must teach the developing human being!

Those who judge these things perhaps believe, from many a bad experience that has been made, that the people who have to deal with science, for example, on which so much depends, are employed according to certain considerations. But science itself and its teaching are free. Such laws can be found in the most diverse states. And many people claim that this is the case. Anyone who really knows things knows that these transgressions occur not only with regard to employment, not only with regard to the administration of intellectual offices, but also in the work itself. Free spiritual life, which can powerfully place itself with its own reality in the healthy social organism, must also be able to develop freely and separately from state and economic life, as being on its own.

I know the cheap objections that can be raised: “When schools are freed from state compulsion, when everyone can send their children to school out of the zeal they have for intellectual education, then we will return to illiteracy.” People who speak like this are reckoning with old sentiments in modern circumstances. We shall see in a moment how these modern conditions have quite a different effect from what these people with the old sentiments suppose. But the result - it must be said in advance - is that the real truth can only live in the social organism if the necessary division is also present and comprises the following: the spiritual organism, which is built on the individual physical and mental faculties of human beings - what we could also call spiritual life in its full extent; the legal organism, which comprises the area of the actual political state; and the cycle of economic processes, in which only the production, circulation and consumption of goods are concerned.

It is not believed that the unity of life is thereby destroyed. On the contrary, each of these members of the healthy social organism will become healthy again precisely because it receives its strength from itself and each member can give the other the appropriate contribution. And so those who aim at the recovery of our social conditions must demand the independence of these three links, which have been fused together by confused thinking and confused action in the last century, i.e. the independence of these three links: spiritual life, legal life and the life that comprises the cycle of the economic process.

The state cannot be an economist. Economic life must necessarily be placed on its own basis according to its own conditions. In economic life this has also developed to a certain extent in cooperative and trade union life. But this cooperative and trade union life has repeatedly become inappropriately intertwined with legal relationships. That which is necessary in economic life is the system of association, that is, the association of certain circles of people according to the needs of consumption and the production necessary for this, the association of people according to professional interests and the administration of that which circulates within these circles according to corresponding human needs, as can only result from an expert judgment of economic life itself.

The effects of human labor now play into this life, the effects of capital play into it. I can only indicate in a few lines how these effects are formed. The use of human labor power in the social organism consists in the relationship of the person who works manually to some spiritual leader who must make use of capital by managing some economic enterprise or anything at all that is useful to the social organism. This relationship can only be a legal relationship. The relationship that the worker has with the entrepreneur must be based on a right. It must be founded on a different ground than the ground of economic life itself. This will bring about a radically different situation from the one we have today. But today we must also come to radical judgments in the face of radical facts. Economic life today is, on the one hand, dependent on the natural basis. Man must face this with expert judgment. He can, to a certain extent, make one piece of land or another fertile through his diligence and technology, but only within certain limits. He is to a large extent dependent on his natural basis. Just as economic life is dependent on the natural basis on the one hand, it must also become dependent on what must be established on the basis of the rule of law, in the cooperation of all people, no matter what kind of work they do. Whether they are intellectual or manual laborers, they enter into a relationship on the basis of the rule of law in which the equality of men among themselves comes into consideration. And it is established, now not in an associative way, as it must be in economic life, but in a purely democratic way, in a way that makes the effects in the political field of the state equal for all people before the law. There is determined what relates to the utilization of human labor power, what relates to the relationship of the worker to the leader. Only a maximum or minimum working day and the type of work a person can perform can be determined. What is fixed - this must be taken into account - will have an effect on the prosperity of the people. If any branch of production should not prosper because too much legally impossible work is demanded of it, it should not be done; then a remedy should be found in other ways. Economic life should reach its limits on both sides: on the one hand, the limits of its scientific basis, and on the other, the limits of law. In short, we move from one part of the social organism to the other, the political state, in which everything legal and everything related to law is regulated to the greatest extent possible.

And then we come to the third member, which again must regulate itself out of its own conditions and needs and give laws: this is the organization of the spiritual. The spiritual must be based on the free initiative of man on the one hand, so that man is able to offer his powers individually to humanity in a free spiritual life. On the other side must be the free understanding and the free acceptance of these spiritual powers. How can this be? It can only be by the fact that the spiritual life, which is free in school life, in all spiritual branches, is administered solely by the spiritual organization right up to the use of the spiritual life, which expresses itself in the utilization of capital. How is this possible? It is only possible if that socialization really takes place which cannot come about by making human society into a uniform cooperative society in which perhaps only economic interests assert themselves and everything is to be organized on the basis of economic interests. If the spiritual organism is structured in a healthy way, free from the two other branches, the state and the economic organism, which have been mentioned, and if one is in a position to provide from that spiritual organism also that administration which relates to the use of capital and the whole economic life, that is: if all the places which are necessary in economic life are filled by the administration of the spiritual organization, if man with his individual abilities is placed in economic life from the spiritual organization, then alone one arrives at a healthy, fruitful socialization. For only in this way is it possible to separate what is the possession of private capital from the administration of this capital in favour of the healthy social organism.

What will happen? Well, many things will happen. I will only cite a few examples. It is quite natural that in the economic process man acquires private capital, property. But as little as it will be possible to separate the utilization of this private capital from the utilization of individual abilities as long as these individual abilities can be active, it will be necessary to separate private property from the individual when their activity ceases. For all private property is after all acquired through that which plays in the social forces, and it must in turn flow back into the social organism from which it is taken. That is to say, there will have to be a law from within the legal organism - for property is a right, the right to use some object or something exclusively - there will have to be a law that what one has acquired as private property from economic life must - through the free disposal of the one who has acquired it - after a certain time fall back to the spiritual organism, which in turn has to look for another individuality that can utilize it in a corresponding way.

Something similar will occur for all possessions that exist today, as for the possession of certain spiritual things that one produces, which belong to general humanity thirty years after death. One cannot say that one has more right to any other possession than to this spiritual possession. However long it may take to be allowed to keep what one has acquired, the time will have to come, be it for inherited property or otherwise acquired property, when, through the free disposal of the private owner, that which has passed into his possession through individual labor will return to the spiritual organism. In addition, the other will develop, that those who acquire private property from the economic process will be able to choose freely, out of free understanding, those whom they consider individually capable of operating something. But this will be made impossible by the power of the rule of law, of the actual political state, that a considerable part of private property will revert to pure interest, by means of which someone will be able to use private labor and other people's labor for himself without using individual abilities that enter into the economic process of life as a whole. It is possible, and it is made possible by these three links, that human productivity always remains connected with the individual abilities of man, with which it must be properly connected.

This tripartite structure of the social organism still appears to be a radical idea today. And yet, whoever will not be comfortable with this idea, whoever will not want to take the first step in this direction towards the summit that we must climb in the social order, whoever does not realize that the most immediate, most everyday, most immediate actions must be developed with the knowledge of this direction, will not be acting in the spirit of human development, but will be acting against this spirit of human development. Today we are faced with facts that have demanded the primal feelings of human beings. We must counter these with the original ideas of human social order. And one such original idea is this threefold structure.

This idea will now initially be regarded as something quite practical even by those who do not consider it to be a pure utopia, but who can perhaps bring themselves to regard it as something quite practical, it will only be regarded as something that relates to the interior of states.

And now you will ask: What does this have to do with the League of Nations? - That is what can at the same time be the most realistic foreign policy! For if we work towards answering the question: What should the state refrain from doing? - the answer that emerges from this consideration is that it should refrain from interfering in the functions of spiritual and economic life. It should confine itself to the purely political, the purely legal sphere. This, however, will also have the necessary consequence in non-political life that the economic interests of one area will come directly into negotiation, into exchange, into intercourse with the economic interests of the other area, and likewise the legal relationships and the spiritual relationships. If the spiritual conditions in one area are liberated, then no cause can ever arise from this spiritual area which could result in any warlike event. This can be observed on the smallest scale. Spiritual interests can only come into a relationship with warlike conflicts through the interposition of state life.

Even here one can really only judge from experience; but even small experiences can be eloquent. One could observe, if one has an eye for such things, how in Hungary, for example, in the times when state life in Hungary had not yet interfered with everything in the German-speaking parts, the people who had German children in the numerous German areas sent them to German-speaking schools, the Magyars living in German areas sent them to Magyar schools, and vice versa: the Germans who lived in areas with Magyar schools sent their children to such areas where there were German schools. This exchange of children was maintained in a free manner.

It was a free exchange of the spiritual goods of languages, just as one can cultivate other spiritual goods in free exchange, from country to country, from town to town. This free exchange of the spiritual goods of languages meant deep peace for the country of Hungary in all areas in which it was cultivated. The inner instinct of the people was imprinted in this free exchange. When the state became involved, things changed. That which happened in the inner political life, happened in the course of modern times in the outer political life. Anyone with an eye for such things could see how deeply peaceful the German intellectuals actually were. The mood of these German intellectuals would never have given rise to the mood of war! But the relationship they had with the state was what gave rise to this impression of the state. This is not meant to be an objection or anything else, but merely an understanding of the facts.

The economic life of a tripartite social organism will be able to live itself out within international economic life precisely because the economic relations are not made by state relations, but by people who grow out of territories in which there is not one parliament, but three parliaments, a spiritual, an economic and a state parliament, in which there is not one administration, but three administrations that work together. Only from such territories will people be able to grow up and play the right role in an intergovernmental organization. And it is not the state and the economy that matter, but the human being, the whole, full human being.

The role of the spiritual leaders will be different if it develops out of the emancipated spiritual organization, different from the theatrical play that takes place, for example, between the Middle States and America in the exchange of professors, which could only develop out of that which was spiritually improperly connected with the state. All these relationships will also be placed on a sound basis in the international sphere when the sound basis has been established in the individual social territory. From these individual social territories will then emerge the man who can also contribute in the right way to international life.

That seems to me to be the answer which can be given in such a way that it takes into consideration not only the coordination of the various peoples, but that the contribution of each people can be considered for the real future ideals of the human League of Nations. A German can also speak in this way; for even if the Central European countries or Germany are excluded from the next League of Nations, they can work in such a way that, through the recovery of their own territory, they work ahead for the healthy League of Nations of the future; they can contribute their share to it.

This is an answer that everyone can give for themselves. It is an answer that each state can also develop as its own policy towards the outside world. For just as the states that enter into peace negotiations with the German Empire, for example, elect their own peace delegates, it will not be possible to prevent the chaotic former German Empire from electing special delegates from the three members - from the economic, the state and the spiritual organism - who can then represent the healthy social organism to the outside world in a corresponding manner. That is real, possible, that is true real politics.

In the last few years I have often presented these ideas to people; I have also, as perhaps some of you have seen, summarized them in an appeal which is now appearing in the newspapers, signed by a very satisfactory number of people, among whom are those who cannot doubt that they have a right to judge these things, and I have often had to hear: such a division would bring back the old, which is precisely contrary to the feelings of a large part of modern mankind, that mankind would be divided again into the old three classes: Nourishing, military and teaching. The opposite is the case! Nothing is so different from these old estates of nourishment, defense and apprenticeship as what is wanted here; for it is not people who are divided into classes, into estates, as earlier times were divided, but that which is separated from man, in which man lives: the social organism is divided. And the human being is precisely that which, as a whole, complete, self-contained being, will only be able to develop as a human being within this structure that is self-contained. This liberated human being, he alone will be able to form the basis of the thoughts, the feelings, the acts of will that must play out in the modern League of Nations.

In thinking about these things, one does not want to become one-sided. And it is easy to become one-sided if you only take your own feelings as a basis. That is why I would like to refer to someone else now, at the end, after I have so radically presented what I have said as necessary for the recovery of the social organism and want to distinguish it from what has developed so far and what has led to this terrible catastrophe. I would like to refer to another, to a man to whom I often refer when I look for a highly respected spiritual observer of those things that have occurred within the development of humanity up to the present day: Herman Grimm. He once said in a passage that emerged from his thoughts on the modern social development of mankind: If one looks at Europe today, one sees on the one hand how people have come into connections with one another of which former times could not have dreamed; but one sees at the same time projecting into this, what is called modern civilization, that which expresses itself in our warlike armament - so he says as a German - in our own militarism and in the armament of the other states, which after all can only amount to invading one another one fine day. And when you see what could come of it - the words sound truly prophetic, they were written in the nineties, Herman Grimm died in 1901 - when you look at it, Herman Grimm says, it is as if a future consisting of nothing but human conflicts could develop, so that you would like to set aside a day for the general suicide of humanity so that it does not have to experience the terrible things that follow from these conditions.

Since then, people have seen many things that result from these conditions. What they have seen could well lead to thoughts that are then no longer regarded as utopian, especially when one has seen how many things that have really come into being should look like utopia to the eyes of practitioners compared to what they believed to be impossible just a short time ago.

This is what should make people today not only change their actions, but also change their thoughts and rethink. In the future, we will not only need different institutions, we will ultimately need new ideas, new people, which can only grow out of a new organization of the social organism. International alliances, we have basically experienced them after all! Whether what we are striving for is on firmer ground, offers a firmer foothold than the old conditions, can only be decided if we really go back to the basic conditions of human social coexistence. Have we not also seen something like an international life develop in the way people used to marry among the members of various royal houses? There would be nothing wrong with that if the princely houses had developed in a promising way! Something could then have arisen in terms of this “international alliance” that would have been very useful even under the monarchical principle! - We have seen other international alliances, for example the very real international alliance of capital. We have experienced international social democracy. We have experienced various international alliances. That which was based on the international of family instincts has disintegrated. That which is based on the economic power of unspiritual capitalism, it is clear to the unbiased eye: it will disintegrate. But what international socialism is aiming at is basically the longing for power. In the future, this power will have to give way to the right, because what man can seize through his striving for power in social life can only lead to the salvation of mankind if it is integrated into legal life, illuminated by legal life.

And so perhaps the feeling may arise in contemporary man in the face of many an internationalism that a truly fruitful alliance of nations of mankind must be founded on something other than these old relationships. It must be founded on entirely new human ideas, entirely new human impulses, and not on princely blood, not on the power of capital or labor. It must be founded on the right, on the truly liberated whole man. For only this truly liberated, whole human being, awake to international feeling, will also have the right understanding for what can then shine for him as the light of international law.

Discussion

1st speaker: Explained that the solution proposed by Dr. Steiner was not clear to him. Nor was it possible to dismiss socialism as a great spiritual concept in the way that Dr. Steiner had done, because, after all, a new right does not come into being by wiping away the healthy core of socialism. The idea of the threefold structure may seem to be a solution, but it is an arbitrary solution. According to this speaker, land reform is something that is in the nature of the times. Finally, reference was made to the progressive spread of socialism as a testimony to the fact that it is not an imaginary system but corresponds to a reality.

Rudolf Steiner: It is, of course, difficult to discuss whether or not what was indicated in a lecture that was, after all, not very short, must be clear to each individual in an absolute sense; after all, that is an individual matter, and each listener will, of course, have his or her own opinion about it. I will therefore not touch on this question in particular. I would just like to make a few very brief comments on the other thoughts expressed by the previous speaker, above all on matters of principle. Anyone who has followed my perhaps radical and therefore seemingly unprovable train of thought today has perhaps been able to see, from the way the matter was formulated, that what I said did not come from a mere flash of inspiration one fine morning, or from other ideas, but that they are built on what I believe has been proven by others. It is not necessary to prove to you again everything that socialism, for example, has proved! I have expressed one thought, the thought that the theory of surplus value and its relation to human labor power is particularly plausible to the proletarian soul. I then expressed the thought that this view must be taken one step further. In doing so, however, I believe I have also shown that I do not want to wipe away what the honorable previous speaker has just pointed out: modern socialism. Anyone who has listened to me more closely will perhaps also be able to tell that I have made sufficient allusions to the significance of modern socialism in my speech.

I could not understand what I said in any other way than in the sense of the example I mentioned. I meant that if one did not get involved in modern socialism, then one would live like the inhabitants of a house that was threatening to collapse and who did not decide to build a new one, but instead discussed how to connect all the rooms so that they could help each other through these doors.

Thus, with some good will, you could see the weight I actually attach to modern socialism. And it was basically not so difficult to derive from this the idea, which could of course be developed further in forty or fifty lectures, that you can't get by with what is already in modern socialism. I would like to point out one more thing. Of course, I will again only be able to be brief enough for those who wish to do so to be able to say that I am not giving the audience anything to take home with them. I would just like to say that I have the greatest respect for what Marxism and everything that has been built on Marxism has produced, especially in modern proletarian thought. I myself was a teacher for many years at a workers' education school founded by Wilhelm Liebknecht, and I was involved, so to speak, in helping to establish socialist ideas within the working class. And I may perhaps point out that it would not exactly be incorrect if I said: I believe that a number of corresponding older editors of German socialist newspapers, even orators, who at least have a not insignificant say in Germany today, are perhaps my pupils. So I not only know modern socialism as such - one could have seen that from the way I put forward my points of view - but I also know the weight that this socialism has in the life of the modern proletariat. If you have been involved in it for years, I might say decades, then you don't really need to wait for a nice, special idea to develop a system, because you want to have one, but then you continue to build on what is there. And those who respond to things see from what they continue to build that they are respecting what is already there.

But there is one thing we must not lose sight of. Certainly, thoughts as such, if they are kept within the theoretical, are basically nothing more than symptoms of what is moving in real life. Therefore do not think that I want to suggest to you how the modern labor movement or anything else is actually carried only by the driving force of thought, but on the contrary I want to express that the thoughts that come to light - and I am not only thinking of economic forces - express deeper inner forces symptomatically. In general, I believe that in the future we will move towards a symptomatological view of history, not the causal one that is popular today.

But now we must see how certain thoughts, which are all to be regarded as symptoms of certain underlying facts, how these thought-symptoms present themselves. Today you are familiar with very radical forms of socialism. Do not believe how this could arise in the subconscious of some people who misinterpret this - which perhaps the previous speaker did not mean in this way - do not believe that I feel as frightened as some people in leading circles about what is emerging in the present - although I must regard it with the same weight as I did in my lecture. I can already look with a certain objectivity at the consequences of the social way of thinking and social development that are emerging today, for example. I would like to point out something that might seem significant to you. You see, Lenin and Trotsky are also socialists. And anyone who is not, I would say, intimidated by what is now being said about Eastern Europe and ascribes it all to the “wicked Bolsheviks”, but who knows that everything that is now tended to be attributed to the Russian socialists is still largely due to Tsarism and what preceded it, will perhaps take a somewhat more objective view of what is happening! And those who look objectively will then have to say to themselves above all: In a certain direction, Lenin in particular is a kind of final consequence of Marx, including the way he sees himself. And Lenin draws attention to two things in Marx. First, he draws attention to the fact that the modern social movement must strive to proletarianize the state itself through the dictatorship of the proletariat. But the state is only - I must briefly indicate this - taken up by the dictatorship of the proletariat because it thereby draws its ultimate consequences. The ultimate consequences of what is germinating in the state are drawn by social-democratism: namely, the state kills itself, it dissolves itself.

Now, the various dark sides of this socialist state must come to light. Lenin, for example, is under no illusions about this. That is also better than indulging in illusions, as so many people do. But he is working towards creating a state that carries within it the seeds of death, that will dissolve. Then comes the really new stage, where work is not paid equally, but where the motto is: each according to his abilities, each according to his needs. - And at that moment, when this appears: each according to his abilities, each according to his needs - which must not only be a socialist ideal, but a very general one - at that moment Lenin, like Marx, makes a strange remark that allows us to look much deeper than we usually do. He makes the remark: this social order, which can only come about in such a way that everyone is placed in the social order according to his needs and his abilities, cannot, of course, be achieved with today's people; it requires a completely new breed of people, which must first come into being.

Yes, you see, those who do not want to wait and cannot wait for a “new breed of man”, because otherwise the time might come when it would be better to establish the general suicide of which I have spoken, will turn their thoughts to the present life, and will try to gain from this present life an idea of what the mistakes were. And in this respect I do believe that it might already be evident from my, albeit brief and sketchy, train of thought, in which I have referred to the question: What should the state do, and what should it not do? How the entanglement of economic life with the state, the entanglement of intellectual life with the state, has caused damage to the social order - I have tried to indicate this; the examples I have given could be multiplied a hundredfold.

Does it not stand to reason that we should think about how these damages can be remedied? It can be remedied by not merging further, but by reversing what has just occurred.

You could call it naïve, of course, but I believe that my lecture today showed how deeply what I have said actually penetrates the very foundations of modern life. How far this is the case, however, must be left to the judgment of each individual. The ideas that are currently realized and recognized are indeed not new ideas; and nothing new can be built with these ideas.

I have presented the idea of the threefold structure to many a person who would have been in a position to realize it, especially during the difficult time of war. I have also found understanding in some circles. But today there is still no bridge between understanding and the courageous will to do something. This bridge has not been built.

I have had a strange experience in the last few days, which could perhaps point out to you how what I have said is deeply rooted in real life and is not a wiping away, but rather a taking up or rather a continuation of socialist thinking: I spoke - which is not exactly easy today - to a workers' meeting that was simply invited from the street. As I experienced many times during my work in Berlin, it was precisely the socialist leaders who opposed my remarks in many ways. And after many objections had been raised, a Russian woman appeared who - I'm just telling you! - said, among many other things, that we may have heard many things today against which we could object to this or that, but it would be impossible today to remain merely with the old ideas or even with the old socialist ideas, but it was necessary to move forward to new ideas.

We will not come to a real, thorough rebuilding of the house, but only to new doors and so on, which cannot help if the whole thing collapses, if we do not really engage in new thoughts. And that is why I have said to many people in these difficult times that many of the misfortunes that have happened in recent years could have been avoided if many people had thought like the Russian woman I spoke of. I am convinced that it would have been understood if the Central European negotiators at the time had made the ideas I have expressed here - which were very well known to a few of them - the content of foreign policy, the content of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk. If these ideas had been presented to the outside world, they would have been understood.

Of course, one cannot explain such things in detail in a lecture; but one has the feeling that real life must live in the human soul in the present, as it is simply rooted in reality. I do not consider myself so clever that I know better than others what has to happen in detail!

Because I am not a program person, because I do not give programs and utopias, but because I am someone who wants reality to be grasped as reality, I am not at all interested in having all my suggestions carried out in detail. If at any point one begins to work in the spirit of what I have said today, then let not one stone of the content I have conveyed be left upon another; something quite different may result, but it will be something that is justified in the face of real life.

With programmes, whether socialist or other programmes, the aim is always to ensure that the individual ideas that have been devised are realized in accordance with the programme; here it is a matter of tackling reality at one point. Then the result may be something quite different! And so what I have said is only apparently so incomprehensible because the matter is not to be understood in the same way as other programs. You could say that today it is easy not only to introduce a program with a few thoughts, but even to prove it. But it is difficult to appeal to human souls, and to appeal in the way I wanted to do, namely to point these souls back to themselves, to give them suggestions. Then perhaps they will think something completely different. But it is basically the most necessary thing today for people to know: you have to start from one reality, then the other will follow.

There is therefore no need to despise what the land reformers are striving for. In a conversation I once had with Damaschke in Berlin many years ago, I pointed out to him that his ideas certainly have a great deal of power, but that they cannot fully intervene in real life and understand it thoroughly because the soil is not elastic. It is not; and therefore, I told him, it is not possible to translate them directly into reality.

Well, there is no other way of coming to terms with it than by looking at the tendency of the times, which results from the fact that people have come to a dead end through the confusion of legal life, economic life and spiritual life. Then something arises which is not at all difficult to prove, namely that one should not continue to confound them, but should start on the way back!

What I have said is intended to continue thoughts about how socialization should actually be carried out, how we can get into a situation where human labour may not legitimately be used in the sense of someone else's power. And as I said, as incomplete as this must remain, because it cannot be dealt with exhaustively in one lecture, I believe that today it is necessary to approach things with a little good will, because the facts speak too loudly! And even in the face of what might well appear to be different in the socialist field than four years ago, the facts speak too loudly today. I will soon explain all this comprehensively and in detail in a brochure, because I consider this to be extremely necessary for the present, which will then prove in detail what has now only appeared in a truly suggestive way.

I believe there is one thing we must not lose sight of today. I had a special experience yesterday. When I was a little boy, I used to learn the following in my religion books: I learned that you have to realize that Christ must either be a fool or a hypocrite, or that he must be what he pretended to be. And that's what it says in these religious books: And since he can be considered neither a fool nor a hypocrite, he must be the Son of the living God. - I also heard that answered yesterday as the solution to the social questions here in Bern! I read it in my school books more than fifty years ago, and I hear it repeated again today - as the right solution to the social question. Between the time when I read it in my religion books at school and this almost word-for-word repetition, which one could hear again and again during the difficult times, I would like to say: word-for-word exactly, but between the two points in time lies the experience that mankind should have had through the great catastrophe that we have lived through. We should learn something from this great catastrophe! Above all, I believe, we should have become more willing to accept thoughts that may seem somewhat sketchy today, but which, by the way in which they refer to things, perhaps show that they are at least making an attempt to delve into the depths of things.

2nd speaker (Baron von Wrangell): Sees in the threefold structure of the social organism proposed by Dr. Steiner the right solution. How the idea can be realized seems to him to be a different question. The fundamental error of socialism lies in the fact that it leads to an overvaluation of the state.

3rd and 4th speakers: Objected essentially that a realization of the idea of tripartism would unnecessarily complicate the situation, which speaks against this solution. The threefold structure would lead to fragmentation, whereas human life should form a unity.

Rudolf Steiner: Well, I think I should perhaps say something very briefly. I can understand quite well what the honorable previous speaker wants; but I have the feeling that he does not understand himself very well! I think he should assess the whole situation we are in from a somewhat broader perspective. We humans really don't just have the task of making our lives comfortable. There are many other things in life than making ourselves comfortable! And I believe that a large part of the damage we suffer today comes precisely from the fact that a large part of humanity only strives to make life comfortable, in its own way. But it seems to me that what matters is something else.

You see, I would not bother you with any ideas about a tripartite division if these three parts were not inherent in the reality of the social organism. The fact that this threefold division wants to happen is something that does not depend on us, we cannot change it, it makes itself. I really did have the opportunity, I must come back to this again, during this difficult time, to talk to many a person who I thought should do something from the positions that are so authoritative today - it was two and a half years ago, there would still have been the possibility of doing something - and I said to some people: “You see, what is being said here is not a simple matter. It is the result of decades of observation of what will happen in Europe over the next ten, twenty or thirty years. For anyone who observes the course of events - and there is no other way to understand the social threefold structure than to recognize the possibilities for future development from the whole of the present - will see that, whether we like it or not, this threefold structure is taking place. In earlier times it arose instinctively; more and more in recent times there has been a confusion, a fusion of the three parts. Now these three parts want to separate again in the way that suits them, to become independent. - And I have said this to some people with the drastic words: “You see, those who are now at the helm could still do many things in this direction with reason; people have the choice - Goethe also said with reference to the revolution: either evolution or revolution - they have the choice of either doing this now through reason, or they will experience revolutions and cataclysms. Not only those who have been at the helm up to now will experience cataclysms, but also those who merely want to hold on to the dogmas of socialism will experience cataclysms. It is a matter of this threefold organization of the social organism taking place by itself. And you can also see that: That which is natural always occurs under certain extraordinary conditions in certain one-sidednesses of development; these three members want to become more and more independent. And they become independent in an unnatural way if they are not given their natural independence, if they are confounded, if they are thrown together; they develop in a way that hinders humanity. The spiritual power, the spiritual organization develops, be it as a church state or state church or whatever, becomes independent, and even if it cannot encompass the whole of spiritual life, it nevertheless seeks to catch as much as it can. The other, legal life, is taken up by the state, and in its turn makes serviceable to the state that which will seek to become independent. What wants to realize itself in political life in an unnatural way is everything that is today the much frowned upon militarism. For you see, many a healthy opinion was expressed during the war about this militarism and its one-sided relationship to state life. But if one gets to the bottom of these opinions with common sense, then one also realizes that militarism is nothing other than the one-sided realization of what one does not want to give its natural independence, political life in turn. And Clausewitz said: War is the continuation of politics by other means; Clausewitz puts it in a certain context; one can still go into these things, not as in recent years, when one has heard many such one-sided statements. One can also say that marital strife and divorce are the continuation of marriage by other means! There have been a lot of one-sided statements like that in recent years; people just mix everything up. But what everything is based on, if one wants to develop fruitful views in life, which then also turn into real institutions, is that one sees these relationships as healthy. And so these things really want to take on a life of their own, to develop independently. In recent times, the economic organism has flooded the whole of public life to such an extent that today many people no longer see anything but an economic organism. And then they see in what can otherwise be there only an administration of the economic organism.

That is what you can prove. But above all, if I have achieved nothing more than to stimulate some people, that is quite enough for me. That is all I want! For I do not believe that one can say anything right about what should happen socially. I would like to add the following: You know that there are two Bolsheviks in the present day: one is Lenin, the other Trotsky. I know of a third, who, however, does not live in the present day and whom few people think of when they talk about the Bolsheviks: Johann Gottlieb Fichte! Read his “Closed Commercial State” and you have, theoretically speaking, exactly what you can read in Lenin and Trotsky! Why? Because Fichte spins a state system out of his own soul! From the forces with which you can reach the highest heights in philosophy, he develops a state system, a political, or rather a social system. Why did this happen? Because it is not at all possible to gain a view of what is socially fruitful from the individual! That can only be found from person to person. Just as language cannot be developed if a person lives alone on an island, but just as language can only develop as a social phenomenon, only when people live together properly, so that which is social at all cannot be gained by spinning it out of an individual person! One cannot draw up a program out of oneself. But we can think about the social order in which people must be placed so that they relate to each other so naturally that they find the right social order of their own accord.

The social question will not disappear from the agenda! It is there and must continue to be solved more and more. But the task at hand is to answer the question: How should people relate to each other in the tripartite social organism? Then you will always more or less find the solution. People must relate to each other in the social organism in such a way that the solutions arise from their living together. To do this preliminary work is the task of truly social thinking, the preliminary work that shows how people can solve social issues in real social life.

I have already said that I do not believe I could be so clever as to draw up a social program. But I drew attention to the fact that if people live in this natural threefold division, and if they really allow what corresponds to their impulses as institutions in this natural threefold division to arise in the world, then it is only through people, in this cooperation of people appropriate to the healthy social organism, that the social order arises! One can cooperate in this! You can't do it the way modern Marxists say: first we make a big mess, then comes the dictatorship of the proletariat, then the right thing will happen. - No, at the very least it is necessary to do this preliminary work, to ask oneself: How must people stand in the social organism so that, through their cooperation, what is demanded of us today by the facts that truly speak loudly will happen?

When I attempted to bring before you the Greek ideal of education, it was with the object that this ideal should stimulate ideas which ought to prevail in our modern system of education. For at the present stage of human life it is, of course, impossible to adopt the same educational methods as the Greeks. In spite of this, however, an all-embracing truth in regard to education can be learned from the Greek ideal, and this we will now-consider.

Up to the seventh year of life, the Greek child was brought up at home. Public education was not concerned with children under the age of seven. They were brought up at home, where the women lived in seclusion, apart from the ordinary pursuits of social life, which were an affair of the men. This in itself is the reinforcement of a truth of education, without knowledge of which one cannot really educate or teach, for the seventh year of life marks an all-important stage of childhood.

The main phenomenon characteristic of the seventh year of human life is the change of teeth. This is an event to which far too little importance is attached nowadays. For think of it, the nature of the human organism is such that it brings the first teeth with it as an inheritance, or, rather, it brings with it the force to produce these first teeth which are discarded at the seventh year. It is incorrect to imagine that the force which pushes up the second teeth at about the seventh year unfolds for the first time at this age. It is developing slowly from birth onwards, and simply reaches its culmination at about the seventh year of life. Then it brings forth the second teeth from the totality of force in the human organization. This event is of the most extraordinary importance in the course of human life as a whole, because it does not occur again. The forces present between birth and the seventh year reach their culmination with the appearance of the second teeth, and they do not act again within the entire course of earthly life. Now this fact should be properly understood, but it can only be understood by an unprejudiced observation of other processes that are being enacted in the human being at about this seventh year of life Up to the seventh year the human being grows and develops according to Nature-principles, as it were. The Nature-forces of growth, the being of soul and the spiritual functions have not yet separated from one another in the child's organization; they form a unity up to the seventh year. While the human being is developing his organs, his nervous system and his blood circulation, this development betokens the evolution of his soul and spirit. The human being is provided with the strong inner impulsive force which brings forth the second teeth because everything in this period of life is still interwoven. With the coming of the second teeth, this impelling force weakens. It withdraws somewhat; it does not work so strongly from out of the inner being. Why is this? Now suppose new teeth were to appear every seven years. (I will take an extreme illustration for the sake of clarity.) If the same organic forces which we bear within us up to the seventh year, if this unity formed of body, soul and spirit were to continue through the whole of life, new teeth would appear approximately every seven years! The old teeth would fall out and be replaced by new ones, but throughout our whole life we should remain children as we are up to the seventh year. We should not unfold the life of soul and spirit that is separated off from the Nature-life. The fact that the physical force decreases in the seventh year and the bodily pressure and impulses to a certain extent grow less—for the body now produces more delicate forces from itself—makes it possible for the subtler forces of soul life to develop. The body grows weaker, the soul stronger, as it were.

A similar process also takes place at puberty, in the fourteenth or fifteenth year. The element of soul now weakens to a certain extent and the spiritual functions make their appearance. So that if we take the course of the first three life-periods: up till the seventh year man is pre-eminently a being of body-soul-spirit in one, from the seventh to the fourteenth years he is a being of body-soul with a separate nature of soul and spirit, and from puberty onwards he is a threefold being, a physical being, a being of soul and a being of spirit.

This truth opens up deep vistas into the whole evolution of the human being. Indeed, without knowledge of it we really ought not to venture upon the education of children. For unless we realise the far-reaching consequences of this truth, all education must necessarily be more or less a dilettante affair.

The Greek—and this is the amazing thing—knew of this truth. To the Greek, it was an irrevocable law that when a boy had reached his seventh year he must be taken away from his parents' house, from the mere Nature-principles, the elementary necessities of upbringing. This knowledge was so deeply rooted in the Greeks that we do well to remind ourselves of it to-day. Later on, in the Middle Ages, traces of this all-important principle of education still existed.

The modern age of rationalism and intellectualism has forgotten all these things, and, indeed, even takes pride in showing that it places no value on such truths, for the child is usually required to go to school at an earlier age, before the end of the seventh year. We may say, indeed, this departure from such eternal principles of human evolution is typical of the chaos obtaining in our modern system of education. We must rise out of this chaos. The Greek placed so high a value on this truth that he based all education upon it. For all that I described yesterday was carried out in order to ground education upon this same truth.

What did the Greek see in the little child from birth to the time of the change of teeth? A being sent down to earth from spiritual heights! He saw in man a being who had lived in a spiritual world before earthly life. And as he observed the child he tried to discover whether its body was rightly expressing the divine life or pre-earthly existence. It was of importance for the Greek that in the child up to the seventh year he should recognize that a physical body is here enclosing a spiritual being who has descended. There was a terribly barbaric custom in certain regions of Greece to expose and thus kill the child who was instinctively believed to be only a sheath, and not expressing a true spiritual being in its physical nature; this was the outcome of rigid regard to the thought that the physical human being in the first seven years of life is the vesture of a divine-spiritual being.

Now when the child passes its seventh year—and this, too, was known in Greece—it descends a second stage lower. During the first seven years the child is released from the heavens, still bearing its own inherited sheaths, which are laid aside at the seventh year, for not only the first teeth but the whole body is cast off every seven years—cast off for the first time, that is to say, in the seventh year. In the first seven years of life the bodily sheaths revealed to the Greek what the forces of pre-earthly life had made out of the child. The child was thought to bear its earthly sheaths proper, its first earthly sheaths, only from about the seventh to the fourteenth years onwards.

I am trying now to express these things as they were conceived of by the highest type of Greek. He thought to himself: I reverence the Divine in the little child, hence there is no need to concern myself with it in the first seven years of life. It can grow up in the family in which the Gods have placed it. Supersensible forces from pre-earthly life are still working in it. When the seventh year is reached it behoves man himself to become responsible for the development of these forces. What must man do, then, when he knows how to pay true reverence to the Divine in the human being? What must he do as regards education? He must develop to the highest extent the human faculties that have unfolded in the child up to the seventh year. The Divine power, the way in which the spiritual expresses itself in the body—this must be developed to the greatest possible extent. Thus the Gymnast had perforce to be convinced of the necessity to understand the Divine power in the human body and to develop it in the body. The same healing, life-sustaining forces which the child possesses from pre-earthly existence, and which have been fostered in an elementary way up to the change of teeth—these must be preserved from the seventh to the fourteenth year by human insight, by human art. Further education must then proceed wholly in accordance with Nature. And so all education was ‘gymnastic’ because the divine education of the human being was seen as a ‘gymnastic.’ Man must continue the ‘divine gymnastic’ by means of education.

This was more or less the attitude of the Greek to the child. He said to himself: If through my intuition I am able to preserve in freshness and health the forces of growth which have developed in the child up to the seventh year, then I am educating in the very best way; I am enabling the forces which are there by nature up to the seventh year to remain throughout the whole of earthly life, right up to death. To see that the “child” in the human being was not lost till death—this was the great and far-reaching maxim of Greek education. The Greek teacher thought: I must see to it that these forces between the seventh and fourteenth years—the forces of childhood—remain living throughout the whole of his earthly life, right up to death. A far-reaching and deeply significant principle of education! And all gymnastic exercises were based on the perception that the forces present up to the seventh year have in no way disappeared, but are merely slumbering within the human being and must be awakened from day to day. To waken the slumbering forces between the seventh and the fourteenth years, to draw forth from the human being in this second period of life what was there by nature in the first period—this constituted Greek gymnastic education. The very glory of his culture and civilization arose from the fact that the Greek, by a right education, was at pains to preserve the ‘child’ in the human being right up to death. And when we wonder at the ‘glory that was Greece,’ we must ask ourselves: Can we imitate this ideal? We cannot, for it rests upon three factors, without which it is unthinkable.

These three factors must be remembered by the modern educationalist when he looks back to Greece. The first thing to remember is the following:—These principles of education were only applied to a small portion of mankind, to a higher class, and they presuppose the existence of slavery. Without slavery it would not have been possible to educate a small class of mankind in this way. For in order to educate thus, part of man's work on the earth fell to the lot of those who were left to their elemental human destiny, without education in the true Greek sense. Greek civilization and Greek education are alike unthinkable without the existence of slavery. And so the delight of those who look back with inner satisfaction on what Greece accomplished in the evolutionary history of mankind is tempered with the tragic realization that it was achieved at the cost of slavery. That is one factor.

The second factor is that of the whole position of woman in Greek social life. The women lived a life withdrawn from the direct impulses at the root of Greek civilization, and it was this secluded life that alone made it possible for the child to be left, up to the seventh year, to the care of the home influences, which were thereby given full scope. Without any actual knowledge, but merely out of human instincts, the child was led on by the elemental forces of growth to the time of the change of teeth. One may say it was necessary that the child's life up to this point, should, despite its different nature, proceed just as unconsciously in the wider environment of the family, detached from the mother's body, as when the embryonic life had proceeded through the forces of Nature. This was the second factor.

The third is really a paradox to modern man, but he must, none the less, grow to understand it. The second point—the position of women in Greece—is easier to understand, for we know from a superficial observation of modern life that between the Greek age and our own time women have sought to take their share in social life. This is a result of what took place during the Middle Ages. And if we still wanted to be as Greek as the Greeks were, with the interest in conscious education confined exclusively to men, I wonder how small this audience would be if it were only made up of the men who were allowed to concern themselves with education!

The third factor lies deeper down, and its nature makes it difficult for modern civilization to acknowledge that we have to attain our spiritual life by human effort, by work. Anyone who observes the spiritual activities of civilized life will be obliged to admit that as regards the most important domain of civilized life, we must count upon what we shall achieve in the future by effort. Observing all the human effort which has to be spent on the attainment of a spiritual life in present-day civilization, we look with some astonishment at the spiritual life of the ancient Greeks and especially of the ancient Orientals. For this spiritual life actually existed. A truth such as that of the part played in human life by the seventh year, a truth which modern man simply does not realise, was deeply rooted in Greece. (Outer symptoms indicate its significance but modern culture is very far from understanding it.) It was one of the mighty truths that flowed through ancient spiritual life. And we stand in wonder before this spiritual life when we learn to know what wisdom, what spiritual knowledge was once possessed by man.

If, without being confused by modern naturalistic and materialistic prejudices, we go back to early civilization, we find, at the beginning of historical life a universal, penetrating wisdom according to which man directed his life. It was not an acquired wisdom, but it flowed to mankind through revelation, through a kind of inspiration. And it is this that modern civilization will not acknowledge. It will not recognize that a primal wisdom was bestowed spiritually upon man, and that he evolved it in such a way that, for instance, even in Greece, care was still taken to preserve the ‘child’ in man until the time of earthly death. Now this revelation of primeval wisdom is no more to be found—a fact deeply connected with the whole evolution of man. Part of man's progress consists in the fact that the primal wisdom no longer comes to him without activity on his part but that he must attain to wisdom through his own efforts. This is connected in an inner sense with the growth of the impulse of human freedom which is at present in its strongest phase. The progress of humanity does not ascend, as is readily imagined, in a straight line from one stage to another. What man has to attain from out of his own being in the present age, he has to attain at the cost of losing revelation from without, revelation which locked within itself the deepest of all wisdom.

The loss of primeval wisdom, the necessity to attain wisdom by man's own labours, this is related to the third factor in Greek education. Thus we may say: Greek education may fill us with admiration but it cannot be dissociated from these three factors •; ancient slavery, the ancient position of woman, and the ancient relationship of spiritual wisdom to spiritual life. None of the three exist to-day nor would they now be considered worthy of true human existence. We are living at a time when the following question arises: How ought we to educate, realizing as we do that these three a priori conditions have been swept away by human progress? We must therefore observe the signs of the times if we desire to discover the true impulse for our modern education from inner depths.

***

The whole of the so-called mediaeval development of man which followed the civilization of Greece and has indeed come right down to modern times, proved by its very nature that in regard to education and methods of teaching, different paths had to be struck from those of Greece, which were so well-fitted to that earlier age. The nature of man had, indeed, changed. The efficacy and reliability of Greek education were an outcome of the fact that it was based upon ‘habit’—upon that which can be built into the very structure of the human body.

Up to the change of teeth in the seventh year, the development of man's being is inwardly connected with the body. The development of the bodily functions, however, proceeds as though unconsciously. Indeed it is only when the faculties work unconsciously that they are right; they are reliable only when what I have to do is implanted into the dexterity of my hands and is accomplished of itself, without need for further reflection.

When practice has become habit, then I have achieved securely what I have to achieve through my body. The real aim of Greek life was to make the whole earthly existence of man a matter of ‘habit’ in this sense. From his education onwards until his death, all man's actions were to become habitual, so habitual that it should be impossible to leave them off. For when education is based on such a principle as this, the forces which are natural to the child up to the change of teeth, up to the seventh year, can be maintained; the child forces can be maintained until earthly life ends with death.

Now what happened when through historical circumstances new peoples pouring over from the East to the West founded a new civilization during the Middle Ages, and established themselves in Middle Europe and in the West, even in America? These peoples assimilated the qualities natural to the Southern regions but their coming brought quite different habits of life to mankind. What was the result of this? It set up the conditions for a totally different kind of development, a development of the individual. In this time, for example, men came to the conscious realization that slavery ought not to be; to the realization that women must be respected. At this time it also became apparent as regards the evolution of the individual, in the period between the seventh and fourteenth year, when development is no longer of a purely bodily nature but when the soul is to a certain degree emancipated from the body that the child in this period was not now susceptible of being treated as in earlier times. In effect, the conservation of the forces of early childhood in the boy between the ages of seven and fourteen that had been practised hitherto was no longer possible.

This is the most significant phenomenon of the Middle Ages and right up to modern times so far as this second period of life is concerned. And only now for the first time do we see the powerful forces of revolt which belong to the period when the fourteenth and fifteenth years have been passed, the period during which human nature rises up most strongly in revolt, when indeed it bears within itself the forces of revolt.

How did this revolt in human nature express itself? The old primeval wisdom which flowed down naturally to the Greeks came to be in Roman and Mediaeval tradition something that was only preserved through books, through writing. Indeed it was only believed on the authority of tradition. The concept of Faith as it developed during the Middle Ages did not exist in very ancient civilizations, nor even in the culture of the Greeks. It would have been nonsense in those times. The concept of Faith only arose when the primeval wisdom no longer flowed directly into man, but was merely preserved. This still applies fundamentally to the greater part of humanity to-day. Everything of a spiritual, super-sensible nature is tradition. It is ‘believed,’ it is no longer immediate and actual. Nature and the perception of Nature this is an actuality, but all that refers to the super-sensible, to super-sensible life, is tradition. Since the Middle Ages man has given himself up to this kind of tradition, thinking at times it is true that he does in fact experience these things. But the truth is that direct spiritual knowledge and revelation came to be preserved in written form, living from generation to generation as a heritage merely on the authority of tradition. This was the outer aspect. And what of the inner aspect? Let us now look back once again to Greece. In Greece, faculties of soul developed as of themselves because the whole human being acquired habits of life whereby the ‘child’ was preserved in man till death. Music proceeded from the breathing and blood circulation, intellect from gymnastic. Without being cultivated, a marvellous memory evolved in the Greeks as a result of the development of the habits of the body. We in our age have no longer any idea of the kind of memory that arose, even among the Greeks, without being cultivated in any way, and in the ancient East this was even more significant. The body was nurtured, habits formed, and then the memory arose from the body itself. A marvellous memory was the outcome of a right culture of the body.

A living proof of the fact that we have no conception of the kind of memory possessed by the Greeks, a memory which made it so easy for the spiritual treasures to be handed down and become a common good, is the fact that shorthand writers have to attend when lectures are given which people want to remember! This would have seemed absurd in Greek civilization, for why should one wish to keep that which one has manifestly thrown away? It was all preserved truly in the memory, by the proficiency of the body. The soul developed itself out of this bodily proficiency. And because of this self-development she stood in contrast to that which had arisen from revelation—the primeval wisdom. And this primal spiritual wisdom disappeared, grew to be mere tradition. It had to be carried from generation to generation by the priesthood who preserved the traditions. And inwardly man was forced to begin to cultivate a faculty which the Greek never thought of as a necessity. In education during the Middle Ages it became more and more, necessary to cultivate the memory. The memory absorbed what had been preserved by tradition.

Thus, historical tradition outwardly and remembrance and memory inwardly, had to be cultivated by education. Memory was the first soul quality to be cultivated when the emancipation of the soul had taken place. And those who know what importance was attached to the memory in schools only a short while ago can form an opinion of how rigidly this cultivation of the memory—which was the result of an historical necessity—has been preserved.

And so through the whole of the Middle Ages education tosses like a ship that cannot balance itself in a storm, for the soul of man is the most hard of access. To the body man can gain access; he can come to terms with the spirit, but the soul is so bound up with the individuality of man that it is the most inaccessible of all.

Whether a man found the inner path to the authorities who preserved the tradition for him, whether his piety was great enough to enable him to receive the words in which the mediaeval priest-teacher inculcated the tradition into humanity, all this was an affair of the individual soul. And to cultivate the memory, without doing violence to another man's individuality, this needs a fine tact. What was necessary for the soul-culture of the Middle Ages was as much heeded by tactful men as it was ignored by the tactless. And mediaeval education swung between that which nourished the human soul and that which harmed it in its deepest being. Although men do not perceive it, very much from this mediaeval education has been preserved on into the present age.

Education during the Middle Ages assumed this character because, in the first place, the soul no longer wished to preserve the ‘child;’ for the soul itself was to be educated. And on account of the conditions of the times the soul could only be educated through tradition and memory. Between the seventh and the fourteenth years the human being is, as it were, in a certain state of flux. But the soul does not work in the same condition of security as is afforded by the bodily constitution up to the seventh year and the direction imparted by the spirit has not yet come into being. Everything is of a very intimate character, calling for piety and delicacy.

All this brought it about that for a long period of human evolution education entered upon an uncertain and indefinite course in which, while tradition and memory had to be cultivated, there were extraordinary difficulties. To-day we are living at a time when, as a result of the natural course of development, man desires a firm foundation in place of the insecurity obtaining in the Middle Ages. And this search for other foundations expresses itself in the innumerable efforts towards educational reform in our time. It is out of recognition of this fact that Waldorf School education has arisen. Waldorf School education is based upon this question: How shall we educate in a time when the revolt in the soul between the seventh and fourteenth years of life against the conservation of ‘childhood’ is still going on? How shall we educate now that man, in addition to that, has in the modern age lost even the old mediaeval connection with tradition? Outwardly man has lost his faith in tradition. Inwardly he strives to be a free being, one who at every moment shall confront life unhampered. He does not wish to stand on a memory foundation all his life long. Such is modern man, who now desires to be inwardly free of tradition and of memory. And however much certain portions of our humanity to-day would like to preserve ancient customs, this is not possible. The very existence of the many efforts for educational reform indicates that a great question is facing us. It was impossible in the Middle Ages to educate in the Greek way, and in our times education can no longer be based on tradition and memory. We have to educate in accordance with the immediate moment of life in which man enters upon earthly existence, when he, as a free being, has to make his decision out of the given factors of the moment. How, then, must we educate free human beings? That is the question which now confronts us for the first time.

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As the hour is getting late, I will bring these thoughts to a conclusion in a few words and postpone until tomorrow's lecture the consideration of the methods of education that are necessary at the present day.

In Greek education, the Gymnast must be recognized as one who preserved the forces of childhood on into the second period of life between the seventh and the fourteenth or fifteenth years. The ‘child’ must be preserved, so said the Greeks. The forces of childhood must remain in the human being up to the time of earthly death; these forces must be conserved. It was the task of the Greek educator, the Gymnast, to develop the fundamental nature, the inherited fundamental nature of the child in his charge, on into the period between the seventh and the fourteenth years of life. It was his task to understand these forces out of his spiritual wisdom and to conserve them. Evolution in the Middle Ages went beyond this, and, as a result, our present age developed. Only now does the position of a modern man within the social order become a matter of consciousness. This fact of conscious life can only come into being after the age of puberty has been reached, after the fourteenth or fifteenth year. Then there appears in the human being something which I shall have repeatedly to describe in the following lectures as the consciousness of inner freedom in the being of man. Then, indeed, man ‘comes to himself.’ And if, as it sometimes happens to-day, human beings believe themselves to have reached this consciousness before the fourteenth or fifteenth years, before the age of puberty, this is only an aping of later life. It is not a fundamental fact. It was this fundamental fact, which appears after the age of puberty, that the Greek purposely sought to avoid in the development of the individual man. The intensity with which he invoked Nature, the child, into human existence, darkened and obscured full experience of this glimpse of consciousness after puberty. The human being passed in dimmed consciousness through this imprisoned ‘Nature,’ this reality. The historical course of human evolution, however, is such that this is no longer possible. This conscious urge would burst forth with elemental, volcanic force after the age of puberty if attempts were made to hold it back.

During what we call the elementary school age, that is to say, between the seventh and fourteenth years, the Greek had to take into consideration the earliest Nature-life of the child. We in our day have to take account of what follows puberty, of that which will be experienced after puberty in full human consciousness by the boy or girl. We may no longer suppress this into a dreamlike obscurity as did the Greeks, even the highest type of Greek, even Plato and Aristotle, who, in consequence, accepted slavery as a self-evident necessity. Because education was of such a kind that it obscured this all-important phenomenon of human life after puberty, the Greek was able to preserve the forces of early childhood into the period of life between the seventh and fourteenth years.

We must be prophets of future humanity if we would educate in the right way. The Greek could rely upon instinct, for his task was to conserve the foundations laid by Nature. We, as educationalists, must be able to develop intuitions. We must anticipate all human qualities if we would become true educators, true teachers. For the essential thing in our education will be to give the child, between its seventh and fourteenth years something which, when the consciousness characteristic of the human being has set in, it can so remember that with inner satisfaction and assent it looks back upon that which we have implanted within its being. We educate in the wrong way to-day if, later on, when the child has gone out into life, it can no longer look back on us and say, “Yes!”

Thus there must arise teachers with intuition, teachers who enter once again upon the path along which the spiritual world and spiritual life can be attained by man, who can give the child between the seventh and fourteenth years all those things to which it can look back in later life with satisfaction. The Greek teacher was a preserver. He said: All that lived within the child in earlier life slumbers within him after the seventh year, and this I must awaken. Of what nature must our education be to enable us to implant in the age of childhood that which later on will awaken of itself in the free human being? We have to lead an education into the future. This makes it necessary that in our present epoch the whole situation of education must be different from what it was in the past. In Greece, education arose as the result of a surrender to the facts of Nature. It was a fact of Nature which, as it were, played into human life, but as a result of the whole of life up to our time, it has worked itself cut of its natural foundations.

As teachers in schools, this is what we must realize: We must offer to the child before us something to which it may be able to cry “Yes!” when in later life it awakens to independent consciousness. The child must not only love us during schooldays, but afterwards too, finding this love for us justified by mature judgment. Otherwise education is only a half-education—therefore weak and ineffective. When we are conscious of this we shall realize to what a great extent education and instruction from being a fact of Nature that plays into the human being must also become a moral fact.

This is the deep inner struggle waged by those who from their innermost being have some understanding of the form which education must assume. They feel this, and it is expressed in the question: How can we ourselves transform education for the free human being into a free act in the very highest sense, that is to say, into a moral act? How can education become out and out a moral concern of mankind? This is the great problem before us to-day, and it must be solved if the most praiseworthy efforts towards educational reform are to be rightly directed on into the future.