The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today it seems appropriate to mention certain thoughts on the meaning and nature of our spiritual Movement—anthroposophical spiritual science, as we call it. To do so will necessitate references to some events which have occurred over a period of time and which have contributed to the preparation and unfolding of this Movement. If, in the course of these remarks, one or another of them should seem somewhat more personal—it would, at any rate, only seem to be so—this will not be for personal reasons but because what is more personal can be a starting point for something more objective. The need for a spiritual movement which makes known to people the deeper sources of existence, especially human existence, can be easily recognized by the way in which today's civilization has developed along lines which are becoming increasingly absurd. No one, after serious thought, will describe today's events as anything other than an absurd exaggeration of what has been living in more recent evolution.

From what you have come to know in spiritual science, you will have gained the feeling that everything, even what is apparently only external, has its foundation in the thoughts of human beings. Deeds which are done, events which take place in material life—all these are the consequence of what human beings think and imagine. And the view of the external world, which is gaining ground among human beings today, gives us an indication of some very inadequate thought forces. I have already put into words the fact that events have grown beyond human beings, have got out of hand, because their thinking has become attenuated and is no longer strong enough to govern reality. Concepts such as that of maya, the external semblance which governs the things of the physical plane, ought to be taken far more seriously by those familiar with them than they, in fact, often are. They ought to be profoundly imprinted on current consciousness as a whole. This alone might lead to the healing of the damage which—with a certain amount of justification—has come upon mankind. Those who strive to understand the functioning of man's deeds—that is, the way the reflections of man's thoughts function—will recognize the inner need for a comprehension of the human soul which can be brought about by stronger, more realistic thoughts.

In fact, our whole Movement is founded on the task of giving human souls thoughts more appropriate to reality, thoughts more immersed in reality, than are the abstract concept patterns of today. It cannot be pointed out often enough how very much mankind today is in love with the abstract, having no desire to realize that shadowy concepts cannot, in reality, make any impact on the fabric of existence. This has been most clearly expressed in the fourteen-, fifteen-year history of our Anthroposophical Movement. Now it is becoming all the more important for our friends to take into themselves what specifically belongs to this Anthroposophical Movement. You know how often people stressed that they would so much like to give the beautiful word ‘theosophy’ the honour it deserves, and how much they resisted having to give it up as the key word of the Movement. But you also know the situation which made this necessary.

It is good to be thoroughly aware in one's soul about this. You know—indeed, many of you shared—the goodwill with which we linked our work with that of the Theosophical Movement in the way it had been founded by Blavatsky, and how this then continued with Besant's and Sinnett's efforts, and so on. It is indeed not unnecessary for our members, in face of all the ill-meant misrepresentations heaped upon us from outside, to persist in pointing out that our Anthroposophical Movement had an independent starting-point and that what now exists has grown out of the seeds of those lectures I gave in Berlin which were later published in the book on the mysticism of the Middle Ages. We must stress ever and again that in connection with this book it was the Theosophical Movement who approached us, not vice versa. This Theosophical Movement, in whose wake it was our destiny to ride during those early years, was not without its connections to other occult streams of the nineteenth century, and in lectures given here I have pointed to these connections. But we should look at what is characteristic for that Movement.

If I were asked to point factually to one rather characteristic feature, I would choose one I have mentioned a number of times, which is connected with the period when I was writing in the journal Lucifer-Gnosis what was later given the title Cosmic Memory. A representative of the Theosophical Society, who read this, asked me by what method these things were garnered from the spiritual world. Further conversation made it obvious that he wanted to know what more-or-less mediumistic methods were used for this. Members of those circles find it impossible to imagine any method other than that of people with mediumistic gifts, who lower their consciousness and write down what comes from the subconscious.

What underlies this attitude? Even though he is a very competent and exceptionally cultured representative of the Theosophical Movement, the man who spoke to me on this was incapable of imagining that it is possible to investigate such things in full consciousness. Many members of that Movement had the same problem because they shared something which is present to the highest degree in today's spiritual life, namely, a certain mistrust in the individual's capacity for knowledge. People do not trust the inherent capacity for knowledge, they do not believe that the individual can have the strength to penetrate truly to the essential core of things. They consider that the human capacity for knowledge is limited; they find that intellectual understanding gets in the way if one wants to penetrate to the core of things and that it is therefore better to damp it down and push forward to the core of things without bringing it into play. This is indeed what mediums do; for them, to mistrust human understanding is a basic impulse. They endeavour, purely experimentally, to let the spirit speak while excluding active understanding.

It can be said that this mood was particularly prevalent in the Theosophical Movement as it existed at the beginning of the century. It could be felt when one tried to penetrate certain things, certain opinions and views, which had come to live in the Theosophical Movement. You know that in the nineties of the nineteenth century and subsequently in the twentieth century, Mrs Besant played an important part in the Theosophical Movement. Her opinion counted. Her lectures formed the centrepiece of theosophical work both in London and in India. And yet it was strange to hear what people around Mrs Besant said about her. I noticed this strongly as early as 1902. In many ways, especially among the scholarly men around her, she was regarded as a quite unacademic woman. Yet, while on the one hand people stressed how unacademic she was, on the other hand they regarded the partly mediumistic method she was famous for, untrammelled as it was by scientific ideas, as a channel for achieving knowledge. I could say that these people did not themselves have the courage to aim for knowledge. Neither had they any confidence in Mrs Besant's waking consciousness. But because she had not been made fully awake as a result of any scientific training, they saw her to some extent as a means by which knowledge from the spiritual world could be brought into the physical world. This attitude was extraordinarily prevalent among those immediately surrounding her. People spoke about her at the beginning of the twentieth century as if she were some kind of modern sibyl. Those closest to her formed derogatory opinions about her academic aptitude and maintained that she had no critical ability to judge her inner experiences. This was certainly the mood around her, though it was carefully hidden—I will not say kept secret—from the wider circle of theosophical leaders.

In addition to what came to light in a sibylline way through Mrs Besant, and through Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, the Theosophical Movement at the end of the nineteenth century also had Sinnett's book or, rather, books. The manner in which people spoke about these in private was, equally, hardly an appeal to man's own power of knowledge. Much was made in private about the fact that in what Sinnett had published there was nothing which he had contributed out of his own experience. The value of a book such as his Esoteric Buddhism was seen to lie particularly in the fact that the whole of the content had come to him in the form of ‘magical letters’, precipitated—no one knew whence—into the physical plane—one could almost say, thrown down to the physical plane—which he then worked into the book Esoteric Buddhism.

All these things led to a mood among the wider circles of the theosophical leaders which was sentimental and devotional in the highest degree. They looked up, in a way, to a wisdom which had fallen from heaven, and—humanly, quite understandable—this devotion was transferred to individual personalities. However, this became the incentive for a high level of insincerity which was easy to discern in a number of phenomena.

Thus, for instance, even in 1902 I heard in the more private gatherings in London that Sinnett was, in fact, an inferior spirit. One of the leading personalities said to me at that time: Sinnett could be compared with a journalist—say, of the Frankfurter Zeitung—who has been dispatched to India; he is a journalistic spirit who simply had the good fortune to receive the ‘Master's letters’ and make use of them in his book in a journalistic way which is in keeping with modern mankind!

You know, though, that all this is only one aspect of a wide spectrum of literature. For in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, there appeared—if not a Biblical deluge, then certainly a flood of—written material which was intended to lead mankind in one way or another to the spiritual world. Some of this material harked back directly to ancient traditions which have been preserved by all kinds of secret brotherhoods. It is most interesting to follow the development of this tradition.

I have often pointed out how, in the second half of the eighteenth century, old traditions could be found in the circle led by Saint-Martin, the philosophe inconnu. In Saint-Martin's writings, especially Des erreurs et de la vérité, there is a very great deal of what came from ancient traditions, clothed in a more recent form. If we follow these traditions further back, we do indeed come to ideas which can conquer concrete situations, which can influence reality. By the time they had come down to Saint-Martin, these concepts had already become exceedingly shadowy, but they were nevertheless shadows of concepts which had once been very much alive; ancient traditions were living one last time in a shadowy form. So in Saint-Martin's work we find the healthiest concepts clothed in a form which is a final glimmer. It is particularly interesting to see how Saint-Martin fights against the concept of matter, which had already come to the fore. What did this concept of matter gradually become? It became a view in which the world is seen as a fog made up of atoms moving about and bumping into one another and forming configurations which are at the root of all things taking shape around us. In theory materialism reached its zenith at the point when the existence of everything except the atom was denied. Saint-Martin still maintained the view that the whole science of atoms, and indeed the whole belief that matter was something real, was nonsense; which indeed it is. If we delve into all that is around us, chemically, physically, we come in the final analysis not to atoms, not to anything material, but to spiritual beings. The concept of matter is an aid; but it corresponds to nothing that is real. Wherever—to use a phrase coined by du Bois-Reymond—‘matter floats about in space like a ghost’: there may be found the spirit. The only way to speak of an atom is to speak of a little thrust of spirit, albeit ahrimanic spirit. It was a healthy idea of Saint-Martin to do battle against the concept of matter.

Another immensely healthy idea of Saint-Martin was the living way in which he pointed to the fact that all separate, concrete human languages are founded on a single universal language. This was easier to do in his day than it is now, because in his time there was still a more living relationship to the Hebrew language which, among all modern languages, is the one closest to the archetypal universal language. It was still possible to feel at that time the way in which spirit flowed through the Hebrew language, giving the very words something genuinely ideal and spiritual. So we find in Saint-Martin's work an indication, concrete and spiritual, of the meaning of the word ‘the Hebrew’. In the whole way he conceived of this we find a living consciousness of a relationship of the human being with the spiritual world. This word ‘the Hebrew’ is connected with ‘to journey’. A Hebrew is one who makes a journey through life, one who gathers experiences as on a journey. Standing in the world in a living way—this is the foundation of this word and of all other words in the Hebrew language if they are sensed in their reality.

However, in his own time Saint-Martin was no longer able to find ideas which could point more precisely, more strongly, to what belonged to the archetypal language. These will have to be rediscovered by spiritual science. But he had before his soul a profound notion of what the archetypal language had been. Because of this his concept of the unity of the human race was more concrete and less abstract than that which the nineteenth century made for itself. This concrete concept of the unity of the human race made it possible for him, at least within his own circle, to bring fully to life certain spiritual truths, for instance, the truth that the human being, if only he so desires, really can enter into a relationship with spiritual beings of higher hierarchies. It is one of his cardinal principles, which states that every human being is capable of entering into a relationship with spiritual beings of higher hierarchies. Because of this there still lived in him something of that ancient, genuine mystic mood which knew that knowledge, if it is to be true knowledge, cannot be absorbed in a conceptual form only, but must be absorbed in a particular mood of soul—that is after a certain preparation of the soul. Then it becomes part of the soul's spiritual life.

Hand in hand with this, however, went a certain sum of expectations, of evolutionary expectations directed to those human souls who desired to claim a right to participate in some way in evolution. From this point of view it is most interesting to see how Saint-Martin makes the transition from what he has won through knowledge, through science—which is spiritual in his case—to politics, how he arrives at political concepts. For here he states a precise requirement, saying that every ruler ought to be a kind of Melchizedek, a kind of priest-king.

Just imagine if this requirement, put forward in a relatively small circle before the outbreak of the French Revolution, had been a dawn instead of a dusk; just imagine if this idea—that those whose concepts and forces were to influence human destiny must fundamentally have the characteristics of a Melchizedek—had been absorbed, even partially, into the consciousness of the time, how much would have been different in the nineteenth century! For the nineteenth century was, in truth, as distant as it could possibly be from this concept. The demand that politicians should first undertake to study at the school of Melchizedek would, of course, have been dismissed with a shrug.

Saint-Martin has to be pointed out because he bears within him something which is a last glimmer of the wisdom that has come down from ancient times. It has had to die away because mankind in the future must ascend to spirituat life in a new way. Mankind must ascend in a new way because a merely traditional continuation of old ideas never has been in keeping with the germinating forces of the human soul. These underdeveloped forces of the human soul will tend, during the course of the twentieth century, in a considerable number of individuals—this has been said often enough—to lead to true insight into etheric processes. The first third of the twentieth century can be seen as a critical period during which a goodly number of human beings ought to be made aware of the fact that events must be observed in the etheric world which lives all around us, just as much as does the air. We have pointed emphatically to one particular event which must be seen in the etheric world if mankind is not to fall into decadence, and that is the appearance of the Etheric Christ. This is a necessity. Mankind must definitely prepare not to let wither those forces which are already sprouting.

These forces must not be allowed to wither for, if they did, what would happen? In the forties and fifties of the twentieth century the human soul would assume exceedingly odd characteristics in the widest circles. Concepts would arise in the human soul which would have an oppressive effect. If materialism were the only thing to continue, concepts which exist in the human soul would arise, but they would rise up out of the unconscious in a way which people would not understand. A waking nightmare, a kind of general state of neurasthenia, would afflict a huge number of people. They would find themselves having to think things without understanding why they were thinking them.

The only antidote to this is to plant, in human souls, concepts which stem from spiritual science. Without these, the forces of insight into those concepts which will rise up, into those ideas which will make their appearance, will be paralysed. Then, not the Christ alone, but also other phenomena in the etheric world, which human beings ought to see, will withdraw from man, will go past unnoticed. Not only will this be a great loss, but human beings will also have to develop pathological substitute forces for those which ought to have developed in a healthy way.

It was out of an instinctive need in wide circles of mankind that the endeavours arose which expressed themselves in that flood of literature and written material mentioned earlier. Now, because of a peculiar phenomenon, the Anthroposophical Movement of Central Europe was in a peculiar position relative to the Theosophical Movement—particularly to the Theosophical Society—as well as to that other flood of written material about spiritual matters. Because of the evolutionary situation in the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was possible for a great number of people to find spiritual nourishment in all this literature; and it was also possible for a great number of people to be utterly astounded by what came to light through Sinnett and Blavatsky. However, all this was not quite in harmony with Central European consciousness. Those who are familiar with Central European literature are in no doubt that it is not necessarily possible to live in the element of this Central European literature while at the same time taking up the attitude of so many others to that flood. This is because Central European literature encompasses immeasurably much of what the seeker for the spirit longs for—only it is hidden behind the peculiar language which so many people would rather have nothing to do with.

We have often spoken about one of those spirits who prove that spiritual life works and weaves in artistic literature, in belletristic literature: Novalis. For more prosaic moods we might equally well have mentioned Friedrich Schlegel, who wrote about the wisdom of ancient India in a way which did not merely reproduce that wisdom but brought it to a fresh birth out of the western cultural spirit. There is much we could have pointed to that has nothing to do with that flood of written material, but which I have sketched historically in my book Vom Menschenrätsel. People like Steffens, like Schubert, like Troxler, wrote about all these things far more precisely and at a much more modern level than anything found in that flood of literature which welled up during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. You have to admit that, compared with the profundity of Goethe, Schlegel, Schelling, those things which are held to be so marvellously wise are nothing more than trivia, utter trivia. Someone who has absorbed the spirit of Goethe can regard even a work like such as Light on the Path as no more than commonplace. This ought not to be forgotten. To those who have absorbed the inspiration of Novalis or Friedrich Schlegel, or enjoyed Schelling's Bruno, all this theosophical literature can seem no more than vulgar and ordinary. Hence the peculiar phenomenon that there were many people who had the earnest, honest desire to reach a spiritual life but who, because of their mental make-up were, in the end, to some degree satisfied with the superficial literature described.

On the other hand, the nineteenth century had developed in such a way that those who were scientifically educated had become—for reasons I have often discussed—materialistic thinkers about whom nothing could be done. However, in order to work one's way competently through what came to light at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century through Schelling, Schlegel, Fichte, one does need at least some scientific concepts. There is no way of proceeding without them. The consequence was this peculiar phenomenon: It was not possible to bring about a situation—which would have been desirable—in which a number of scientifically educated people, however small, could have worked out their scientific concepts in such a way that they could have made a bridge to spiritual science. No such people were to be found. This is a difficulty that still exists and of which we must be very much aware.

Supposing we were to approach those who have undergone a scientific education, with the intention of introducing them to Anthroposophy: lawyers, doctors, philologists—not to mention theologians—when they have finished their academic education and reached a certain stage in life at which it is necessary for them, in accordance with life's demands, to make use of what they have absorbed, not to say, have learnt. They then no longer have either the inclination or the mobility to extricate themselves from their concepts and to seek for others. That is why scientifically-educated people are the most inclined to reject Anthroposophy, although it would only be a small step for a modern scientist to build a bridge. But he does not want to do so. It confuses him. What does he need it for? He has learnt what life demands of him and, so he believes, he does not want things which only serve to confuse him and undermine his confidence. It is going to take some considerable time before these people who have gone through the education of their day start to build bridges in any great numbers. We shall have to be patient. It will not come about easily, especially in certain fields. And when the building of bridges is seriously tackled in a particular field, great obstacles and hindrances will be encountered. It will be necessary above all to build bridges in the fields encompassed by the various faculties, with the exception of theology.

In the field of law the concepts being worked out are becoming more and more stereotyped and quite unsuitable for the regulation of real life. But they do regulate it because life on the physical plane is maya; if it were not maya, they would be incapable of regulating it. As it is, their application is bringing more and more confusion into the world. The application of today's jurisprudence, especially in civil law, does nothing but bring confusion into the situation. But this is not clearly seen. Indeed, how should it be seen? No one follows up the consequences of applying stereotyped concepts to reality. People study law, they become solicitors or judges, they absorb the concepts and apply them. What happens as a consequence of their application is of no interest. Or life is seen as it is—despite the existence of the law, which is a very difficult subject to study for many reasons, not least because law students tend to waste the first few terms—life is seen as it is; we see that everything is in a muddle and do no more than complain.

In the field of medicine the situation is more serious. If medicine continues to develop in the wake of materialism as it has been doing since the second third of the nineteenth century, it will eventually reach an utterly nonsensical situation, for it will end up in absurd medical specializations. The situation is more serious here because this tendency was, in fact, necessary and a good thing. But now it is time for it to be overcome. The materialistic tendency in medicine meant that surgery has reached a high degree of specialization, which was only possible because of this one-sided tendency. But medicine as such has suffered as a result. So now it needs to turn around completely and look towards a real spirituality—but the resistance to this is enormous.

Education is the field which, more than any other, needs to be permeated with spirituality, as we have said often enough. Bridges need to be built everywhere.

In technology—although it may appear to be furthest away from the spirit—it is above all necessary that bridges should be built to the life of the spirit, out of direct practical life. The fifth post-Atlantean period is the one which is concerned with the development of the material world, and if the human being is not to degenerate totally into a mere accomplice of machines—which would make him into nothing more than an animal—then a path must be found which leads from these very machines to the life of the spirit. The priority for those working practically with machines is that they take spiritual impulses into their own soul. This will come about the moment students of technology are taught to think just a little more than is the case at present; the moment they are taught to think in such a way that they see the connections between the different things they learn. As yet they are unable to do this. They attend lectures on mathematics, on descriptive geometry, even on topology sometimes; on pure mechanics, analytical mechanics, industrial mechanics, and also all the various more practical subjects. But it does not even occur to them to look for a connection between all these different things. As soon as people are obliged to apply their own common sense to things, they will be forced—simply on account of the stage of development these various subjects have reached—to push forward into the nature of these things and then on into the spiritual realm. From machines, in particular, a path will truly have to be found into the spiritual world.

I am saying all this in order to point out what difficulties today face the spiritual-scientific Movement, because so far there are no individuals to be found who might be capable of generating an atmosphere of taking things seriously. This Movement suffers most of all from a lack of being taken seriously. It is remarkable how this comes to the fore in all kinds of details. Much of what we have published would have been taken seriously, would have been seen in quite a different light, if it had not been made known that it stemmed from someone belonging to the Theosophical Movement. Simply because the person concerned was in the Theosophical Movement, his work was stamped as something not to be taken seriously. It is most important to realize this, and it is just these trifling details which make it plain. Not out of any foolish vanity but just so that you know what I mean, let me give you an example of one of these trifles which I came across only the other day.

In my book Vom Menschenrätsel I wrote about Karl Christian Planck as one of those spirits who, out of certain inner foundations, worked towards the spiritual realm, even though only in an abstract way. I have not only written about him in this book, but also—over the past few winters—spoken about him in some detail in a number of cities, showing how he went unrecognized, or was misunderstood, and referring especially to ane particular circumstance. This was the fact that, in the eighties, seventies, sixties, fifties, this man had ideas and thoughts in connection with industrial and social life which ought to have been put into practice. If only there had been someone at that time with the capacity of employing in social life the great ideas this man had, ideas truly compatible with reality, then—and I am not exaggerating—mankind would probably not now be suffering all that is going on today which, for the greater part, is a consequence of the totally wrong social structure in which we are living.

I have told you that it is a real duty not to let human beings come to a pass such as that reached by Karl Christian Planck, who finally came to be utterly devoid of any love for the world of external physical reality. He was a Swabian living in Stuttgart. He was refused a place in the philosophy department of Tübingen University, where he would have had the opportunity to put forward some of his ideas. I entirely intentionally mentioned the fact that, when he wrote the foreword to his book Testament of a German, he felt moved to say, ‘Not even my bones shall rest in the soil of my ungrateful fatherland’. Hard words. Words such as people today can be driven to utter when faced with the stupidity of their fellow human beings, who refuse to see the point about what is really compatible with reality. In Stuttgart I purposely quoted these words about his bones, for Stuttgart is Planck's fatherland in the narrower sense. There was little reaction, despite the fact that events had already reached a stage when there would have been every reason to understand the things he had said.

Now, however, a year-and-a-half later, the following notice may be found in the Swabian newspapers:

‘Karl Christian Planck. More than one far-seeing spirit foretold the present World War. But none anticipated its scale nor understood its causes and effects as clearly as did our Swabian countryman Planck.’

I said in my lecture that Karl Christian Planck had foreseen the present World War, and that he even expressly stated that Italy would not be on the side of the Central Powers, even though he was speaking at the time when the alliance had not yet been concluded, but was only in the making.

‘To him this war seemed to be the unavoidable goal toward which political and economic developments had been inexorably moving for the last fifty years.’

This is indeed the case!

‘Just as he revealed the damage being done in his day, so he also pointed the way which can lead us to other situations.’

This is the important point. But nobody listened!

‘By him we are told the deeper reasons underlying war profiteering and other black marks which mar so many good and pleasing aspects of the life of the nation today. He knows where the deeper, more inward forces of the nation lie and can tell us how to release them so that the moral and social renewal longed for by the best amongst us can come about. Despite all the painful disappointments meted out to him by his contemporaries, he continued to believe in these forces and their triumphant emergence.’

Nevertheless, he was driven to utter the words I have quoted!

‘The news will therefore be widely welcomed that the philosopher's daughter is about to give an introduction to Planck's social and political thinking in a number of public lectures.’

It is interesting that a year-and-a-half later his daughter should be putting in an appearance. This notice appeared in a Stuttgart newspaper. But a year-and-a-half ago, when I drew attention as plainly as possible in Stuttgart to the the philosopher Karl Christian Planck, no one took the slightest notice, and no one felt moved to make known what I had said. Now his daughter puts in an appearance. Her father died in 1880, and presumably she had been born by then. Yet she has waited all this time before standing up for him by giving public lectures.

This example could be multiplied not tenfold, but a hundredfold. It shows once again how difficult it is to bring together the all-embracing aspect of spiritual science with everyday practical details, despite the fact that it is absolutely essential that this should be done. Only through the all-embracing nature of spiritual science—this must be understood—can healing come about for what lives in the culture of today.

That is why it has been essential to keep steering what we call anthroposophical spiritual science, in whatever way possible, along the more serious channels which have been increasingly deserted by the Theosophical Movement. The spirit that was even known to the ancient Greek philosophers had to be allowed to come through, although this has led to the opinion that what is written in consequence is difficult to read. It has often not been easy. Especially within the Movement it met with the greatest difficulties. And one of the greatest difficulties has been the fact that it really has taken well over a decade to overcome one fundamental abstraction. Laborious and patient work has been necessary to overcome this fundamental abstraction which has been one of the most damaging things for our Movement. This basic abstraction consisted simply in the insistence on clinging to the word ‘theosophy’, regardless of whether whatever was said to be ‘theosophical’ referred to something filled with the spirituality of modern life, or to no more than some rubbish published by Rohm or anyone else. Anything ‘theosophical’ had equal justification, for this prompted ‘theosophical tolerance’.

Only very gradually has it been possible to work against these things. They could not be pointed out directly at the beginning, because that would have seemed arrogant. Only gradually has it been possible to awaken a feeling for the fact that differences do exist, and that tolerance used in this connection is nothing more than an expression of a total lack of character on which to base judgements. What matters now is to work towards knowledge of a kind which can cope with reality, which can tackle the demands of reality. Only a spiritual science that works with the concepts of our time can tackle the demands of reality. Not living in comfortable theosophical ideas but wrestling for spiritual reality—this must be the direction of our endeavour.

Some people still have no idea what is meant by wrestling for reality, for they are fighting shy of understanding clearly how threadbare are the concepts with which they work today. Let me give you a small example, from a seemingly unrelated subject, of what it means to wrestle for reality in concepts. I shall be brief, so please be patient while I explain something that might seem rather far-fetched.

There were always isolated individuals in the nineteenth century who were prepared to take up the question of reality. For reality was then supposed to burst in on mankind with entirely fresh ideas about life, not only the unimportant aspects but especially the basic practical aspects of life. Thus at a certain point in the nineteenth century Euclid's postulate of parallels was challenged. When are two lines parallel? Who could have failed to agree that two lines are parallel if they never meet, however long they are! For that is the definition: That two straight lines are parallel if they never meet, whatever the distance to which they are extended. In the nineteenth century there were individuals who devoted their whole life to achieving clarity about this concept, for it does not stand up to exact thinking. In order to show you what it means to wrestle for concepts, let me read you a letter written by Wolfgang Bolyai. The mathematician Gauss had begun to realize that the definition of two straight lines being parallel if they meet at infinity, or not at all, was no more than empty words and meant nothing. The older Bolyai, the father, was a friend and pupil of Gauss, who also stimulated the younger Bolyai, the son. And the father wrote to the son:

‘Do not look for the parallels in that direction. I have trodden that path to its end; I have traversed bottomless night in which every light, every joy of my life has been extinguished. By God I implore you to leave the postulate of the parallels alone! Shun it as you would a dissolute association, for it can rob you of all your leisure, your health, your peace of mind and every pleasure in life. It will never grow light on earth and the unfortunate human race will never gain anything perfectly pure, not even geometry itself. In my soul there is a deep and eternal wound. May God save you from being eaten away by another such. It robs me of my delight in geometry, and indeed of life on earth. I had resolved to sacrifice myself for the truth. I would have been prepared for martyrdom if only I could have handed geometry back to mankind purified of this blemish. I have accomplished awful, gigantic works, have achieved far more than ever before, but never found total satisfaction. Si paullum a summo discessit, vergit ad imum. When I saw that the foundation of this night cannot be reached from the earth I returned, comfortless, sorrowing for my self and the human race. Learn from my example. Desiring to know the parallels, I have remained without knowledge. And they have robbed me of all the flowers of my life and time. They have become the root of all my subsequent failures, and much rain has fallen on them from our lowering domestic clouds. If I could have discovered the parallels I would have become an angel, even if none had ever known of my discovery.

... Do not attempt it ... It is a labyrinth that forever blocks your path. If you enter you will grow poor, like a treasure hunter, and your ignorance will not cease. Should you arrive at whatever absurd discovery, it will be for naught, untenable as an axiom ...

... The pillars of Hercules are situated in this region. Go not a step further, or you will be lost.’

Nevertheless, the younger Bolyai did go further, even more so than his father, and devoted his whole life to the search for a concrete concept in a field where such a concept seemed to exist, but which was, however, empty words. He wanted to discover whether there really was such a thing as two straight lines which did not meet, even in infinity. No one has ever paced out this infinite distance, for that would take an infinite time, but this time has not yet run its course. It is nothing more than words. Such empty words, such conceptual shadows, are to be found behind all kinds of concepts. I simply wanted to point out to you how even the most thorough spirits of the nineteenth century suffered because of the abstractness of these concepts! It is interesting to see that while children are taught in every school that parallel lines are those which never meet, however long they are, there have been individual spirits for whom working with such concepts became a hell, because they were seeking to push through to a real concept instead of a stereotyped concept.

Wrestling with reality—this is what matters, yet this is the very thing our contemporaries shun, more or less, because they ‘realize’, or imagine they realize, that they have ‘high ideals’! It is not ideals that matter, but impulses which work with reality. Imagine someone were to make a beautiful statement such as: At long last a time must come when those who are most capable are accorded the consideration due to them. What a lovely programme! Whole societies could be established in accordance with this programme. Even political sciences could be founded on this basis. But it is not the statement that counts. What counts is the degree to which it is permeated by reality. For what is the use—however valid the statement, and however many societies choose it for the prime point in their programmes—if those in power happen to see only their nephews as being the most capable? It is not a matter of establishing the validity of the statement that the most capable should be given their due. The important thing is to have the capacity to find those who are the most capable, whether they are one's nephews or not! We must learn to understand that abstract concepts always fall through the cracks of life, and that they never mean anything, and that all our time is wasted on all these beautiful concepts. I have no objection to their beauty, but what matters is our grasp and knowledge of reality.

Suppose the lion were to found a social order for the animals, dividing up the kingdom of the earth in a just way. What would he do? I do not believe it would occur to him to push for a situation in which the small animals of the desert, usually eaten by the lion, would have the possibility of not being eaten by the lion! He would consider it his lion's right to eat the small animals he meets in the desert. It is conceivable, though, that for the ocean he would find it just and proper to forbid the sharks to eat the little fishes. This might very well happen. The lion might establish a tremendously just social order in the oceans, at the North Pole or wherever else he himself is not at home, giving all the animals their freedom. But whether he would be pleased to establish such an order in his own region is a question indeed. He knows very well what justice is in the social order, and he will put it into practice efficiently in the kingdom of the sharks.

Let us now turn from lions to Hungaricus. I told you two days ago about his small pamphlet Conditions de Paix de l'Allemagne. This pamphlet swims entirely with the stream of that map of Europe which was first mentioned in the famous note from the Entente to Wilson about the partition of Austria. We have spoken about it. With the exception of Switzerland, Hungaricus is quite satisfied with this map. He begins by talking very wisely—just as most people today talk very wisely—about the rights of nations, even the rights of small nations, and about the right of the state to be coincident with the power of the nation, and so on. This is all very nice, in the same way that the statement, about the most capable being given his due, is nice. As long as the concepts remain shadowy we can, if we are idealists, be delighted when we read Hungaricus. For the Swiss, the pamphlet is even nicer than the map, for rather than wiping Switzerland off the map, Hungaricus adds the Vorarlberg and the Tyrol. So I recommend the Swiss to read the pamphlet rather than look at the map. But now Hungaricus proceeds to divide up the rest of the world. In his own way he accords to every nation, even the smallest, the absolute right to develop freely—as long as he considers he is not causing offence to the Entente. He trims his words a little, of course, saying ‘independence’ when referring to Bohemia, and obviously ‘autonomy’ with regard to Ireland. Well, this is the done thing, is it not! It is quite acceptable to dress things up a little. He divides up the world of Europe quite nicely, so that apart from the things I have mentioned—which are to avoid causing offence—he really endeavours to apportion the smallest nations to those states to which the representatives of the Entente believe they belong. It is not so much a question of whether these small territories are really inhabited by those nationalities, but of whether the Entente actually believes this to be the case. He makes every effort to divide up the world nicely, with the exception of the desert—oh, pardon me—with the exception of Hungary, which is where he practises his lion's right! Perfect freedom is laid down for the kingdom of the sharks. But the Magyar nation is his nation, and this is to comprise not only what it comprises today—though without it only a minority of the population would be Magyar, the majority being others—but other territories as well. Here he well and truly acts the part of the lion.

Here we see how concepts are formulated nowadays and how people think nowadays. It gives us an opportunity to study how urgent it is to find the transition to a thinking which is permeated with reality. For this, concepts such as those I have been giving you are necessary. I want to show you—indeed, I must show you—how spiritual thinking leads to ideas which are compatible with reality. One must always combine the correct thought with the object; then one can recognize whether that object corresponds to reality or not.

Take Wilson's note to the Senate. As a sample it could even have certain effects in some respects. But this is not what matters. What matters is that it contains ‘shadowy concepts’. If it nevertheless has an effect, this is due to the vexatious nature of our time which can be influenced by vexatious means. Look at this matter objectively and try to form a concept against which you can measure the reality, the real content with which this shadowy concept could be linked. You need only ask one question: Could this note not just as well have been written in 1913? The idealistic nothings it contains could just as easily have been expressed in 1913! You see, a thinking which believes in the absolute is not based on reality. It is unrealistic to think that something ‘absolute’ will result every time. The present age has no talent for seeing through the lack of reality in thinking because it is always out for what is ‘right’ rather than for what is in keeping with reality.

That is why in my book Vom Menschenrätsel I emphasized so heavily the importance not only of what is logical but also of what is in keeping with reality. A single decision that took account of the facts as they are at this precise moment would be worth more than all the empty phrases put together. Historical documents are perhaps the best means of showing that what I am saying has to do with reality, for as time has gone on the only people to come to the surface are those who want to rule the world with abstractions, and this is what has led to the plight of the world today. Proper thinking, which takes account of things as they are, will discover the realities wherever they are. Indeed, they are so close at hand! Take the real concept which I introduced from another point of view the other day: Out of what later became Italy in the South there arose the priestly cultic element which created as its opposition the Protestantism of Central Europe; from the West was formed the diplomatic, political element which also created an opposition for itself; and from the North-west was formed the mercantile element which again created for itself an opposition; and in Central Europe an opposition coming out of the general, human element will of necessity arise. Let us look once more at the way these things stream outwards. (See diagram.)

Even for the fourth post-Atlantean period—proceeding on from the old fourfold classification in which one spoke of castes—we can begin to describe this structure in a somewhat different way: Plato spoke of ‘guardian-rulers’; this is the realm for which Rome—priestly, papal Rome—seized the monopoly, achieving a situation in which she alone was allowed to establish doctrinal truths. She was to be the only source of all doctrine, even the highest.

In a different realm, the political, diplomatic element is nothing other than Plato's ‘guardian-auxiliaries’. I have shown you that, regardless of what people call Prussian militarism, the real military element was formed with France as its starting point, after the first foundations had been laid in Switzerland. That is where the military element began, but of course it created an opposition for itself by withholding from others what it considered to be its own prerogative. It wants to dominate the world in a soldierly way, so that when something soldierly comes to meet it from elsewhere it finds this quite unjustified, just as Rome finds it unjustified if something comes towards her which is to do with the great truths of the universe.

And here, instead of mercantilism, we might just as well write ‘the industrial and agricultural class’. Think on this, meditate on it, and you will come to understand that this third factor corresponds to the provision of material needs. So what is being withheld? Foodstuffs, of course!

If you apply Plato's concepts appropriately, in accordance with reality, then you will find reality everywhere, for with these concepts you will be able fully to enter into reality. Starting from the concept, you must find the way to reality, and the concept will be able to plunge down into the most concrete parts of reality. Shadowy concepts, on the other hand, never find reality, but they do lend themselves exceptionally well to idealistic chatter. With real concepts, though, you can work you way through to an understanding of reality in every detail. Here lies the task of spiritual science. Spiritual science leads to concepts through which you can really discover life, which of course is created by the spirit, and through which you will be able to join in a constructive way at working on the formation of this life.

One concept, in particular, requires realistic thinking, owing to the terrible destiny at present weighing down on mankind, for the corresponding unreal concept is especially persistent in this connection. Those who speak in the most unrealistic way of all, these days, are the clergymen. What they express about Christianity or the awareness of God, apropos of the war, is enough to send anyone up the wall, as they say. They distort things so frightfully. Of course things in other connections are distorted too, but in this realm the degree of absurdity is even greater.

Look at the sermons or tracts at present stemming from that source; apply your good common sense to them. Of course it is understandable that they should ask: Does mankind have to be subjected to this terrible, painful destiny? Could not the divine forces of God intervene on behalf of mankind to bring about salvation? The justification for speaking in this way does indeed seem absolute. But there is no real concept behind it. It does not apply to the reality of the situation. Let me use a comparison to show you what I mean.

Human beings have a certain physical constitution. They take in food which is of a kind which enables them to go on living. If they were to refuse food, they would grow thin, become ill, and finally starve to death. Now is it natural to complain that if human beings refuse to eat it is a weakness or malevolence on the part of God to let them starve? Indeed it is not a weakness on the part of God. He created the food; human beings only need to eat it. The wisdom of God is revealed in the way the food maintains the human beings. If they refuse to eat it, they cannot turn round and accuse God of letting them starve.

Now apply this to what I was saying. Mankind must regard spiritual life as a food. It is given by the gods, but it has to be taken in by man. To say that the gods ought to intervene directly is tantamount to saying that if I refuse to eat God ought to satisfy my hunger in some other way. The wisdom-filled order of the universe ensures that what is needed for salvation is always available, but it is up to human beings to make a relationship with it. So the spiritual life necessary for the twentieth century will not enter human beings of itself. They must strive for it and take it into themselves. If they fail to take it in, times will grow more and more dismal. What takes place on the surface is only maya. What is happening inwardly, is that an older age is wrestling with a new one. The general, human element is rising up everywhere in opposition to the specialized elements. It is maya to believe that nation is fighting against nation—and I have spoken about this maya in other connections too. The battle of nation with nation only comes about because things group themselves in certain ways but, in reality, the inward forces opposing one another are something quite different. The opposition is between the old and the new. The laws now fighting to come into play are quite different from those which have traditionally ruled over the world.

And again it was maya—that is, something appearing under a false guise—to say that those other laws were rising up on behalf of socialism. Socialism is not something connected with truth; above all it is not connected with spiritual life, for what it wants is to connect itself with materialism. What really wants to wrestle its way into existence is the many-sided, harmonious element of mankind, in opposition to the one-sided priestly, political or mercantile elements. This battle will rage for a long time, but it can be conducted in all kinds of different ways. If a healthy way of leading life, such as that described by Planck in the nineteenth century, had been adopted, then the bloody conduct of the first third of the twentieth century would, at least, have been ameliorated. Idealisms do not lead to amelioration, but realistic thinking does, and realistic thinking also always means spiritual thinking.

Equally, we can say that whatever has to happen will happen. Whatever it is that is wrestling its way out, must needs go through all these experiences in order to reach a stage at which spirituality can be united with the soul, so that man can grow up spiritually. Today's tragic destiny of mankind is that in striving upwards today, human beings are endeavouring to do so not under the sign of spirituality but under the sign of materialism. This in the first instance is what brought them into conflict with those brotherhoods who want to develop the impulses of the mercantile element, commerce and industry, in a materialistic way on a grand scale. This is today's main conflict. All other things are side issues, often terrible side issues. This shows us how terrible maya can be. But it is possible to strive for things in different ways. If others had been in power instead of the agents of those brotherhoods, then we would, today, be busy with peace negotiations, and the Christmas call for peace would not have been shouted down!

It is going to be immensely difficult to find clear and realistic concepts and ideas in respect of certain things; but we must all seek to find them in our own areas. Those who enter a little into the meaning of spiritual science, and compare this spiritual science with other things making an appearance just now, will see that this spiritual science is the only path that can lead to concepts which are filled with reality.

I wanted to say this very seriously to you at this time. Despite the fact that the task of spiritual science can only be comprehended out of the spirit itself, out of knowledge, and not out of what we have been discussing today, I wanted to show you the significance, the essential nature, of spiritual science for the present time. I wanted to show you how urgent it is for everything possible to be done to make spiritual science more widely known. It is so necessary in these difficult times for us to take spiritual science not only into our heads but really into our warm hearts. Only if we take it into the warmth of our hearts will we be capable of generating the strength needed by the present time.

None of us should allow ourselves to think that we are perhaps not in a suitable position, or not strong enough, to do what it is essential for us to do. Karma is sure to give every one of us, whatever our position, the opportunity to put the right questions to destiny at the right moment. Even if this right moment is neither today nor tomorrow, it is sure to come eventually. So once we have understood the impulses of this spiritual Movement we must stand firmly and steadfastly behind them. Today it is particularly necessary to set ourselves the aim of firmness and steadfastness. For either something important must come from one side or another—although this cannot be counted upon—in the very near future, or all conditions of life will become increasingly difficult. It would be utterly thoughtless to refuse to be clear about this. For two-and-a-half years it has been possible for what we now call war to carry on, while conditions remained as bearable as they now are. But this cannot go on for another year. Movements such as ours will be put te a severe test. There will be no question of asking when we shall next meet, or why do we not meet, or why this or that is not being published. No, indeed. It will be a question of bearing in our hearts, even through long periods of danger, a steadfast sense of belonging.

I wanted to say this to you today because it could be possible in the not too distant future that there will be no means of transport which will enable us to come together again; I am not speaking only of travel permits but of actual means of transport. In the long run, it will not be possible to keep the things going which constitute our modern civilization, if something breaks in on this civilization which, although it has arisen out of it, is nevertheless in absolute opposition to it. This is how absurd the situation is: Life itself is bringing forth things which are absolutely opposed to it.

So we must accept that difficult times may be in store for our Movement too. But we shall not be led astray if we have taken into ourselves the inner steadfastness, clarity and right feeling for the importance and nature of our Movement, and if in these serious times we can see beyond our petty differences. This, our Movement ought to be able to achieve; we ought to be able to look beyond our petty differences to the greater affairs of mankind, which are now at stake. The greatest of these is to reach an understanding of what it means to base thinking on reality. Wherever we look we are confronted with the impossibility of finding a thinking which accords with reality. We shall have to enter heart and soul into this search in order not to be led astray by all kinds of egoistic distractions.

This is what I wanted to say to you as my farewell today, since we are about to take leave of one another for some time. Make yourselves so strong—even if it should turn out to be unnecessary—that, even in loneliness of soul, your hearts will carry the pulse of spiritual science with which we are here concerned. Even the thought that we shall be steadfast will help a very great deal; for thoughts are realities. Many potential difficulties can still be swept away if we maintain an honest, serious quest in the direction we have here discussed so often.

Now that we have to depart for a while we shall not allow ourselves to flag, but shall make sure that we return if it is possible. But even if it should take a long time as a result of circumstances outside our control, we shall never lose the thought from our hearts and souls that this is the place—where our Movement has even brought forth a visible building—where the most intense requirement exists to bear this Movement so positively, so concretely, so energetically, that together we can carry it through, come what may. So wherever we are, let us stand together in thought, faithfully, energetically, cordially, and let us hear one another, even though this will not be possible with our physical ears. But we shall only hear one another if we listen with strong thoughts and without sentimentality, for the times are now unsuitable for sentimentality.

In this sense, I say farewell to you. My words are also a greeting, for in the days to come we shall meet again, though more in the spirit than on the physical plane. Let us hope that the latter, too, will be possible once more in the not too distant future.

These are the greatest riddles of existence, where sympathy, antipathy and all sorts of other feelings so easily cloud the view. As far as human thinking reaches, this question has always been thought of. When the spiritual researcher looks at what has been thought, said and researched in this regard by those who take the modern point of view, a point of view that is already over 200 years old, he finds that scholars and non-scholars, the educated and the uneducated, have very peculiar views on the character traits of women and men.

Lombroso's description of woman caused a particularly great stir. He attributes to woman a sense of devotion that permeates the entire female character. Others, in turn, emphasize the feeling of domination and rule in woman: the most important thing in woman's character, as history has shown, is the desire to rule. Two judgments are juxtaposed here. A completely different direction attributes humility and gentleness to the woman's character, and energy to the man's. Others claim that the woman's basic character is patience. Finally, a neurologist describes the female as a pathological nature: “On the Physiological Imbecility of Women”. Some describe the woman as a conservative, Hippel as a revolutionary element in history.

But perhaps it is not reasonable to ask the question at all. Let us limit ourselves to the objective observation of the facts. There are similarities between men and women that are actually much more similar than between men and men or women and women. If you look at life from this point of view, what stands out to you the most, what stands out to you in the strongest way? The female or male character – or other qualities that have nothing to do with male or female characteristics? And is it not perhaps a sign of higher education to be able to recognize that we can also look at a person of the opposite sex and consider them in terms of qualities that have nothing to do with their gender?

Is it justified to attach such great importance to gender in human relationships, as is the case today, or is it not perhaps one of the many consequences of materialism that gender characteristics are given such a prominent role today?

Let us look at the matter objectively! Those who consider human beings only from the external, sensual point of view have only the external in mind. But there is also a supersensible. If we were to turn to the invisible, then perhaps something could arise that stands highly exalted above mere sexual relations. For the one who observes with all the powers of the soul, it is clear that the great importance attached to sexuality, which would like to make everything else devour these sexual relations, is the result of the materialistic way of thinking of our age.

Let us see where the truth about the masculine and the feminine lies! Spiritual science sees many members in the human being: the physical body and the etheric body fight against the disintegration of the human being, the astral body against overwork. The plant, which has no astral body, does not tire either. The astral body is the constant fighter against fatigue; sleep is called upon to remove the fatigue of the etheric and physical bodies. We are confronted here with an extraordinarily important fact!

It is easy to laugh and find it grotesque when naming what is at stake here, but on the other hand it is something that has a deep, deep significance for the knowledge of the true human being and of life on earth. Every human being, whether man or woman, consists of the four elements, but now we have a strange contrast in human nature: the physical body of man is male, the physical body of woman is female; but it is different with the so-called ether or life body: in man the ether body is female, in woman it is male, so that each sex continually carries the other within itself.

As I said, however grotesque this may appear to those who know nothing of these facts, it is all the more enlightening for those who are aware of these things. How profoundly significant this is for many, many phenomena in our everyday and social lives. When we look at the individual human being, can we not see the beautiful harmony of masculine qualities, harmonized by his feminine qualities coming from his etheric body, and vice versa in women? Why is it that the strongest men in particular have certain feminine qualities in certain respects? Or do we not also see heroic qualities in women? Are they not qualities that they develop in war, for example? This fact, which is an ancient spiritual one, is sensed by some people, but how they utilize it is quite characteristic of our materialistic age.

Perhaps most people know that an unhappy young man's book – Weininger's book “Sex and Character” – made a big impact not only because it contains many paradoxes, but also because of the fate of the unfortunate author, who soon after the book was published took his own life. No matter how capable one is, one cannot have judgment at such a young age; one must have patience to form an opinion on these matters. It is not for nothing that the great poet Dante says that he reached the middle of life at the age of 35. Before the age of 35, it is not at all possible to have a sound judgment on this important matter. Well, this Weininger had some inkling of the dual nature of every human being, of the masculinity of women and the femininity of men. However, he conceived this in a materialistic sense, quite literally, by seeking twofold substantiality in every germ cell, a male and a female character in every cell! Thus the visible had to contain the invisible in a mysterious way! One can hardly imagine anything more grotesque! Because he knew nothing of the etheric body, he attributes the invisible to the visible! He does not know that there are higher links, and so he tries to characterize people as falling into two categories: male and female. This leads Weininger to the conclusion that there is a certain difference between the female and the male: the female is physical, and the male is spiritual. He draws the conclusion that women do not have an ego or individuality, personality or freedom, character or will! But then he must also deny the same to the other half! Then he attributes half of this to every woman and takes it away from every man! This is what happens when one wants to apply materialistic theories directly in practice.

Let us now consider other human qualities, for example, the I! Let us look at the sleeping person. When we have a sleeping person in front of us, then all sentient life sinks down into an indefinite darkness; the physical and life bodies remain in bed; from this, the astral body rises with the I. It is in this spiritual world. If we now consider this astral body and the ego in relation to gender, what then emerges? Only spiritual science can provide information here. What we call man and woman here in this world in the physical world and also in the world to which our ether body belongs is not recognized by the astral body, and not by the ego. Masculine and feminine remain connected to the physical and etheric bodies when the person is alive, and without the sexual the person is in a state of sleep, in his actual home, in the so-called astral and spiritual worlds: initially, neither feminine nor masculine is the human astral body and the I.

Now we ask ourselves: Is there nothing at all in this astral world, where we are at night, that corresponds to gender? Here lies a great and significant mystery that man must understand if he dares to make a judgment about it at all! The question is this: What is there in the world that is in the same space as we are here, in a world that we call astral or spiritual, that corresponds to the masculine and the feminine of physical nature? After all, bear in mind that this spiritual or astral world is not in a cloud cuckoo land, but around us. If we now ask what corresponds to the opposition of male and female in this world, we find two essential words that penetrate deep, deep into our soul. If we understand them correctly, they can solve many, many secrets of the astral world.

There, the opposition of life and death, of destruction and development, corresponds to the sexual opposition.

This polar contrast corresponds to it! Two elemental forces are indicated, which go through the whole cosmos and must be there. If man wants to understand here, only the horrors and all the peculiar feelings that are associated with the words death and life in man must cease! He must see the great significance of death and life! Goethe said: “Nature has invented death in order to have many lives!”

What does death mean for a person? Spiritual science shows us that a person does not just die this death once, but that they go through it repeatedly! This life is a repetition of many lives that have preceded it, and many follow the present one, in the alternation between birth and death. And each embodiment means progress for the person in some respect: with each embodiment, the person rises higher. At that time, when the Earth planet emerged from the darkness of life, man first came into the stages of existence in which he now is, into his first physical embodiment, into his first earthly existence. His limbs were imperfect, his ego was a slave to the astral body. Man would never ascend to the higher stages of development if he did not pass through death. Only that can make him ascend.

He had to destroy this body, but what remained for the person from the first form of embodiment? What he had heard and seen went into the spiritual world from which he had come, and now he builds the foundation for his second embodiment in this spiritual world. If he remained in the first, he could never use what one has conquered here in the spiritual world as a creator.

So one must always pass through death again, and an image of death is the solidification of form, the hardening of form. Consider what is called life and death out in nature, look at the tree! How does it approach death? It becomes woody, it dries up. And so it is with everything that must succumb to death! You can follow it in your own human life! You can see very clearly in a person an ascending line of life up to the middle of life, where more and more of the forces developed in the previous incarnation come out, and then the descending line in old age, a hardening. Compacted matter is deposited in various places and so on. Here on this earth, every life is subject to hardening, and hardening is the sister of death.

But hardening is nothing other than that which one side presents, the form, the figure. Imagine life being taken out of a person – what remains? Figure! Study a wonderful picture of life, and what remains is only a picture without life, which you admire, for example, in the great, significant Zeus, and so on. There you have the form, the work of art without life, the image of life, but not filled with life. The form eternally strives to emancipate itself from life, and this emancipation of the form can be seen in the astral world at every moment, there it is what the seer perceives as the image, as the rigid image of life, as the dead form of life. It is a power, like positive magnetism, like electricity; and so this form leads through the astral world.

If it seeks to embody itself here in the physical world, it is beauty! The opposite poles constantly repel each other, push and push, every form that arises is immediately dissolved and transformed into a new one, an eternal metamorphosis. This is brought about by the other pole; it is that which confronts man in the night: will, energy. Form and beauty are the two phenomena here in the physical world, and they surround us in the astral as death and life. Form comes and goes, and life is eternal. The principle of dissolution and that of crystallization are eternally at work. These are two fundamental forces, and in man the images of these two fundamental forces must prevail: the pure astral body is surrounded by death and life in the astral world, and when it enters this world of day, of waking, it is absorbed by the physical body and the etheric body.

The female aspect of the human being is the image of the form, of that which on the astral plane is continually seeking to shape everything into existence; the male aspect of the human being is the image of that which continually seeks to shape everything into something eternal.

In this physical world, the relationship between death and life is determined. What are two poles on the astral plane – death and life, is here an ongoing struggle. The image of all physical life is embodied in the female form - when the progressive principle triumphs, death comes. Here, man's life is determined as dividing between birth and death, in the feminine, which is the image of the formed, of that which pushes towards the solid, that wants to become permanent. If only the feminine were to work, then the human being would have the tendency to live in the physical body for as long as possible, to remain in the form. Through the influence of the masculine, death is instilled into the form. This is the secret of the work between man and woman – through this, life and death are judged in the relationship between the feminine and the masculine. The feminine gives us life, and the masculine limits this life, sets death against life. Thus that which in ordinary life is called an expression of love touches directly on the mystery of death. As a sign of this, beings exist that, in the moment when they love and bring forth a new being, also depart from this world with death.

Thus we have come, as they say in spiritual science, to the edge of a great mystery. The mingling, and what is connected with it, death, shows us the possibility that the sexual antagonism – male and female – is only a specialty, only something special of a great antagonism. We see this antagonism arising on the astral plane as eternally changing life – powerful will and formed beauty. Sexual polarity is a special case. There is a law in the world that is much more significant than sexual polarity. Such laws are present in all worlds, and they work their way down into this world of ours. If people only knew about the most important riddles of existence, they would see that these laws are there, for their consequences are there in the ordinary world. There is the same measure of the masculine and the feminine on earth, of great cosmic forces flowing through the world. Man is immersed in many worlds, and whether a male or a female child is born somewhere does not depend on the parents, but on the forces that are outside of them.

Imagine, for example, two vessels; one filled with a red liquid and the other with a blue liquid. If you immerse any object in the vessel with the blue liquid, that object must come out blue, and vice versa. It is the same with the sexuality of human beings.

The physiologists are doing good research; if they are unable to see and investigate more than what their eyes can see, the secret will never be revealed to them.

Remember the words: In heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. (Matt. 22,30; Mark 12,25; Luke 20,35f.) Therefore man, by his nature, which is neither male nor female, reaches into the higher world, thereby transcending the opposition between male and female, and each of us carries, in addition to our own, a super-male or super-female nature, through which we stand face to face with another human being. The more the higher part of us develops, the more we can stand face to face with another human being in this way.

Theosophy is not about preaching asceticism, not about deadening the senses, but about allowing the feminine and the masculine to flow through and permeate everything. Spiritual science is called upon to bring this back to consciousness in people, and that will be the future coexistence of men and women longed for by the best of men today, when people will be aware of what stands above gender, what carries the highest interests and connects man and woman in itself. Then it will be impossible for the relationship between man and woman to resemble a struggle. And the spiritual-scientific current will be one that will flow through the development of humanity and take hold of people. Then the time will come when people will no longer talk idly and in clichés about whether there is a difference between men and women. The difference cannot be denied in many respects, because we are firmly on this physical plane: if we are a man, we are in the male physical body; if we are a woman, we are in the female physical body. This gives the shading to our outer existence; but when we recognize that we have an innermost core of being, then we will accept this shading with joy, for it gives us the delightful diversity and multiplicity. And precisely when we understand how to find the eternal, the essence, then we can also rejoice in the temporal. Then a great, practical perspective opens up and we see how spiritual science can intervene in life, in art, education and so on. We see that spiritual science is not a gray theory, but a living weaving and working. Those who take it up permeate their whole being with it and ennoble, beautify and uplift the relationships of people, which express themselves in the generations of humanity, by bringing them into harmony, into a collaboration for the great progress and forward movement of the human race.

To-day I wish to speak to you of some fundamental pieces of knowledge of the science of initiation, which will then supply to us a kind of foundation for that which we shall consider tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. To-day we shall first speak of something which lies in the consciousness of every human being, but is not grasped clearly enough in the ordinary course of life. When we speak of such things, we always speak of them from the standpoint of our present time, in the sense and meaning which I have often explained to you: namely, that knowledge is not in any way valid for all time and for every place, but that it is only valid for a certain definite time, indeed, only for a definite region of the earth. Thus, certain standpoints of knowledge would be valid, for instance, for the European civilisation, and other standpoints would be valid—let us say—for the knowledge of the East.

Everybody knows that we live, as it were, between two poles of our knowledge. Everyone feels that, on the one hand, we have the knowledge gained through our senses. A plain, unprejudiced person learns to know the world through his senses, and is even able to sum up what he sees and hears, and, in general, what he perceives through his senses. After all, that which science supplies to us, in the form in which science now exists in the Occident, is merely a summary of that which the senses convey to us.

But everyone can feel that there is also another kind of knowledge, and that it is not possible to be in the full sense of the word a real human being living in the ordinary world, unless another kind of knowledge is added to the one which has just been characterized. And this kind of knowledge is connected with our moral life. We do not only speak of ideas pertaining to the knowledge of Nature, and explaining this or that thing in Nature, we also speak of ethical ideas, ethical ideals. We feel that they are the motives of our actions, and that we allow them to guide us when we ourselves wish to be active in the ordinary world. And every man will undoubtedly feel that this knowledge of the senses, with the resulting intellectual knowledge (for, the intellectual knowledge is merely a result, an appendix of the knowledge transmitted by the senses) is a pole of our cognitive life which cannot reach as far as the ethical ideas. The ethical ideas are there, but when we pursue, for instance, natural science, we cannot find these ethical ideas by contemplating the plant-world, the mineral world, or by following any other branch of modern natural sciences. The tragic element of our time consists, for instance, in trying to discover, upon a natural-scientific basis, ideas which are to be applied to the social sphere. If sound common sense were adopted, this would never be possible. The ethical ideas exist as if on another side of life. And our life is indeed under the influence of these two streams: on the one hand, the knowledge of Nature, and on the other hand, the ethical knowledge.

From my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity you will know that the highest ethical ideas required by us as human beings are given to us when we grasp moral intuitions, and that when we begin to gain possession of these ethical ideas, they are the foundation of our human freedom. On the other hand, you may perhaps also know that for certain thinkers there has always been a kind of abyss between that which is given, on the one hand, by the knowledge of Nature, and on the other hand, by ethical knowledge. The philosophy of Kant is based upon this abyss, which he is unable to bridge completely. For this reason, Kant has written a Critique of Theoretical Reason, of Pure Reason, as he calls it, where he grapples with natural science, and where he says all that he has to say about natural science, or the knowledge of Nature. On the other hand, he has also written a Critique of Practical Reason, where he speaks of ethical ideas. We might say: The whole human life is born for him out of two roots which are completely severed from one another, which he describes in his two chief critical studies.

Of course, it would be unfortunate for the human being if there were no connecting bridge between these two poles of our soul-life. Those who earnestly pursue, on the one hand, spiritual science, and on the other hand, earnestly consider the tasks of our present time, must eagerly ask themselves: Where is the bridge connecting ethical ideas and the ideas of Nature?

To-day we shall adopt the standpoint which I would like to characterize as a historical standpoint, in order to come to a knowledge of this bridge. You already know from the explanations which have recently been given here, that in past times man's soul-constitution was essentially different from that of a later time. The origin of Christianity really forms a deep incision in the whole evolution of humanity. And only if we understand what has really arisen in the evolution of humanity through the birth of Christianity we shall understand human reason.

That which lies behind the rise of Christianity—not to mention Jewish history—is the whole extent of pagan culture. Jewish culture was, after all, a preparation for Christianity. This whole extent of pagan culture is essentially different from our modern Christian culture. The more we go back into time, the more we shall find that this pagan culture had a uniform character. It was principally based upon human wisdom. I know that it is almost offending for a modern man to hear that, as far as wisdom is concerned, the ancients were far more advanced than modern man; nevertheless it was so. In ancient pagan times a wisdom extended over the earth, which was far nearer to the origin of things than our modern knowledge, particularly our modern natural sciences. This ancient, this primeval knowledge, was very concrete, it was a knowledge intensively connected with the spiritual reality of things. Something entered the human soul through man's knowledge of the reality of things. But the special characteristic of this ancient pagan wisdom was the fact that the human beings obtained it in such a way (you know that they obtained it from the Mysteries of the Initiates) that this wisdom contained both a knowledge of Nature, and an ethical knowledge. This extraordinarily significant truth in the history of human evolution, this truth which I have just explained to you, is ignored to-day only because people cannot go back to the truly characteristic times of the ancient pagan wisdom. A historical knowledge does not reach back so far as to enable us to grasp the times when the human beings who looked up to the stars really received from the stars, on the one hand, a wisdom explaining to them in their own way the course of the stars, but on the other hand, it also told them how they were to behave and act here upon the earth. Metaphorically speaking, (yet it is not entirely metaphorical, but quite objective up to a certain degree), we might say, that the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Chaldean civilisations were, for instance, of such a kind that men could read the laws of Nature in the course of the stars, but in the star's course they could also read the rules governing that which they were to do upon the earth.

The codices of the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs contain, for instance, rules concerning that which was to become law. It was so that for centuries ahead that which would later on become law was foretold prophetically. Everything contained in these codices was read from the course of the stars. In those ancient times there was no astronomy such as we have it now, merely containing mathematical laws of the movements of the stars or of the earth, but there was a knowledge of the cosmos which was at the same time moral knowledge, ethics.

The doubtful element of modern astrology, which does not go beyond the stage of dilettantism, is that people no longer feel that its contents can only be a complete whole if the laws discovered in it are at the same time moral laws for the human beings. This is something extraordinarily significant.

In the course of human evolution, the essence of that primeval science was lost. This lies at the foundation of the fact that certain Secret Schools—but the schools of an earnest character have really ceased to exist at the end of the 18th century—and even certain Secret Schools of the Occident, have again and again pointed back to this lost science, to the lost Word. As a rule, those who came later no longer knew what was meant by the expression “Word”. Nevertheless, this conceals a certain fact. In Saint-Martin's books we may still find an echo showing that up to the end of the 18th century it was very clearly felt that in ancient times men possessed a spiritual wisdom which they obtained simultaneously with their knowledge of Nature. Their spiritual wisdom also contained their moral and ethical wisdom; this had already disappeared in the eight centuries preceding the rise of Christianity. We may even say: Ancient Greek history is, essentially, the gradual loss of primeval wisdom.

If we study the philosophers before Socrates, namely Heraclitus, Thales, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, the philosophers of the tragic epoch, as Nietzsche called them—I have dealt with them in my book Riddles of Philosophy, and have tried to give as good as possible a picture, from an external standpoint—if we study these philosophers (but the external writings tell us very little about them), we shall find again and again that the passages which have remained like oases in a desert, re-echo a great, encompassing wisdom and knowledge which existed in the remote past of human evolution. The words of Heraclitus, of Thales, Anaxagoras and Anaximenes, appear to us as if humanity had, as it were, forgotten its primeval wisdom and only remembered occasionally some fragmentary passages. The few passages of Thales, Anaxagoras, of the seven Greek sages, etc., which have been handed down to us traditionally, appear to us like fragmentary recollections.

In Plato we still encounter a kind of clear consciousness of this primeval wisdom; in Aristotle everything has been transformed into human wisdom.

And among the Stoics and Epicureans this gradually disappears. The ancient primeval knowledge only remains like an old legend. This is how matters stood with the Greeks.

The Romans—and they were by Nature a prosaic, matter-of-fact nation—even denied that this primeval knowledge had any meaning at all, and they transformed everything into abstractions. The course which I have just described to you in regard to the primeval knowledge, was necessary for the evolution of humanity. Man would never have reached freedom in the course of his development, had the primeval wisdom, which came to him indirectly through atavistic clairvoyance, remained in its original intensity and significance. Nevertheless, this primeval knowledge was connected with everything which could reach man from divine heights in the form, I might say, of moral impulses. This had to be rescued. The moral impulse had to be rescued for man.

Among the many things which we have already explained in regard to the Mystery of Golgotha we have also explained that the divine principle which descended to the earth trough the man, Jesus of Nazareth, contained the moral power which was little by little dispersed and cleft through the waning and gradual dying out of the ancient primeval wisdom. It is indeed so—although this may seem paradoxical to a modern man—that we can say: Once upon a time there was an old primeval wisdom. Man's moral power and moral wisdom were connected with primeval knowledge; this was contained in it as an integrant. The ancient primeval wisdom then lost its power, it could no longer be the bearer of a moral impulse

This moral impulse had, as it were, to be taken under the wing of the Mystery of Golgotha. And for the civilisation of the Occident, the further continuation was the Christ Impulse which has arisen from the Mystery of Golgotha containing that which had remained as a kind of moral extract from the ancient primeval wisdom.

It is very strange to follow, for instance, that which Occidental civilisation contains in the form of true science, true wisdom, up to the 8th or 9th century after Christ. Try to read the description of Occidental wisdom up to the 8th and 9th century, as contained in my book, Riddles of Philosophy, and you will see that, after all, this course of development contains nothing of what may be designated as knowledge, in our modern meaning. For this arises towards the middle of the 15th century, at the time of Galilei. Until that time, knowledge has really been handed down traditionally from the primeval wisdom of the past. It is no longer a wisdom gained through inner intuition, no longer a primeval wisdom experienced inwardly, but an external wisdom handed down traditionally. I have often told you the story of Galilei, the story which is not an anecdote, namely, how Galilei had to make a great effort in order to convince a friend of the truth of his statements. Like all the other people of the Middle Ages who pursued wisdom, this friend was accustomed to accept what was contained in the books of Aristotle, or in the other traditional works. Everything which was taught at that time was traditional. That which was contained in the books of Aristotle was handed down traditionally. And the learned friend of Galilei agreed with Aristotle that the nerves go out from the heart. Galilei endeavoured to explain to him that according to the knowledge he had gained by studying a corpse, he was obliged to say something else: namely, that in the human being the nerves go out from the head, or the brain. This Aristotelian thinker could not believe it. Galilei then led him to the corpse, showed him that the nerves in fact go out from the brain and not from the heart, and felt sure that his friend would now have to believe what he saw with his own eyes. But his friend said: “Indeed, this appears to be true; I can see with my own eyes that the nerves proceed from the brain. But Aristotle says the opposite, namely that the nerves proceed from the heart. If I have to choose between the evidence of the senses in Nature and Aristotle's statements, I prefer to believe in Aristotle, and not in Nature!” This is not an anecdote, but a true occurrence. After all, in our time we simply experience the same thing, only the other way round.

You see, at that time all knowledge was traditional. A new knowledge only began with the time of Galilei, Copernicus, and so forth. But throughout these centuries the moral impulse was borne by the Christian impulse. It was essentially connected with the religious element. This was not the case in pagan times. The pagans realised that when they obtained cosmic wisdom, they obtained at the same time a moral impulse.

A new impulse arose towards the middle of the 15th century, an impulse which completely severed the connection with everything that existed in the form of ancient wisdom, even though this merely existed traditionally. It is very interesting to see the passion with which those who brought to the surface this new science—for instance, Giordano Bruno—abuse everything which existed in the form of old traditional wisdom. Bruno almost begins to rave when he rails against the recollections of ancient wisdom. Something entirely new arises. In fact, we shall be far from understanding human evolution if we are unable to look upon this new element which thus arises, as a beginning.

We may say (a drawing is made on the blackboard): If we indicate, here, the Mystery of Golgotha ... the moral impulse will continue from there, but what was that which the Mystery of Golgotha carried from an older into a more recent time? What was it, in reality, while it was being borne in that direction? It was an end. The more we progress, the more the ancient wisdom disappears, even in its traditional form. We may say that it continues to drip like water, in the form of traditional knowledge; but a new element, a beginning, arises with the 15th century.

Indeed, we have not advanced very far in this new direction. The few centuries which have elapsed since the middle of the 15th century have brought us some natural science, but we have not progressed far since that beginning.

What is this new wisdom? You see, it is a wisdom which, to begin with, in the form in which it has appeared, has this peculiarity: Contrary to the ancient pagan wisdom, it does not contain a moral impulse. You may study as much as possible of this new wisdom, of this Galilei wisdom—mineralogy, geology, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. etc.,—but you will never be able to draw a moral impulse out of this knowledge of Nature.

If modern people think that they can establish sociology upon the foundation of natural sciences, this is a tremendous illusion. For it is impossible to squeeze out of natural science, such as it exists to-day, that kind of knowledge which can be an ideal for human actions. For natural science is altogether in an elementary stage, and we can only hope that by developing more and more, it will again come to the point of containing, as natural science, moral impulses.

If the knowledge of Nature were to continue only in accordance with its own form, it would not be able to produce moral impulses out of its own nature. A new super-sensible knowledge will have to develop by the side of this knowledge of Nature. This super-sensible knowledge will then contain once more the rays of a moral will. And when the beginning which was made towards the middle of the 15th century will have reached its end at the conclusion of the evolution of the earth, then super-sensible knowledge will flow together with the knowledge of the senses, and a unity will arise out of this.

When the old pagan sage, or the follower of pagan wisdom received pagan wisdom from his initiate in the Mysteries, he received at one and the same time a knowledge of Nature, a cosmic knowledge, an anthropogenesis and a moral science, and this was simultaneously a moral impulse. All this was one.

To-day it is necessary to admit that we obtain on the one hand, a knowledge of Nature, and on the other hand, super-sensible knowledge. This knowledge of Nature is, as such, devoid of moral impulses. Moral impulses must be gained through a super-sensible knowledge. Since the social impulses must, after all, be moral impulses, no true social knowledge, and not even a sum of social impulses can be imagined, unless man rises to super-sensible knowledge.

It is important that modern man should realise that he must strike out a new course in regard to social science; he must tread a different path than that of natural science. But I am at the same time obliged to draw your attention to a strange paradox:—I have often explained to you here that the deepest truths of the science of initiation appear strange to the ordinary every-day consciousness, may even appear crazy to an extreme materialist, but in our time it is necessary to grow acquainted with this wisdom which appears so paradoxical to-day. For in our time many things which appear foolish to men are wisdom before God. It would be a good thing if this bible passage were to be considered a little by those who brush aside Anthroposophy with a supercilious smile, or who criticize it in a vile way. They should consider that what they look upon as foolishness may be “wisdom before the Gods”. It would be a very good thing if several people—and by “several” I mean many—particularly those who go to church with their prayer book and revile Anthroposophy, were to insist less upon their proud faith and look more closely into that which is really contained in the Christian faith. In our time it is necessary to become acquainted with several things which appear paradoxical. You see, two things are possible to-day. Someone may become acquainted with the natural science of to-day (I shall now characterize these two things rather sharply), he may, for instance, take up the facts supplied by the science of chemistry, physics, biology, etc. He may study diligently and eagerly the Theory of Evolution which has arisen from the so-called Darwinism. If he studies all this he may become a materialist, as far as his world conception based on knowledge is concerned. Indeed, he will become a materialist; this cannot be denied. Since men, as it were, so quickly arrive at an opinion, they become materialists if they give themselves up wholly to the external knowledge of Nature, according to the intentions of some of their contemporaries. But it is also possible to do something else. In addition to that which physics, chemistry, mineralogy, botany, geology, biology, offer, in addition to that which these sciences teach, we may also direct our attention to what we do in the physical laboratory, to our behaviour during an experiment; we may watch carefully how we behave in the chemical laboratory and what we do there; we may watch the way in which we investigate plants, animals, and their evolution.

Goethe's knowledge of Nature is chiefly based upon the fact that he has deeply studied the way in which others have come to their knowledge. The greatness of Goethe depends upon this very fact, namely, that he has deeply occupied himself with the way in which others have attained to their knowledge. And it is very, very significant to penetrate really into the essence and spirit of an essay by Goethe, such as “The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject”. Here we may see how Goethe carefully follows the way in which phenomena of Nature are handled. What we may call the method of investigation, this is something which he has studied with the greatest attention. If you read my Introduction to Goethe's Natural-Scientific Writings you will find what great results Goethe has reached by thus pursuing the natural-scientific method.

In a certain way, that which Goethe has done can be developed further for the achievements of the 19th century and up to the 20th century ... but Goethe was no longer able to do this.

I therefore state: Two things are possible. Let us keep to this, to begin with. We remain by the results which natural science supplies, or else we investigate the attitude needed in order to arrive at these natural scientific results. Let us keep to what we have said in regard to the knowledge of Nature; let us now observe the human striving after knowledge from another standpoint.

You know that beside natural science there is also a spiritual knowledge; in the form of Anthroposophy, the knowledge of man, we may pursue cosmology, anthropology, etc., in such a way that they lead to the kind of results described, for instance, in my Occult Science. There, we may find positive knowledge pointing to the spiritual world. Just as we obtain positive knowledge in natural science, in mineralogy, geology, etc., so we have, here, a positive knowledge referring to the spiritual world. In our anthroposophical movement it was particularly important for me to spread also this kind of positive knowledge concerning the spiritual world in the various books which I have written. Now we may also tackle things in such a way that we observe chiefly the way in which these things are done, and do not merely aim at obtaining knowledge. We observe how a person describes something, how he rises from external observation to inner observation; how he arrives to a higher spiritual conception, not through scientific investigations in the laboratory, in the clinic, in the astronomical observatory, but through his inner soul-development, along a mystical path. This would be parallel to the observation of the natural-scientific method, of the handling, of the way in which things are done. Also here we have this twofold element: to watch the results, and to watch the way in which our soul comes to these results.

Let us take hypothetically something which may seem rather paradoxical. Let us suppose that someone were to pursue the natural-scientific methods, like Goethe: he will certainly not become a materialist, but will undoubtedly accept a spiritual world-conception. An infallible way of overcoming materialism in our modern time is to have in insight into the natural-scientific methods of investigation. In the natural-scientific sphere, men become materialists only because they do not observe, because they insufficiently observe the way in which they carry on their investigations. They are satisfied with results, with what the clinic, the laboratory, the observatory supply. They do not progress as far as Goetheanism, i.e. the observation of their manner of research; for those who allow themselves to be influenced by the natural-scientific manner of contemplating the world and of handling things in order to reach knowledge, will at least become idealists, and probably spiritualists, if they only proceed far enough.

If we now try to avoid reaching the positive results of spiritual science, if we find it boring to enter into the details of spiritual science, and only like to hear again and again how man's soul becomes mystical, if we concentrate our chief attention upon the methods leading to the spiritual sphere, this will be the greatest temptation for really becoming materialists. The greatest temptation for becoming materialists is to ignore the concrete results of spiritual science and to emphasize continually the importance of mystical research, mystical soul-concentration, and the methods of entering the spiritual world.

You see this is a paradox. Those who observe natural science, natural research, become spiritualists; those who disdain to reach a real spiritual knowledge and who always speak of mysticism and of how spiritual knowledge is gained, are exposed to the great temptation of becoming more than ever materialistic. This should be known to-day. We cannot do without the knowledge of such things.

To-day we have monistic societies. Those who give themselves the air of leaders in these monistic societies spread a very superficial world-conception. They condense the external materialistic results of natural science to a superficial world-conception. This is so easy for modern men who do not wish to make a great effort, who prefer to go to the “movies” rather than to other places, and consequently prefer to accept a kind of cinema-science—for materialism is nothing else—they prefer this to something which must be worked out inwardly. These leaders of monistic societies therefore supply a superficial materialism. Undoubtedly they are, at least for a time, temporarily noxious creatures, for they spread errors. It is not good if they flourish, for of course they turn the heads of people in a materialistic way. Nevertheless they are the less dangerous elements, for to begin with they are generally honest people, but this honesty does not protect them against this spreading of errors; however, they are for the most part frankly honest and their errors will be overcome. They will only have a temporary significance.

But there are other people who systematically, knowingly, refuse to lead man towards the concrete positive results of spiritual-science. Indeed, they nourish the aversion which exists to-day through a certain love of ease, the aversion of penetrating into the positive concrete results of spiritual science. You know that the things described in my Occult Science must be studied several years if we wish to understand them, they are not comfortable for a modern man, who may indeed send his son to the university, if he is to become a chemical scientist; nevertheless, if he is to recognize and grasp heaven and earth in a spiritual way, he expects him to do this in a twinkle, at least in one evening, and from every lecture on the super-sensible worlds he expects to have the whole sum of cosmic wisdom. Concrete results of a positive spiritual research are uncomfortable for most men, and this aversion is made use of by certain personalities of the present time who persuade men that they do not need these things, that it is not necessary to pursue the positive concrete details of spiritual facts. “What is this talk of the higher hierarchies which must first be known? What is this talk of Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan etc.? All this is unnecessary.” They will tell you: “If you concentrate deeply, if your soul becomes quite mystical, you shall reach the God within you”. They will tell you these things, give general indications on the connection of the material and the super-sensible world. They nourish man's aversion to penetrate into the concrete spiritual world. Why do they do this? Because apparently, apparently they wish to spread a spiritual mentality, but in reality they aim at something else: Along this path, more than ever, they seek to produce materialism. For this reason the leaders of the monistic societies are less harmful. But the others who so often spread mysticism to-day, and who always speak of all kinds of mystical things, they are those who truly foster materialism, who foster it in a most refined way. They put into the heads of men that one or the other way leads into the spiritual world, and they avoid speaking about it concretely. They chiefly speak in general phrases and if they remain victorious they will undoubtedly succeed in making the third generation entirely materialistic. To-day, the more certain and also more refined way leading into materialism is to transmit mysticism traditionally, a mysticism which despises to penetrate into positive spiritual-scientific results. Many things which appear to form part of the spiritual literature of to-day foster materialism far more strongly than, for instance, the books of Ernst Häckel.

You see, these things are uncomfortable to hear, because in setting them before men we strongly appeal to their power of discernment, but men do not wish to listen to this appeal to their power of discernment. They are much more satisfied if every kind of mystical nonsense stimulates an inner lust of the soul. This is why there are so many opponents, particularly of those efforts which to-day honestly pursue spiritual life by disdaining to approach men with a shallow mysticism of a general nature. True spiritual science arouses opposition. In the present time there are numerous people and communities who do not in any way wish that a true spiritual regeneration and elevation should take hold of humanity, and who make use of the fact that materialism is undoubtedly festered if they speak to men of mysticism in general terms. They make use of this fact. For this reason they wage war to the knife where they encounter honest paths which are meant to lead into spiritual science.

I have thus characterized an extensive literature which exists to-day. In reality everyone who takes up a mystical book, no matter of what kind, should appeal strongly to his own judgment. This is strictly necessary. For this reason we should not be led astray by the fact that the many pseudo-mystical scribbles of our present time seem to be so easily accessible. Of course, people will easily understand us if we tell them, for instance: “You only need to penetrate deeply into your inner being and God will be within you; your God whom you only find by treading your own path; no one can show you this path because every other man speaks of another God”, or similar stuff. To-day you will find this in many books, and it is described in a most tempting and misleading manner.

I would like you to take to heart these things very deeply. For that which is to be reached through our anthroposophical movement can only be reached through the fact that you are at least a small number of people who strive to cultivate the characterized power of discernment; it would be fatal for humanity if no effort were made to develop this power of discernment. To-day we must try to stand firmly on our feet, if we do not wish to lose our foothold in the midst of the confusion and chaos of the present. We may often ask to-day after the cause of so much confusion in humanity. But we can almost touch these causes. We may find them in insignificant facts, but we must be able to judge these little facts on the right way.

It is uncomfortable to see this immediately, in the many forms in which it exists on all sides. Many grotesque paradoxes can be found not only in rather loathsome places, but also in the modern life of humanity. They undoubtedly exist also in the modern life of humanity. And it is necessary to-day to strive to obtain a clear understanding, an understanding as sharp as a blade, if we wish to gain a firm foothold. This is the essential thing.

Dear attendees! The day before yesterday, I took the liberty of speaking here about the spiritual-scientific approach to how it should lead to true reality. On the basis of these discussions, I would like to give some applications of this spiritual-scientific view of reality today, some applications in the field of human life, which, it seems to me, are of great importance for life practice, especially in our time, and certainly even more so in the future , not so much because I believe it is necessary to talk about the historical way of thinking in a larger circle, but because I think it is important to present such historical considerations for the practice of life.

The great poet and writer Goethe believed he could judge the value of the historical perspective as it was particularly evident in his time in a way that he expressed in the following words: “The best thing about history is the enthusiasm it arouses in us.” One could be forgiven for thinking that Goethe was dismissing all the possibilities that people otherwise see in historical observation when they seek to answer the recurring question of what one's presence in life is for and what one can learn from the history and behavior of people for one's practical life by observing human life.

Now, however, it must be said that the more one immerses oneself in the historical way of thinking, the more one comes to the conclusion that it can indeed, as perhaps this Goethean saying also means, be a summary of a rich life experience, a rich life wisdom. Especially in our time, one is very often led to a strange impression by the question: What can one gain from history for life? Our catastrophic present must repeatedly suggest to us that significant forces of human life are at work across the whole earth, that experiences are taking place from which we can learn an enormous amount for our lives in relation to the present. And it must also be said that some things are happening today that could give us cause for concern in relation to these questions.

Of the hundreds of cases that could be cited in this regard, I would like to highlight just one that has a certain significance with regard to the present suffering. In August, September and October of 1914, one could very often hear from people who are quite astute, who certainly have a sound judgment in the sense that one can have today – I repeat: in the sense that one today and as it has been formed from the historical and practical-historical point of view - one could therefore hear from these people at the time that this war would certainly not last longer than four, at most six months, given the prevailing conditions.

It must be said that at the time there was no reason to smile or be ironic about such a statement. It was precisely those people who had keenly followed the latest historical events in some area or other, whether economic, socio-political or otherwise, who made such statements, and these were by no means unfounded according to the results of the historical perspective. But today the anxious question arises before us: What have we had to experience in reality itself in the face of such a historically based view? And the further question may follow: What could reality still bring in terms of our lives? - One simply comes to the question: Is there a way to look at our usual way of understanding history in such a way that we can draw conclusions about the present from our immediate life practice?

I would like to give an example from a time long past, the example of a man whose name vouches for the fact that he did not make a judgment out of carelessness and unreason, the judgment of a man whose importance you will immediately recognize when I name, who in 1789 took up his professorship of history at a German university and wanted to discuss what had emerged as the conclusion that he had to draw from the historical consideration that he now had to present to his students. He said: “Perhaps the various European states have worked their way to the point where they resemble the members of a large family, who may still fight among themselves in the future, but who will never be able to tear each other apart again.”

This judgment of a mind, which he expressed in his inaugural address from the depths of his historical research on the eve of the French Revolution, certainly contains an insight from which one can say that reality is quite different from what even the most profound historian could have suspected. For when we consider what followed in Europe, we cannot say that the members of the European family can feud with each other, but not tear each other apart. And yet, Friedrich Schiller, who made this judgment, was right when he took up his professorship of history in Jena.

We see that one does not need to be short-sighted to err when it comes to applying the historical way of thinking to the practice of life. Because the way the question is formulated and the way we have been forced to apply the historical perspective and the historical way of looking at things so far, which has led to this or that result, was probably not suitable for reaching into reality with the right judgment so that this reality can be mastered in such a way that one would also come out of the historical consideration to an appropriate application of one's will in relation to reality.

Today, it cannot truly be said that this question is not extremely important, because today, when it comes to human life in human community, we can no longer embrace only a small perspective. We are in the midst of catastrophic events that have gradually taken hold of the entire earth, and the challenge is to people to not remain within the narrow confines of their own considerations, but to try to get an impulse from historical observation that could extend across the whole earth, at least in a certain direction. There is a feeling, at least in certain circles, that the old way of looking at history – I will pick out just one example, the one by Ranke – would no longer suffice for the demands of the new life.

What has emerged in this respect becomes interesting when one broadens one's perspective, and especially when the observer of history pauses and asks himself: What emerges in the life of the whole person when one looks at the way in which human history is viewed? I will select a characteristic example that can illustrate many things for us today. I will first disregard the fact that the German historian Karl Lamprecht felt how inadequate Ranke's way of thinking is, and that he has made the attempt to motivate historical events in a more inward way, to set the impulses instead of the people, and thus to consider and examine historically more, how the impulses have given rise to events over time.

Of the many things that could be considered in the case of Lamprecht, a summary is to be considered, which he gave when he gave lectures at the beginning of this century in some places in America about his way of understanding the history of his people. I know very well that today there are numerous opponents who consider Lamprecht's way perhaps mistaken, perhaps even enthusiastic. But you must admit that Lamprecht is trying to proceed in the right way by attempting to bring the inner motives and forces in human life into line with the concept of history. His intention in doing so can be seen from the lecture he has given, in which he wanted to show how he conceives the course of German history according to his way of thinking.

Lamprecht also has a special way of explaining the historical development of a people. I will only very briefly point out what Karl Lamprecht came to in the course of his long life. He says: If we look back to the first period of the historical development of the Germans, up to the third century after Christ, we find that all the soul-forces out of which the historical life and the historical interrelations of men arise are based on a certain soul-condition of our ancestors in those ancient times. This soul-condition Karl Lamprecht characterizes as the symbolizing soul-condition. From this state of mind, that social structure then arose through which life itself takes on the character of a symbol, and not only that life becomes a symbolic representation, but also when a leading personality appears, she appears with such a state of mind that one could say this personality is a symbol for the whole tribe.

This is what Karl Lamprecht found from the third to the tenth century; but then it is a completely different state of mind that emerges and makes history. It is now the subjective-typical way in which no longer the symbol is represented, no longer the personality in the symbol, but the type, the representative of the tribe and the tribal nature becomes. Customary rights now become established, and people interact in such a way that they reveal the typical aspects of these circumstances and shape them into a certain social structure.

From the eleventh to the mid-fifteenth century, in the history of mankind, according to Karl Lamprecht's way of presenting it, what he calls the conventional age occurs. No longer does something emerge from the soul and lead to a symbol or type, but individual people, out of tradition or reason, determine the leading persons or leading circles of what should regulate the whole mutual context. This leads to certain conventions and certain judgments. This is the age of knighthood, the age in which the social structure is formed through which the conventions can particularly take hold.

Now it is very strange that Karl Lamprecht places the most significant point in history in the middle of the fifteenth century, because the historical impulse begins with the fifteenth century. Lamprecht says: In the middle of the fifteenth century, the development of German history begins - and he believes that such a course can be applied to the historical development of the entire tribe, that people now no longer appear as a type or conventionally, but that people are now individuals and as such are part of the historical process and the social order. According to Karl Lamprecht, this [individual] age lasted until the eighteenth century, and then the age in which we live began, the [subjective] age, in which more and more is introduced into historical life that people experience and that does not determine them from the outside, but that touches them within. Thus more understandable elements enter into the course of historical knowledge, the educated public begins to play a role, whereas in the symbolic and conventional age one had to deal more with elementary forces that, coming instinctively from within man, influenced the will and the social structure.

From this it can be seen what Karl Lamprecht is striving for; he strives to bring into human history that which conditions the course and development of events in the human soul. He seeks to penetrate deeply into the picture of human society and believes that intensive historical research should only be a preparation for what it is all about. But it should endeavor to penetrate into the human soul in order to show how history is created from the human soul.

If we look at these attempts to observe historical developments in a certain strict way, we will find, when we follow the individual types, that they leave us highly unsatisfied in many respects, especially when we go through the individual epochs as described by Karl Lamprecht. One finds that the same concepts keep cropping up, and while he thinks that the epochs are different, he cannot grasp what he wants to grasp because he is unable to delve into reality itself. Nevertheless, this attempt is interesting because Karl Lamprecht shows us that a way must be sought to an inner consideration of history, to a spiritualization of historical research. And it is very interesting, from this point of view, to compare what another man has presented here on the basis of serious historical endeavor, who seeks to compare the history of his own people with the history of another and does so with a different kind of historical research. From this it will be possible to see how two personalities, one belonging to a particular area of human life and the second to a completely different one, relate to historical reflection.

This other personality is Woodrow Wilson, who, at the very time when Karl Lamprecht was speaking to the Americans about the history of his people, was making an attempt that led to the conclusion that he had reached from a completely different point of view, as he observed the history of his American people. Something very peculiar emerges here. It is of particular interest for everyone to observe a personality who is very distant from us in the same field as Karl Lamprecht. But with Wilson, we encounter a great peculiarity. He looks at the history of his American people, which is quite easy to overlook. But with this short period of American history, Wilson and Lamprecht are – it must be said – in a strange contrast, whereby one feels what is important to both of them.

Wilson wants to grasp what he is supposed to represent and what is characteristic for the development of the American people, and one sees how he, by continuing from one point to the next, actually manages to present the whole history of his people in an extremely plausible way. He shows how wrong all those are who apply a historical way of thinking to America according to the pattern of the way of thinking that comes from England and that they want to apply to American life, without realizing that America has shaped its life under special preconditions. Wilson wants to create pure Americanism in his own way; he points out that it is a striking phenomenon precisely in America that culture in America gradually moved from the east to the west, where it was only fully developed in later times. From the east to the west, people have moved, overcoming the wilderness, and he shows how the development of American history lies in this struggle against the wilderness, how everything that Americans have done in life has come about because the west had to be conquered from the east. American history was not made by politicians or diplomats, but by hunters who felled the trees, and by farmers who moved into the wilderness and cultivated the fields. These were also the most important questions for Americans: questions of agriculture and farming. Wilson views American history from this perspective and comes to a [plausible] solution to these questions by showing how these questions arose and why it has become necessary for this advance to move from east to west.

One has to say that one gets the impression that Wilson, in his own way, describes the history of the American people quite correctly, he knows the relationship between the things he describes and presents. You can feel how he puts something very remarkable into it by seeking to find the salient points in American history; and when he says that it is a characteristic of the American, his mobile eye, his passion to seek adventure, to situations quickly and to carry out something quickly, to do his part for his country, that all these plans should be quickly conceived and executed, then one feels with everything that is in it: He knows where the salient points are.

Woodrow Wilson also spoke about [the method] of his historical presentation in a rather interesting lecture; and I must say that I find something extraordinarily characteristic in this lecture in particular. I should also like to take this opportunity to say that, although I have now told you how Wilson describes the history of his people, Woodrow Wilson is not a personality that one could call sympathetic in any way, and not for subjective reasons, but because I believe that such a way of looking at things as Wilson uses it cannot be fruitful in our parts, even though I have to describe it as I have done today. We will come back to this later. But I don't think that anyone who has heard me speak more than once can accuse me of having formed my opinion of Wilson for some kind of jingoistic reasons, as opposed to the opinion that people here have of him. I have long since formed my opinion of Wilson from “literature” and from his advocacy of American freedom, and in a lecture in Helsingfors I also expressed this opinion in the same way as I have done today. So the war has not changed that at all. This can be proved by documents, and therefore I may well speak about his personality as I have done today.

What struck me as strange about Wilson's historical perspective is contrasted when I compare what he himself said about this historical perspective with some very dear and sympathetic explanations of a personality who was only active in a specific field of historical perspective, but who is infinitely sympathetic to me because of the special impulses that could come from her. This is the great master Herman Grimm, who long ago delivered his verdict on how history should be viewed. It is remarkable that one can take individual sentences from Grimm and insert them into Wilson's presentation without interrupting the train of thought. And that one can again insert sentences from Wilson into Grimm's essays; and one then sees that they correspond to what Wilson said.

This experiment can be done, and I consider it to be tremendously significant for the thinking of a certain type of world view and for the way of thinking of the present. It [calls itself practical] believes that it can immerse itself everywhere in all practical realities and in all concepts and is proud of how far it has come in terms of the practical view of life. And yet the present is thoroughly theoretical and stuffed full of intellectual concepts. If someone today listens to an argument from any side, he pays attention only to the content, he follows only the pure wording; this is particularly evident in the present and is very important with regard to what has been said, because everyone must realize that two people can say the same thing according to the wording, but it is quite different in terms of meaning. Theory does not yet account for everything in life, nor does mere intellectual content. But there is something in the way a personality engages with social life that is more than the content of its sentences, that is, the theory; it is how the personality in question speaks, the way it comes out of life and how it comes out, what the personality in question has to say.

And in this example, something very remarkable emerges. When I look at Lamprecht's way of speaking, and I am not speaking from a national point of view, but only from the point of view of objective science – when I look at Lamprecht's view of history, then, despite all the mistakes, I see how people struggle hard, how they struggle hard to achieve what they want to achieve. Perhaps he has fewer concepts than Wilson, but he fights, and you can tell from the way he speaks that the struggling soul acquires from sentence to sentence what it perhaps presents as a false view, but what it has gained through experience. And this is particularly the case with Herman Grimm's brilliant treatment [in the field of art]. And I say to myself, despite all objective appearances: The statements that are dear to me and that I find in Lamprecht as well as in Grimm make a completely different impression in Wilson. I ask myself, and dare to answer: everything that comes out in Wilson is as if he were instinctively driven to the right thing, but it never gives the impression that it is his experience, his striving and It only gives the impression that, although it is directed towards practical reality, it does not emerge from the depths of the soul, but as if what Wilson expresses were a self-suggestion, a kind of subconscious. I believe I acquired the right to use that expression here yesterday. Wilson does not present himself in the same way [in his view of history], as if he were fathoming the soul bit by bit, but it gives the impression as if he were receiving revelations from the depths of his soul, as if he were possessed by his teachings, as if his inner self were suggesting them to him.

It is very strange to see two personalities in historical life who are so different in this way, like Lamprecht and Grimm on the one hand and Wilson on the other. Furthermore, it is also interesting to look at other perspectives. You can't really call them historical, but you can summarize them under the historical considerations.

One could also cite other, Asian observers of life; I will just mention Rabindranath Tagore, who, among other things, has provided a comprehensive account of the spirit of Asia. He also spoke about the spirit of Japan, but something quite different emerges from his account. It emerges that this man, who, just as Lamprecht and Grimm in German and Wilson in American life, is steeped in Asian life, must be seen as an educated representative of Asian culture. If you look at this man's life, you get the impression that he wants to explore the content, the original source of Indian and Japanese life, placing less emphasis on what Japan and India have experienced in modern times and instead investigating what the actual sources are. He has a unique way of admiring human culture; Rabindranath Tagore says that there should not really be any history for his people, the human soul should remain untouched in its inner life by what moves people in the immediate present. Its mode of expression extends across the whole earth, and those who look more deeply know that our great catastrophe depends, more than one might think, not on the things on which it is believed to depend so much today, but on the spiritual impulses of the peoples dwelling across the whole earth.

This is symptomatically evident in the way in which it is presented, which seeks to stand out from the generality and to present what must apply in the life of the generality. And if we look at what is closest to us, the historical conception of Karl Lamprecht, we find that almost every chapter is characterized in the same way and in the same terms. We find that the concepts do not descend into reality. But why is that so? The answer to this question is extremely important. Lamprecht wants to observe the human soul and wants to explore how history is made out of the impulses of the human soul. To do this, he needs to understand the laws of the human soul that show us how the human soul manifests itself in social life. And there he describes the actions in such a way that it is impossible to apply them to other areas of observation that are directly related to life and to come to a correct conclusion; in a word, one finds: you don't get anywhere!

And so the question may well be raised: what it would be like if those researchers of reality, of whom we spoke the day before yesterday, whose knowledge is built up in a completely different way from natural science and mysticism, and which must first be acquired by the soul when the soul is in such a state of consciousness that it is as opposed to the ordinary state of consciousness as day consciousness is to dream consciousness – if those researchers of reality look at history from their insights? In this short time I can only give the results, but they are found through the method I described here the day before yesterday; and the following can be said first: to the superficial observer, human life proceeds in two states, sleeping and waking, and by studying the two states, sleeping and waking, one seeks to understand the entire course of human life.

But things are not that simple, and much harm has been done to the present worldview by the idea that things are much simpler than they really are. In reality, things are quite different, and even what we call the state of sleep, in which our consciousness is dulled, is quite different. Because this sleeping consciousness does not completely disappear during daytime life; it is not only present from falling asleep to waking up, but it also shows itself to the serious soul researcher in real daylight, because we are only awake for part of our soul life. We are awake for our perceptual life and for our imaginative life, but we are not awake for our emotional life and for our will life. The one who seriously studies the most important state, from waking up to falling asleep, will find that the clarity of consciousness, the strength of consciousness, that is present in relation to the life of imagination, is not present in relation to the life of feeling and is especially not present in relation to the life of will.

The way I mean it here has also been noted by other spiritual researchers and by many other thinkers who have wrestled with reality. For example, the Swabian researcher Friedrich Theodor Vischer pointed out how closely all passions, the emotional life, all affects of life in waking consciousness are related to the dream life, and we may say: our feelings are not present in the brightness of consciousness during waking life in consciousness as perceptions or thoughts, but they are only present as feelings, like the images of dreams in the sleeping consciousness; and during sleep consciousness, we remember the images when we are awake. Then the dream image lies in our waking consciousness.

Nothing of the emotional life of the dream comes through clearly to us either; we only have the idea of it in us, but what has actually penetrated into us is not the feeling that we have dreamt; for this gives rise to the illusion in us as if we had the feeling in our soul consciousness, but we do not have it, but it extends from the twilight into the light and evokes the idea, so that we often confuse what we have experienced with what we have dreamed. We also believe that it is the same with the life of the will, but in reality it is this: what protrudes from the actual volitional processes into our world of imagination is that we can form concepts and thoughts about what we do, but what is actually connected with our organization and our soul life eludes consciousness. The actual content of the will, the way it is carried out, from the beginning to the effect (to the movement of the hand, to the grasping of an object), is a thoroughly unconscious process, just as the unconscious processes are in sleep. Therefore, we must say: our waking life is not just a waking life, but also a state of the subconscious, a kind of dream life that extends into our ordinary waking consciousness.

What I have now discussed arises from truly conscientious and serious observation of the soul, at least to a certain extent in the case of ordinary psychology, of which I spoke here the day before yesterday. When the soul succeeds in penetrating into another consciousness that looks into another life, then this consciousness succeeds in arriving at a different observation of the soul. Then, in the depths of the soul, in the form of imaginations [which, however, are not our abstract ideas and thoughts, but which penetrate into life], the feeling that is coming to life awakens, then one knows that what one is brightening up is not present in full reality in the ordinary consciousness, but only in the sleeping consciousness. One must look with intense strength of feeling through this mode of cognition if one wants to bring this feeling and the subconscious of the soul before the ordinary consciousness, and one must make even greater efforts to bring up the act of will as such.

It follows that what we feel and want in everyday life, what forms the impulses for us and the soul content of all individual people, is connected and wells up in the life that unfolds between birth and death, and that these impulses carry us through life, from person to person, and we experience them in dreams or in sleep. But these are also the historical impulses, and it will be a significant insight for the historian of the future when one will recognize the character of these forces living in the people, when one will no longer believe that what occurs in history can be understood in the same way as in ordinary life, for it takes place as if in a dream, as if in the subconscious, so that it does not come to the full and clear consciousness of the human being; he simply does not know it in ordinary life.

This view, which will have to penetrate from spiritual scientific research into historical observation, and only then will historical observation be infallible, only then will it be effective and in accordance with reality. For he who wants to research history today does not think about the fact that history cannot be researched in the old way. The science of history has only emerged in the last century, during which the foundations of scientific knowledge have been developed and the method by which natural science has led to such brilliant results, by bringing humanity so far in terms of external life practice, has been developed. Historical observation has been grasped and developed according to the model that is common, correct and justified in natural science. It is regarded as a kind of ideal natural science and attempts are made to extend this way of looking at things to history as well. Lamprecht had something like this in mind in the background; he said that a way of thinking that is not intended for history is decisive for it, but that it has only emerged from the natural scientific way of looking at things.

The one who has this knowledge, which I have developed, who has recognized that this knowledge relates to daytime consciousness as daytime consciousness relates to sleep consciousness, the one who, from this point of view, looks at the course of historical activity and penetrates into the course of of historical wisdom, it becomes clear that this behavior of our soul is fully justified in relation to nature, in relation to the thought with which we gain knowledge of nature, but that this old way of looking at things is not suitable for judging the course of human life as history. But this approach to the course of historical events is also characteristic of the whole nineteenth-century way of looking at things: people do not realize that the impulses are rooted in the unconscious course of life and that they cannot be grasped with the ordinary mind. If one bears this in mind, then one comes to wonder: what must take the place of what is today?

Herman Grimm made some very correct remarks about this and he understood many things very correctly in relation to the history of mankind and felt very clearly how the spirit of science can emerge again. He thought - and he discussed this subject very thoroughly with me - that his ideal would be to look at human history in such a way that the impulses present themselves as a world-effective imagination. It is not correct that the impulses present themselves in this way, but nevertheless Grimm has instinctively come up with a very curious fact. He first asks himself: What, for example, is Gibbon's way of presenting history? Gibbon wrote the history of the decline of the Roman Empire, and his way of looking at it can be compared to the [scientific] way of knowing of the present day [it is the application of knowledge of nature to history]. Gibbon describes the decline of the Roman Empire and all the forces that worked to bring about its downfall. He does not grasp what was an emerging impulse at the time, because he cannot grasp emerging impulses with the intellect and the scientific way of looking at things. Thus he can grasp only that which does not make historical life, but only that which has arisen when historical impulses have already expired.

But history is not written in this way; historical life is transformed into a corpse, because first the impulses on which it is based must be awakened and discovered. If history is to be understood as something living, then it cannot be grasped in terms of natural history. But Gibbon never succeeded in grasping something correctly like the rising forces of Christianity, which, as living forces, extend into the history of that time. Therefore, we must be clear about how to grasp real historical forces, and we see that we have to go back to what is subconscious in human life, what plays into the mind and will in the way I have presented it. Therefore, one can never grasp [what is fruitful in history] with the usual scientific method, nor the forces that lead to the practice of life, with which one can face life and with which one can judge: life has taught us this and this.

Only the observing consciousness, in which the new kind of knowledge is immersed, is what we call the only real way of looking at history, which will no longer say that different new states will be founded that may feud with each other but can no longer tear each other apart. This is also a prerequisite for history to provide a real basis for life. It must become so, because only in this way does history flow into our lives, the historical view flows into us. We see what really was through a real historical perspective, even if it is initially as inadequate as I have described it. One can grasp the spirit only by plunging into its depths, by seizing with clear light that which otherwise remains in the subconscious; otherwise one does not touch anything with the theory, as it is imitated by the natural-historical approach; with theory one does not penetrate into real life.

One can easily test the correctness of this assertion; just try it: put a pure theorist, an astute person who can think quite well about nature and the course of human knowledge, who is a good economist and social theorist, into life, and this is the best method to destroy what is good. This can be done with a theorist in social and ethical life and it will be seen: such theoretical minds work as destructive forces; they are capable of surveying life, but never of working fruitfully because their way of looking at things is not based on a correct view of history. And Lamprecht's view of history also confirms this view.

But how the type of knowledge meant here is submerged in the real impulses, I would like to show with an example. I know that it sounds extremely paradoxical when I say this, but I have said before: what Copernicus set out in his world view was also regarded as paradoxical and ridiculous. The world view reaches into those impulses that otherwise remain unconscious. For years I have pursued this idea in lectures and said that one would then come to a fruitful practical conception of history. But I will only hint at something in principle with two examples, which should lead a little further and which also reach into everyday life.

For those who look at history, the historical epoch that extends to the middle of the fifteenth century, but begins with the seventh or eighth century BC, is offered. It is remarkable that there is a similarity in the way the human soul is formed, how the human soul becomes social through mental powers that remain essentially the same from the seventh century BC to the mid-fifteenth century AD. Only then does a rapid change occur, but we do not notice it today because our attention is not focused on it and because some people live by the saying: Just as nature does not make leaps, so too does life. But that is not true, nature and life make leaps everywhere, we just do not notice how enormous they are, and we do not focus our attention on the great turning points of life.

If you do not penetrate into the great transformation, if you cannot see it, which occurred in the middle of the fifteenth century, then you also do not see the most important thing, you do not see the difference between these two ages, one of which is the one in which we are fully immersed and which will perhaps last another hundred years. The whole of human life between the seventh and eighth centuries BC and the fifteenth century AD is such that souls develop differently than in later times. I would like to say: in that older age, the human mind is developed much more instinctively, it therefore works more correctly, as a review of that time proves, and how everything was developed then, for example Roman law, which is still of great importance today.

Only if one knows which individual ideas emerged from Roman law, from the uniquely instinctive mind, will one also understand that at that time the mind worked in the soul [like a sense]. The social structure is also highly developed in Roman life with all its characters, and instinctive mind also worked during the decline of the Roman Empire.

It was only in the middle of the fifteenth century that reason began to operate in a different sense, that consciousness of reason began to operate in its own way. This age not only begins to carry a new psychic organization within itself, but it also develops it further, and thoughts are set with full awareness of the things.

We no longer understand anything of the inner impulses of those who lived at that time because we do not consider how the laws, state institutions and state formations of that time came about. It is therefore assumed that educated humanity, which is relevant for cultural development, no longer came to these institutions through the instinctive workings of the mind. But it is precisely when we consider this picture that the depth from which human activity arises becomes apparent, and when we follow the historical documents to study the human development of peoples and the laws they have created, then we can apply the conclusion to ourselves.

I will give another example, which covers an even longer period of time. It may also seem paradoxical, especially if I could give the details in question. But there is not enough time to point out what would result from research in spiritual science, and I can only briefly mention the results in general. The age that I have just described, which is still in contemporary history, is followed, going back from the seventh and eighth centuries, by another one in which the soul was in a completely different state, but which, according to research using the methods of spiritual science, covers a much longer period of time than can be documented by our records. We come to a different epoch from the one I have just characterized, which begins with the seventh and eighth centuries BC and ends in the middle of the fifteenth century. If we look at the events of this earlier epoch from a spiritual scientific point of view, as far back as we can trace the time with our eyes and with a seeing consciousness, we come to a time that was very significant in many respects.

Today, in the sense of the old method of developmental theory, research is being conducted into historical application, which is expressed in the attempt to create an analogue. One looks at the progress of historical development, the progress of humanity [as an organism], one compares what took place in prehistoric times with infancy, later times with adolescence, and then, when you apply it from the earlier time to the present time, you come to say how we have “come so gloriously far” and how we have developed our minds compared to our ancestors. But all these analogies fall apart when we look at them through the lens of spiritual science. For then it becomes clear that people in the earlier periods of human development faced life in a completely different way than they do today.

Scientific theory has brought with it many errors and, above all, has created a certain prejudice with regard to the historical development of humanity. And no attention is paid to how the human soul has changed over time, how it has taken on a different form over the centuries. What people had in earlier times is regarded as if it all came from soul impulses that are always the same. If you believe this, you don't know how the human soul has changed, which was connected to human life in a completely different way back then. Today we only know of such a connection in the youth and childhood of a person. We know how the soul is closely connected with the development of life and how what is called spiritual development often depends on the historical course of life. But by the twentieth year this ceases for the human being; the close connection that can be scientifically traced [of the spiritual-soul with the development of the physical-bodily] ceases, and the spirit begins to develop, and this period then comes to an end by the twentieth year.

It was quite different in the early days of humanity. There were times in the history of humanity, which I have already mentioned, when the human soul remained spiritually connected to the body, quite unlike today. One result of spiritual research is that, during their lifetime, people remained dependent on bodily consciousness, except for the way they experience bodily processes, and today we are discovering certain events in human history from which we can still see today that certain ideas, which have not been examined in literary history, but which resonate in some old sages, have retained their old originality.

Then comes the second age, which can be compared with the age of man up to the age of forty, but this is already the age which has already adopted a definite culture and of which we know that the people of that time were already dependent on many conditions of life, which penetrate into their lives as ideas. And here we come to the human age, which begins with the seventh to eighth century BC; people experience the forces of the body until the age of forty, which now already allows our individuality to decline from the age of 35 onwards. If this [Greco-Roman] period is not only considered from an external point of view, but is studied in depth, we find that it is based on the fact that man experiences life with his consciousness, whether this occurs in the course of history or in the life of an individual, up to the age of forty, when external circumstances influence the spiritual life. Today, we no longer achieve this; we only experience fully up to the age of 27 or 28.

Thus history, if we follow the historical life, shows us, one might say in a few words, that humanity as such is becoming ever younger. But this means a great deal for a correct understanding of the life of humanity. At first, humanity became so old that it, as peoples, experienced in common what happens in human life up to the age of thirty, and only then came the younger age. Today, humanity lives a much younger age throughout life than in the past, and therein lies the real power that seems incomprehensible, and also the processes of human history, which seem to want to be incomprehensible to us, such as Roman law or the Greek world view, art and the social life of that time, which correspond to a much older age.

We find it understandable, however, when we know that the human experience in his soul was quite different then and that man today can no longer experience the same. Today, man is dependent on grasping with his soul that which life no longer gives him, and since the middle of the fifteenth century, man has been confronted with the necessity of grasping with the consciousness of the intellect that which life no longer gives man and which cannot be found through the inner impulses of the soul. That is why we only now understand how we have to reach into the reality of the soul's life in order to grasp the connections.

I have only characterized the general aspects in general; one can also pick out only the everyday events and then see the individual events in this light. But the picture of what is spreading around us and what I have characterized also emerges in a very strange way. We look to the Asian East, to Rabindranath Tagore, how he understands the spirit and how he views the history of the Indians and the Japanese people. He wants the old roots to remain, and does not want the foreign spirit to enter, which is different from the old spirit and enters after the period that ends with the age from the seventh to the eighth century. Nevertheless, he is a fine spiritual man of the Orient, and despite the fact that he has absorbed everything that the object itself can offer, with all its sympathies and impulses, he has his own point of view in his understanding of tradition.

If we look more closely, we see that life today has forged a common bond across the whole earth, despite the different worldviews that often clash and interfere with each other. We also see minds like Lamprecht and Grimm wrestling with what has been developing as individuals since the fifteenth century and seems more and more alive from year to year. These are the driving impulses for our spiritual and moral approach. The humanities scholar does not need to create new concepts; he finds the concepts that can be applied to the age in which we live. He is also not looking for new ideals, for fantasies; he is only seeking to grasp that in which he can truly immerse himself, and he knows that human coexistence must develop. But we say to ourselves with regard to the Orient: there is something at work that we are not allowed to participate in, because we would not get along if we thought we could imitate it in Central Europe. What occurs in the Orient and in our regions is quite different, and one understands it only if one can grasp it in the way described. But then one must say: it is as if someone develops from childhood to the age of thirty. And only from this point of view can one understand it if one wants to face these realities.

But what we encounter in America is a kind of anticipation of a state, as if a child were senile, that is, a state that is quite good for later in life but not in youth, when it is an unhealthy state; and therefore, what works in the sense of this perspective will only be conscious in his head, to which life is not actually connected. Wilson's restless eye can be compared to the calm gaze of Herman Grimm, in which the calmness of the soul is expressed, emerging from within, moving from experience to experience and connecting everything with its own breath. When a person is possessed by his inner being, then the eye does not become calm, then everything he says becomes apt, forceful. What is to be developed out of the spirit is developed out of the body. We must pay attention to this difference, we must see it if we want to understand our soul and ethical and historical work, especially in today's difficult times, when we shape through direct experiences of other soul impressions on the historical ground and create social connections. We certainly cannot accept what is Asian, nor what is American, even though it must be understood.

The European nations could also be characterized, but one must delve below the surface, and then only can one extract what are the historical impulses from those forces that otherwise work unconsciously. But if one recognizes this, then one will also have real historical considerations that give people maturity for life. And when that happens, then such discussions will no longer be considered paradoxical, and one will really have something from history that can work in one's life. Placed in life, one will be able to say that one has grown to meet the demands of one's position by being able to see life from true and full reality and not just from the surface.

It is remarkable that Goethe was the first to coin the phrase about the value of history in awakening enthusiasm. But he only wanted to describe the concept with it, because the soul concepts are not given from history, but are brought forth from the unconscious depths. However, since they are instinctive, they enter the emotional life only to sink back down into feelings and impulses; and enthusiasm will again be able to arise from that which has been seen through a true historical method of observation, and then, through feeling enthusiasm and through a true historical method of observation, we will face life for the first time. I know that today this way of looking at history sounds highly paradoxical to many, and that most people do not agree with the conclusion that correct social thinking and ethical action can arise from such a consideration, which is based on the historical consideration of the seeing consciousness. I know that today we are seen as fantasists, whose way of thinking cannot yet be easily grasped.

But I would like to ask a question: how many people before the fourteenth century could have imagined, based on the concepts of the time, that our Earth would experience such a movement as we know today? No one who lived at that time knew. We now look at many things differently, since we can see the big picture, and in the near future we will be able to see much more. This will happen often in human life, and our view of things will broaden. We will have to take into account our old sympathies and antipathies and we will see that everything that has befallen humanity will be balanced out when we understand what humanity wants, and that this cannot be linked to the way we have thought up to now.

It is important that people learn this so that humanity can develop forward. People must learn new perceptions, ideas and concepts, especially new thinking, which balances out with the earlier concepts and ideas. The former may already be the only decisive thing for some people today, but the latter will be the important thing, because it will reach into the future and be fundamental for life and it will found our life for the future. Therefore, I believe that actions will arise from such considerations and that some may still come to ideas and feelings that are still considered paradoxical, perhaps even strange, today, but which will later, albeit reluctantly, be recognized. People will come to the conclusion that we have to learn anew from one day to the next and have to familiarize ourselves with a new way of thinking, feeling and willing for the near future, in order to be able to settle into this time.

First of all I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Mrs. Mackenzie for her kind words of greeting, and to all of you who have made the effort to meet again, at Professor Mackenzie’s invitation, to discuss questions of education.

In the short time available little can be said about the educational methods based on anthroposophy, for their essence is in an educational practice that does not have fixed programs, nor clearly defined general concepts to encompass it. The main intention of Waldorf education is that its teachers should be able to look deeply into the nature of the child from a true and genuine knowledge of the human being, and that in the individuality of each child who has come down into the earthly realm, they should be able to experience a wondrous enigma, which the educator and the world can never hope to understand completely. The teacher’s practical task is to discern ways to approach the mystery, the enigma, that divine guiding spirits present us with each child who joins our contemporary society. The teacher’s task begins at the age when the child discards the baby teeth, around the seventh year, and extends until the eighteenth or nineteenth year when, as a young man or woman, the student either goes out into life or enters higher education.

A few years ago, due to the devastating war, many new ideals, and certainly many illusions as well, emerged in Germany. At that time, the industrialist Emil Molt saw an opportunity to do something important for the workers in his factory. He felt that, by opening a school for their children, he could to some extent help reconcile his workers with their destiny as factory workers, and above all do something about what was then the great social demand of the time—he wanted to begin a school for his employees’ children, where the children, although laborers’ children, would get the best possible education imaginable.

This should make it clear immediately that the education I am representing here was not hatched from some ideas or from any plan for reform; it was, instead, born as a direct answer to a practical life situation. Emil Molt simply declared, “My workers have a total of a hundred and fifty children, and these children must be educated in the best way possible.” This could happen within the anthroposophical movement because, as strange as it may sound to you, anthroposophists are neither theorists nor visionary dreamers, but practical people who take the pragmatic side of life seriously; indeed, we like to believe that practical matters are nurtured especially within the anthroposophical movement. In other words, the idea regarding this education was the direct result of a practical need.

In Stuttgart, where all this happened, the necessary conditions for starting such a school were soon created. At that time, a democratic legislation of schools did not yet exist; that came into force only with the subsequent democratically constituted assembly. We came just in time to begin the school before the emergence of a “free” school legislation, which forced a general levelling of all schools in Germany—paying lip service to freedom by enforcing fixed laws. So we were only just in time to open such a school. I must quickly add that the school authorities have always shown great understanding and cooperation ever since the school was founded. It was fortunately possible to begin “The Free Waldorf school” in complete freedom. Its name arose because of its association with the Waldorf-Astoria Factory.

I do not wish to imply in any way that state-trained teachers are inferior, and certainly not that they are poor teachers simply because they have passed a state exam! Nevertheless, I was granted freedom in my choice of teachers, regardless of whether they were state trained or not. It was left to my discretion whether my candidates would make good and efficient teachers, and it happens that most of the teachers at the Waldorf school, based on the educational principles I wish to speak about, are in fact not state trained.

However, the situation did not remain as it was then. The school was begun with a hundred and fifty students. In no time at all, anthroposophists living in Stuttgart also wanted to send their children to this school because the education it offered was supposed to be very good. Since then (only a few years ago) the school has grown to more than eight hundred children. Several grades, like our fifth and sixth grades, have three parallel classes.

A further step, perhaps not quite as practical (I don’t want to judge this) was that Emil Molt, after deciding to open the school, asked me to provide the school with spiritual guidance and methods. It was only possible to give this guidance based on the spiritual research and knowledge of the human being that I represent. Our fundamental goal is to know the complete human being as a being of body, soul, and spirit, as a person grows from childhood, and to be able to read in the soul of the child what needs to be done each week, month, and year. Consequently, one could say our education is a teaching based entirely on knowledge of the child, and this knowledge guides us in finding the appropriate methods and principles.

I can give only general and sketchy outlines here of what is meant by knowledge of the human being. There is much talk nowadays about physical education, about the importance of not sacrificing physical education to the education of the child’s mind and soul. However, to separate the physical aspect from that of the soul and spirit is in itself a great illusion, because in a young child, spirit, soul, and body form a unity. It is impossible to separate one realm from the other in early childhood.

To give an example, let us imagine a child at school; a child becomes more and more pale. The paling of the child is a physical symptom that the teacher should notice. If an adult becomes increasingly pale, one seeks the advice of a doctor, who will think of an appropriate therapy according to an understanding of the case. Teachers of an abnormally pale child must ask themselves whether this child was already that pale when entering the class, or if the child’s complexion changed afterward. Lo and behold, they may realize that they themselves were the cause of the child’s pallor, because of excessive demands on the child’s memory forces. Consequently they will realize that they must reduce the pressure in this respect. Here is a case where physical symptoms reveal problems in the sphere of the soul. The child becomes pale because the memory has been overtaxed.

Then again, teachers may be faced with a different type of child; this time the child does not turn pale; on the contrary, the complexion becomes increasingly ruddy. This child appears to lack good will, gets restless, and turns into what is usually called a “hyperactive” child. The child lacks discipline, jumps up and down and cannot sit still for a moment, constantly wanting to run in and out. It is now up to the teacher to find the cause of these changes, and, lo and behold, it may be found (not always, because individual cases vary greatly and have to be diagnosed individually) that the child had been given too little to remember. This can easily happen because the appropriate amount of material to be remembered varies greatly from child to child.

As it happens, government inspectors visit our school. The authorities make sure that they know what is happening in our school! At the time when socialism was flourishing, one local director of education came to inspect the school, and I took him around to the various classes for three days. I pointed out that our physical education was intended to develop the students’ spiritual capacities, and that we educate their mental-spiritual capacities in such a way that their physical bodies benefit, because the two form a unity. Thereupon the inspector exclaimed, “But in this case your teachers would have to know medicine as well, and that is not possible!” To which I answered, “I do not think so, but if it were indeed necessary, it would have to be done, because a teacher’s training must ensure that the teacher is capable of thorough insight into the physical and spiritual background of the growing child.”

Furthermore, if one has a child of the type just described, a child who becomes increasingly restless and who does not pale but, on the contrary, becomes flushed, one can think of all kinds of things to do. However, to help such a child, one has to make sure of the right treatment. And the right treatment may be very difficult to find, for insight into human nature must not limit its considerations to a certain period of time, such as from age seven to age fourteen, which is the time when the class teacher is with the children. One must realize that much of what happens during these seven years has consequences that manifest only much later. One might choose the comfortable ways of experimental psychology, which only considers the child’s present state of development to decide what to do, but if one endeavors to survey the child’s whole life from birth to death, one knows: When I give the child too little content to remember, I induce a tendency toward serious illness, which may not appear before the forty-fifth year; I may cause a layer of fat to form above the heart. One has to know what form of illness may be induced eventually through the education of the child’s soul and spirit. Knowledge of the human being is not confined to an experiment with a student in the present condition, but includes knowledge of the whole human being—body, soul, and spirit—as well as a knowledge of what happens during various ages and stages of life.

When these matters become the basis for teaching, one will also find them relevant in the moral sphere. You may agree with me when I say that there are some people who, in ripe old age, give off an atmosphere of blessing to those in their company. They needn’t say much, but nevertheless radiate beneficial influence to others merely by the expression in their eyes, their mere presence, arm gestures—saying little perhaps, but speaking with a certain intonation and emphasis, or a characteristic tempo. They can permeate whatever they say or do with love, and this is what creates the effect of blessing on those around them. What kind of people are they?

In order to explain this phenomenon with real insight into human life, one must look back to their childhood. One then finds that such people learned, in their childhood, to revere and pray to the spiritual world in the right way, for no one has the gift of blessing in old age who has not learned to fold his or her hands in prayer between the ages of seven and fourteen. This folding of the hands in prayer during the age of primary education enters deeply into the inner organization of the human being and is transformed into the capacity for blessing in old age. This example shows how different life stages are interrelated and interwoven in human life. When educating children, one educates for all of life—that is, during a person’s younger years one may cultivate possibilities for moral development in old age. This education does not encroach on human freedom. Human freedom is attacked primarily when a certain inner resistance struggles against a free will impulse. What I have been talking about is connected with freeing a person from inner impediments and hindrances.

This should suffice as an introduction to tonight’s theme. When one tries to achieve a more intimate knowledge of human nature, observing it not just externally but also with the inner gaze directed more toward the spiritual, one discovers that human beings pass through clearly defined life periods.

The first three periods of life are of particular importance and interest for education. The first one has a more homogeneous character and lasts from birth to age seven—that is, until the time of the change of teeth. The second period of life extends from the change of teeth to puberty, around age fourteen. The third begins at puberty and ends in the twenties. It is easy to notice external physical changes, but only a trained capacity for observation will reveal the more hidden aspects of these different life periods.

Such observation shows that during the first seven years, roughly from birth to the change of teeth, the child’s spirit, soul, and body are completely merged into a unity. Observe a child entering into this world, with open features still undifferentiated, movements uncoordinated, and without the ability to show even the most primitive human expressions, such as laughing or weeping. (A baby can cry, of course, but this crying is not really weeping; it does not spring from emotions of the soul because the soul realm has not yet developed independently.) All of this makes the child into a unique being, and indeed, the greatest wonder of the world. We observe a baby weekly and monthly; from an undefined physiognomy, something gradually evolves in the physical configuration of the little body, as if coming from a center. Soul qualities begin to animate not only the child’s looks, but also the hand and arm movements. And it is a wonderful moment when, after moving about on hands and knees, the child first assumes the vertical posture. To anyone who can observe this moment, it appears as a most wonderful phenomenon.

When we perceive all this with spiritual awareness, which can be done, it shows us the following: There, in this unskillful little body, spirit is living, spirit that cannot yet control limb movements. This is still done very clumsily, but it is the same human spirit that, later on, may develop into a genius. It is there, hidden in the movements of arms and legs, in questing facial expression, and in the searching sense of taste.

Then we find that, from birth until the second dentition, the young child is almost entirely one sense organ. What is the nature of a sense organ? It surrenders fully to the world. Consider the eye. The entire visible world is mirrored in the eye and is contained in it. The eye is totally surrendered to the world. Likewise the child, though in a different way, is surrendered fully to the environment. We adults may taste sweet, bitter, or acid tastes on the tongue and with the palate, but the tastes do not penetrate our entire organism. Although we are not usually aware of it, it is nevertheless true to say that when the baby drinks milk the taste of the milk is allowed to permeate the entire organism. The baby lives completely like an eye, like one large sense organ. The differentiation between outer and inner senses occurs only later. And the characteristic feature is that, when a child perceives something, it is done in a state of dreamy consciousness.

If, for example, a very choleric father, a man who in behaviors, gestures, and attitudes is always ready to lose his temper, and displays the typical symptoms of his temperament around a child, then the child, in a dreaming consciousness, perceives not only the outer symptoms, but also the father’s violent temperament. The child does not recognize temperamental outbursts as such, but perceives the underlying disposition, and this perception directly affects the finest vascular vessels right into the blood circulation and respiration. The young child’s physical and bodily existence is thus affected immediately by the spiritual impressions received. We may admonish a child, we may say all kinds of things, but until the seventh year this is all meaningless to the child. The only thing that matters is how we ourselves act and behave in its presence. Until the change of teeth, a child is entirely an imitating being, and upbringing and education can be effected only by setting the proper example to be imitated. This is the case for moral matters as well.

In such matters one can have some rather strange experiences. One day a father of a young child came to me in a state of great agitation because (so he told me) his son, who had always been such a good boy, had stolen! The father was very confused, because he was afraid this was a sign that his son would develop into a morally delinquent person. I said to him, “Let’s examine first whether your son has really stolen. What has he actually done?” “He has taken money out of the cupboard from which his mother takes money to pay household expenses. With this money he bought sweets, which he gave to other children.” I could reassure the father that his boy had not stolen at all, that the child had merely imitated what he had seen his mother do several times every day. Instinctively he had imitated his mother, taking money out of the cupboard, because Mother had been doing it.

Whether in kindergarten or at home, we educate the child only when we base all education and child rearing on the principle of imitation, which works until the second dentition. Speaking, too, is learned purely by imitation. Up to the change of teeth, a child learns everything through imitation. The only principle necessary at this stage is that human behavior should be worthy of imitation. This includes also thinking, because in their own way, children perceive whether our thoughts are moral or not. People do not usually believe in these imponderables, but they are present nevertheless. While around young children, we should not allow ourselves even a single thought that is unworthy of being absorbed by the child.

These things are all connected directly with the child as an imitator until the change of teeth. Until then all possibility of teaching and bringing up a child depends on recognizing this principle of imitation. There is no need to consider whether we should introduce one or another Froebel kindergarten method, because everything that has been contrived in this field belongs to the age of materialism. Even when we work with children according to the Froebel system, it is not the actual content of the work that influences them, but how we do it. Whatever we ask children to do without doing it first ourselves in front of them is merely extra weight that we impose on them.

The situation changes when the child’s change of teeth begins. During this stage the primary principle of early education is the teacher’s natural authority. Acceptance of authority is spontaneous on the child’s part, and it is not necessary to enforce it in any way. During the first seven years of life a child will copy what we do. During the second seven years, from the change of teeth until puberty, a child is guided and oriented by what those in authority bring through their own conduct and through their words. This relationship has nothing to do with the role of freedom in human life in a social and individual sense, but it has everything to do with the nature of the child between the second dentition and puberty. At this point it is simply part of a child’s nature to want to look up with natural respect to the authority of a revered teacher who represents all that is right and good. Between the seventh and fourteenth years, a child still cannot judge objectively whether something is true, good, or beautiful; therefore only through the guidance of a naturally respected authority can the students find their bearings in life. Advocating the elimination of a child’s faith in the teacher’s authority at this particular age would actually eliminate any real and true education.

Why does a child of this age believe something is true? Because the authority of the teacher and educator says so. The teacher is the source of truth. Why does something appeal to a child of this age as beautiful? Because the teacher reveals it as such. This also applies to goodness. At this age children have to gain abstract judgment of truth, goodness, and beauty by experiencing concretely the judgments of those in authority. Everything depends on whether the adult in charge exerts a self-evident authority on the child between seven and fourteen; for now the child is no longer a sense organ but has developed a soul that needs nourishment in the form of images or thoughts. We now have to introduce all teaching subjects imaginatively, pictorially—that is, artistically. To do so, teachers need the gift of bringing everything to children at this age in the form of living pictures.

As teachers, we ourselves must be able to live in a world of imagery. For example, let’s imagine that we have to teach a young child to read. Consider what this implies—the child is expected to decipher signs written or printed on paper. In this form they are completely alien to the child. Sounds, speech, and vowels that carry a person’s feelings and are inwardly experienced, are not alien to the child. A child knows the sense of wonder felt at seeing the sun rise. “Ah” (A) is the sound of wonder. The sound is there, but what does the sign that we write on paper have to do with it? The child knows the feeling of apprehension of something uncanny: “Oo” (U).

But what does the sign we write on the paper have to do with this sound? The child has no inner relationship to what has become modern abstract writing. If we return to earlier civilizations, we find that writing was different then. In ancient days, people painted what they wished to express. Look at Egyptian hieroglyphics—they have a direct relationship to the human soul. When introducing writing to the child, we must return to expressing what we wish to communicate in the form of pictures. This is possible, however, only when we do not begin by introducing the alphabet directly, nor reading as a subject, but when we start with painting.

Consequently, when young students enter our school, we introduce them first to the world of flowing colors with watercolor painting. Naturally, this can cause a certain amount of chaos and disorder in the classroom, but the teacher copes with that. The children learn how to work with paints, and through the use of color the teacher can guide them toward definite forms. With the necessary skill, the teacher can allow the shapes of the letters to evolve from such painted forms. In this way, the children gain a direct relationship to the various shapes of the letters. It is possible to develop the written vowels A or U so that first one paints the mood of wonder (or of fright), finally allowing the picture to assume the form of the appropriate letters.

All teaching must have an artistic quality based on the pictorial element. The first step is to involve the whole being of the child in the effort of painting, which is subsequently transformed into writing. Only later do we develop the faculty of reading, which is linked to the head system—that is, to only one part of the human being. Reading comes after writing. First a form of drawing with paint (leading the child from color experience to form), out of which writing is evolved. Only then do we introduce reading.

The point is that, from the nature of the child, the teacher should learn how to proceed. This is the right way of finding the appropriate method, based on one’s observation and knowledge of the child. Our Waldorf school has to do with method, not theory. It always endeavors to solve the wonderful riddle, the riddle of the growing child, and to introduce to the child what the child’s own nature is bringing to the surface. In using this method, one finds that between the second dentition and puberty one has to approach all teaching pictorially and imaginatively, and this is certainly possible. Yet, in order to carry the necessary authority, one has to have the right attitude toward what one’s pictures really represent. For example, it is possible to speak to one’s students even at a relatively early age about the immortality of the human soul. (In giving this example, I am not trying to solve a philosophical problem, but speak only from the perspective of practical pedagogy.) One could say to a child, “Look at the cocoon and its shape.” One should show it to a child if possible. “You see, the cocoon opens and a butterfly flies out! This is how it is when a human being dies. The human body is like the cocoon of a butterfly. The soul flies out of the body, even though we cannot see it. When someone dies, just as the butterfly flies out of the cocoon, so the soul flies out of the body into the spiritual world.”

Now, there are two possible ways that a teacher can introduce this simile. In one instance, the teacher may feel very superior to the “ignorant” student, considering oneself clever and the child ignorant. But this attitude does not accomplish much. If, in creating a picture for the child, one thinks that one is doing so only to help the child understand the abstract concept of immortality, such a picture will not convey much, because imponderables play a role. Indeed, the child will gain nothing unless the teacher is convinced of the truth of this picture, feeling that one is involved with something sacred. Those who can look into the spiritual world believe in the truth of this picture, because they know that, with the emerging butterfly, divine-spiritual powers have pictured in the world the immortality of the human soul. Such people know this image to be true and not a teacher’s concoction for the benefit of “ignorant” students. If teachers feel united with this picture, believing what they have put into it and thus identifying themselves with it, they will be real and natural authorities for their students. Then the child is ready to accept much, although it will appear fruitful only later in life.

It has become popular to present everything in simple and graphic form so that “even children can understand it.” This results in appalling trivialities. One thing, however, is not considered. Let’s assume that, when the teacher stands before the child as the representative and source of truth, beauty, and goodness, a child of seven accepts something on the teacher’s authority, knowing that the teacher believes in it. The child cannot yet understand the point in question because the necessary life experience has not occurred. Much later—say, at the age of thirty five—life may bring something like an “echo,” and suddenly the former student realizes that long ago the teacher spoke about the same thing, which only now, after having gained a great deal more life experience, can be understood fully.

In this way a bridge is made between the person who was eight or nine years old, and the person who is now thirty-five years old, and this has a tremendously revitalizing effect on such a person, granting a fresh increase of life forces. This fact is well-known to anyone with a deep knowledge of the human being, and education must be built on such knowledge.

Through using our educational principles in the Waldorf school in this and similar ways, we endeavor to attune our education of body, soul, and spirit to the innermost core of the child’s being. For example, there might be a phlegmatic child in a class. We pay great attention to the children’s temperaments, and we even arrange the seating order in the classrooms according to temperaments. Consequently we put the phlegmatic children into one group. This is not only convenient for the teachers, because they are always aware of where their young phlegmatics are sitting, but it also has a beneficial effect on the children themselves, in that the phlegmatics who sit together bore each other to death with their indifference. By overcoming some of their temperament, they become a little more balanced.

As for the cholerics who constantly push and punch each other when sitting together, they learn in a wonderfully corrective way how to curb their temperament, at least to some extent! And so it goes. If teachers know how to deal with the various temperaments by assuming, let us say, a thoroughly phlegmatic attitude themselves when dealing with phlegmatic children, they cause in these little phlegmatics a real inner disgust with their own temperament.

Such things must become a part of our teaching, in order to turn it into a really artistic task. It is especially important for students at this age. Teachers may have a melancholic child in their class. If they can look into the spiritual background, in an anthroposophical sense, they may want to find and think through some measure for the benefit of such a child. The education we speak of begins with the knowledge that spirit exists in everything of a physical-bodily nature. One cannot see through matter, but one can learn to know it by seeing its spiritual counterpart, thereby discovering the nature of matter. Materialism suffers from ignorance of what matter really is, because it does not see the spirit in matter.

To return to our little melancholic, such a student can cause us serious concern. The teacher might feel prompted to come up with very ingenious ideas to help the child overcome a particularly melancholic temperament. This, however, can often prove fruitless. Although such a situation may have been observed very correctly, the measures taken may not lead to the desired effect. If, on the other hand, teachers realize that a deterioration of the liver function is at the root of this melancholic nature, if they suspect that there is something wrong with the child’s liver, they will know the course of action necessary. They must contact the child’s parents and find out as much as possible about the child’s eating habits. In this way they may discover that the little melancholic needs to eat more sugar. The teachers try to win the parents’ cooperation, because they know from spiritual science that the beginnings of a degeneration in the liver function connected with melancholia can be overcome by an increased sugar intake. If they succeed in gaining the parents’ help, they will have taken the right step from an educational perspective. It would be necessary to know, through spiritual insight, that an increase of sugar consumption can heal or balance a pathological liver condition.

One must be able to perceive and know the growing child and even the individual organs. This is fundamental in our education. We do not insist on particular external circumstances for our schooling. Whether forest or heath, town or country, our opinion is that one can succeed in a fruitful education within any existing social conditions, as long as one really understands the human being deeply, and if, above all, one knows how the child develops.

These are only a few criteria that I may speak of today, which characterize the nature of Waldorf education and the methods used for its implementation, all of which are based on a spiritual- scientific foundation.

If one can approach the child’s being in this way, the necessary strength is found to help children develop both physically and morally, so that fundamental moral forces manifest also. Barbaric forms of punishment are unnecessary, because the teacher’s natural authority will ensure the proper inner connection between teacher and child. Wonderful things can happen in our Waldorf school to demonstrate this. For example, the following incident occurred a little while ago: Among our teachers there was one who imported all kinds of customary disciplinary measures from conventional school life into the Waldorf school. When a few children were naughty, he thought he would have to keep them in after school. He told them that they would have to stay behind as punishment and do some extra work in arithmetic. Spontaneously, the whole class pleaded to be allowed to stay behind and do arithmetic as well, because, as they called out, “Arithmetic is such fun!” What better things could they do than additional work in arithmetic? “We too want to be kept in,” they declared. Well, here you have an example of what can happen in the Waldorf school where teachers have implanted in their students the right attitude toward work. The teacher of course had to learn his own lesson: One must never use something that should be considered a reward as a punishment. This example is one of many that could be mentioned. It shows how one can create a real art of education based on knowledge of the human being.

I am extremely thankful to Mrs. Mackenzie for giving me the opportunity of at least outlining just some of the fundamentals of education based upon anthroposophical spiritual science. Our teaching is based on definite methods, and not on vague ideals born of mere fantasy. These methods answer the needs and demands of human nature and are the primary justification for our education. We do not believe in creating ideas of what ideal human beings should be so that they fit into preconceived plans. Our goal is to be able to observe children realistically, to hear the message sent to us through the children from the divine-spiritual worlds. We wish to feel the children’s inner affirmation of our picture of the human being. God, speaking through the child, says: “This is how I wish to become.”

We try to fulfil this call for the child through our educational methods in the best way possible. Through our art of education, we try to supply a positive answer to this call.

A view of the world, as it is intended to be in spiritual science, must prove itself by giving people support for what they need in life. The support for life must be what we can call moral strength. But the support for life must also include, among other things, what we can call the inner soul-condition that can arise in a person from feeling that he is a member of the great cosmic whole, from feeling so incorporated into the cosmic whole that it corresponds to what one can call one's religious need. As for man's inner moral strength, Schopenhauer spoke an excellent word, even if the further remarks he made on these words in his own way seem quite disputable. He said: It is easy to preach morals, but to found morals is difficult. This is indeed a true saying of life. For in general, to recognize what is good, what the moral life demands of us, is relatively easy as a matter of intellect. But to draw from the primal forces of the soul those impulses that are necessary in man to place himself in the fabric of life as a morally powerful being, that is difficult. But that is what it means to found morality. To found morality is not merely to say what is good, what is moral. To found morality is to bring to man such impulses, which, by absorbing them into his soul life, become a real strength, a real efficiency in him.

Now, at the present stage of civilization, man's moral consciousness is embedded in the world in a very unique way, in a way that is not always fully consciously observed, but which is the reason for many uncertainties and insecurities that prevail in people's lives. On the one hand, we have our intellectually oriented knowledge, our insight, which makes it possible for us to penetrate into natural phenomena, which makes it possible for us to absorb the whole world into our imagination to a certain extent, which makes it possible for us, in an admittedly very limited way, as we have seen in the last two reflections here, to also make ideas about the nature of man.

Alongside what flashes up in us as our cognitive faculty, as everything that is, I would say, directed by our human logic, alongside all this, another element of our being asserts itself, the one from which our moral duty, our moral love, in short, the impulses for moral action, arise. And it must be said that modern man lives, on the one hand, in his cognitive abilities and their results, and on the other hand, in his moral impulses. Both are soul contents. But for this modern man, there is basically little mediation between the two, so little mediation that, for example, Kant could say: There are two things that are most precious to him in the world: the starry heavens above him, the moral law within him. But precisely this Kantian way of thinking, which lies dormant in the modern human being, knows of no bridge between what leads to knowledge of the world on the one hand and what moral impulses are on the other. Kant regards the life of knowledge in his Critique of Pure Reason and the moral life in his Critique of Practical Reason as if by chance.

And if we are completely honest with our sense of the times, we must actually say that there is an abyss here between two ways of experiencing human nature. Today's science, in forming ideas about the course of world evolution in the most diverse fields of knowledge, regards the workings of nature from the simplest living creatures, indeed from inorganic nature, right up to the human being. It forms ideas about how this world, which is directly before us, came into being. It also forms ideas about the processes by which the former end of this world, which is immediately before us, could take place. But now, from within man, who is nevertheless interwoven with this natural order, there wells up what he calls his moral ideals. And man perceives these moral ideals in such a way that he can only feel himself valuable if he follows these ideals, if there is agreement between him and these ideals. Man makes his value dependent on these moral ideals. But if we imagine that the forces of nature, which become accessible to man through his knowledge, are once upon a time approaching their end, where does today's sense of time leave what man creates out of his moral ideals, out of his moral impulses? Anyone who is honest, who does not shroud today's consciousness in nebulousness, must admit that, in the face of present-day scientific knowledge, these moral ideals are something by which man must guide himself in life, but by which nothing is created that could once triumph when the earth, together with man, comes to an end.

It is, for today's consciousness, one must only admit it, no bridge between the cognitive abilities that lead to natural knowledge and the abilities that govern us by being moral beings. Man is not aware of everything that goes on in the depths of his soul. Much remains unconscious. But what rumbles unconsciously down there asserts itself in life through disharmony, through mental or even physical illness. And anyone who just wants to see what is going on today without prejudice will have to say: our life is surging, and there are people in this life with all kinds of mental and physical contradictions. And that which surges up wells up from a depth in which something is indeed active that is like those weak human powers that cannot build a bridge between the moral life and the knowledge of nature. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science addresses these questions in the following way. It must abandon everything that is, on the one hand, only a theoretical view of external reality. It must therefore recognize everything that, as I explained in the last two lectures here, would like to exclude the human being from this view of nature, so that a true objectivity can arise.

What I characterized as the path to the spiritual world is presented, to summarize what I said earlier, in the following way: First of all, anyone who wants to enter the spiritual world must devote themselves to a certain inner soul-spiritual work. In my books, I have summarized this inner practice, this inner spiritual-soul work, as meditation and concentration work. This work enables people to relate to their imaginative life differently than they do in ordinary life when we observe natural phenomena or even social life. It is a complete being-with-the-ideas, which otherwise only accompany our outer impressions like shadows. Just as I said, we usually face people or nature or anything else in physical life with our feelings, with our sympathies and antipathies, and we face facts with our will emotions. How these ideas arise, that disturbs us, that challenges our sympathy and antipathy, that stimulates our entire life force. This becomes our destiny. While we are outwardly quite calm, inwardly we are going through something that is by no means weaker than what we otherwise go through as life's destiny in the outer world. We are, so to speak, doubling our lives. While we usually get excited, develop sympathy and antipathy, and assert volitional impulses only in the outer life, in relation to outer events, we carry what otherwise only occupies us in this outer material world into our inner life of thought. If we can do this — and everyone can do it if they practise as I have described in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' or in my 'Occult Science' —, if we can really carry this out, then there comes a moment for us when in which he not only has images of the world when he opens his senses, when he hears or sees, but where he has images purely from the life of imagination, so full of content images, if I may use the expression, so full of sap, as they otherwise only come to us through sensory perception. They come through this thus intensified and sharpened life of imagination. Without sensory perception, we live in a world of images, as they otherwise only come to us through sensory perception.

But another significant experience is linked to this – these things can only be understood as experiences; abstract logic, so-called reasoning does not lead to them. Another experience is connected to this: We learn through such practice what it means to develop a spiritual-soul activity independently of the physical activity. The moment comes for the human being when he can rightly admit to himself, if I may put it this way, that he is a materialist, however strange and paradoxical that may sound. At this moment he can say: yes, in ordinary life we are completely dependent on the tools of our body. We think through the instrument of our nervous system. But that is precisely what characterizes this outer life, that we traverse it only by developing the soul and spiritual when it avails itself of the bodily instruments. But the soul and spiritual is not dependent on merely availing itself of the bodily instruments. Through the efforts described, it can free itself from the physical tool, can become free of the body. No matter how much speculation and philosophizing one does with materialism, if one only brings against it what can be known from ordinary life, one will never refute it, because for ordinary life, materialism is right. Materialism can only be refuted through spiritual practice, by detaching the soul-spiritual from the bodily in direct experience. One visualizes – I called it imaginative visualization in the books mentioned – one visualizes, but outside of the body, whereby the “outside” is of course not to be imagined spatially, but independently of the body. This is one side of what one must get to know within anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in order to really build the bridge that cannot be built in the way we have described. What one attains in this way as the content of imaginative knowledge is not in the human body, but outside of it. This provides the practical explanation that our innermost being was in the spiritual-soul world before it clothed itself with this body. For one is not only outside of the body, one is outside of time, in which one lives with the body. In this way, one really experiences the prenatal, or let us say, the pre-physical conception in man. Just as a light from outside shines into the room, so our prenatal life shines into our present life in this imagination.

What shines in is not just thoughts, it has a living content. This living content reveals itself as something very special. It reveals itself as a certain, I might say, intellectual content. So, as we cultivate, sharpen and strengthen our imaginative life in the way I have described, we come out of ourselves into a will content that has something living about it at the same time. It is the will content that creates in us what clothes itself in the physical body, what we do not have through heredity, what we do not have at all from the physical world.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not arrive at the realization of immortality through speculative processing of ordinary life, but rather through the cultivation of a cognitive faculty that is initially not present in ordinary life. What is particularly important for us today, however, is that in this way we reach beyond our physical body, even beyond the time in which our physical body lives. There one arrives at ideas that are still difficult for most people today to imagine, but which must become an important link in the evolution of humanity towards the future.

And now something very strange comes to light when one not only exercises on one side, that of the life of imagination, but also when one exercises on the side of the life of will. We human beings live, I would say, as Faust goes through life, saying, “I have only run through the world.” We run through the world. Of course, we undergo a development between birth and death, from month to month, from year to year, from decade to decade; but we undergo this development by, as it were, abandoning ourselves to external objectivity. Hand on heart, how many people do it differently than letting themselves be carried by life, be it by childhood, where adults educate them, or by later life and its fate? They become more perfect because the world makes them more perfect. But what do most people do differently, other than just abandon themselves to the stream of life? However, by abandoning oneself to the stream of life, one does not come to the spiritual path meant here. It is necessary that one takes self-discipline into one's own hands, that one actually works on oneself in such a way that one not only develops through the life that fate brings one, but that one develops further by making up one's mind: you want to implant this or that attitude. Now one works on implanting this attitude. One can undertake something on a small scale, one can do something on a large scale. But there is a big difference between just carrying out something in yourself, in the training of your own nature, by abandoning yourself to life, or taking this training of your own self into your own hands. By taking it into your own hands, you get to know the will in its effectiveness; because you learn to recognize what kind of resistance stands in the way of this will when you want to cultivate it in self-discipline. Oh, one gets to know all kinds of things in this way, one strengthens above all one's own powers of the spiritual-soul, and one will very soon notice when one exercises such exercises in self-discipline – but one must practice them for years – that one then acquires inner powers. These inner powers are of such a nature that we do not find them in outer nature. They are of such a nature that we do not find them in the ordinary life of the soul that we have carried within us before our exercises. We discover these forces only when we engage in such an inner exercise with ourselves. These forces are capable of something very definite: they are capable of absorbing into our own self, in a much more conscious way, the moral impulses that otherwise arise in the soul as if they were instinctive, as if they were indefinite and separate from the cognitive faculties. But understand me correctly, not into the self that we develop in our body, but into the self that we develop when we step out of our body with our imagination in the way described earlier. We cannot get the true form of the moral impulses into our sensual body, into our sensual perception; but we get what stands there so isolated that Kant presented it quite isolated as the categorical imperative, we get that into our self that has separated from the body.

And then what I have described earlier as imagination, as pictorial representations, becomes imbued with what one can call the objective power of moral impulses; it becomes imbued with moral inspiration. We now recognize that what wells up in us as moral imperatives, as moral ideals, is not rooted only in us, but in the whole of the world. We learn, by being outside of our physical being, to recognize that which does not appear in its true form within the physical organization, but in this true form, we recognize it through imaginative beholding, as objective forces of the world.

Such a vision can open up to a person who, with his or her healthy common sense, properly takes in what the spiritual researcher is able to say from his vision of the spiritual world. Anyone who imbues themselves with such a vision feels something very special about what today's popular public lectures are. It may sound strange when I say it, but I would like to say: anyone who unreservedly absorbs this inspiration in their imagination, which coincides with the moral forces that are present in human life, and imagines how can see through something like this in the present through spiritual knowledge, would like to think: if only such knowledge could take hold of people, at least as strongly as they are seized when they hear that X-rays or wireless telegraphy have been found! In view of what is taking place in the soul of a spiritual scientist, one would like to say: it is very necessary for present-day civilization that people should come to appreciate the spiritual forces for human strengthening that can be found in this way, just as much as what can be useful and beneficial in the outer life.

I believe that we have touched on an important challenge of civilization in the present day. The spiritual-scientific insights are, I repeat, not speculation, they are experiences. And the fact that so few people today accept them is because most people allow themselves to be blinded by materialistic scientific views, let their own prejudices stand in their way, do not apply their common sense, and therefore cannot properly

examine what the spiritual scientist says. They always say: we cannot see for ourselves what the spiritual researcher says. I would like to know how many people who believe in the Venus transits have ever seen a Venus transit! I would like to know how many people who say that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen have ever observed in a laboratory how to determine that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen and so on. There is a logic of common sense. Through it one can check what the spiritual researcher says. I certainly cannot paint illusions before those who use their common sense, nor can I talk fantasies to them, because they can use their common sense to see whether I speak like a dreamer or whether I speak in logical contexts, whether I speak like someone who puts forward one idea after another, as one does even in the most exact science. Anyone who acquires such a healthy knowledge and understanding of human nature will be able to distinguish whether he has a fantasist in front of him or a person who, by knowing how to clothe his view in healthy logical forms and not giving the impression of a dreamer in other ways, is to be taken seriously. We have to decide many things in life in this way; why should we not decide in this way the most important thing: insight into the order of the world? There is no other way for someone who cannot become a spiritual researcher themselves – but everyone can become a spiritual researcher to a certain extent, as I have explained in the books mentioned – to determine this; because spiritual science is something that is experienced, something that must be experienced, not something that is only achieved through logical conclusions.

So if you study worldviews, I would say the combination of imagination and inspired morality, you get to know something else, you learn to recognize what the contradiction is between so-called natural causality, natural necessity, and the element in which man lives as in his freedom. For it is only in the element of freedom that we can live with our moral impulses. We look out into the outer nature. Overwhelming for the view of nature that has developed over the last three to four centuries is what is called the necessary connection of the following with the preceding, what is called general causality. Thus, nature, including the human condition, presents itself as if everything were seized by a natural necessity. But then our freedom would be in a sorry state; then we could not act differently than the natural necessity in us compels us to act. Freedom would be an impossibility if the world were as the scientific view that has become popular in the last three to four centuries wants it to be.

But once we have gained the point of view that I have just described, the point of view of observation outside the human body, then everything that is permeated by necessity is, so to speak, presented as a kind of natural body. And this natural body produces a natural soul and a natural spirit in all possible places. The natural body is, as it were, that which has cast and thrown off the nascent world; the natural spirit, the natural soul, is that which grows into the future.

Just as, when I see a corpse before me, this corpse no longer has the possibility of following anything other than the necessities that have been determined by the soul and spirit that dwelled in it, so too that which is corpse-like in external nature has nothing in it of impulses as necessities. But in every place, what grows into the future springs forth. Our natural science has only been accustomed to observing the natural corpse, and therefore sees only necessity everywhere. Spiritual science must be added to this. It will see the life that is sprouting and has sprouted everywhere.

Thus man is placed, on the one hand, in the realm of natural causality and, on the other, in that which is also there but contains no causality. This contains something that is the same as the element of freedom we experience inwardly. We experience this element of freedom as I have described it in my Philosophy of Freedom when we rise to inwardly transparent, pure thinking, which is actually an outflow of our will activity. You can find more details in my Philosophy of Freedom.

Thus, what we gain by creating a possibility of knowledge for ourselves outside the human body carries us into a world where the contrast between natural necessity and freedom becomes explicable. We get to know freedom itself in the world. We learn to feel ourselves in a world in which freedom resides.

When I describe something like this to you, I do not do it just to show you the content of what I am describing, but I want to present it to you show you how man can enter into a certain frame of mind by absorbing knowledge drawn from such regions, by invigorating himself with such knowledge.

Just as we are imbued with joy when we experience an extraordinarily joyful event, as some people, when they have drunk so and so much Moselle wine, are completely imbued with the mood that comes from the Moselle wine, so too can a person's entire state of mind be seized by something so truly spiritual that it permeates the person. When has a person's state of mind been gripped by something, at first only in the outer life, but then in a shadowy way? When the categorical imperative or conscience moves in the face of moral obligations. But the content of this conscience now becomes clear and it will also take on a different emotional nuance. For what has actually happened – whether a person is a spiritual researcher himself, or whether he absorbs what the spiritual researcher brings through his common sense and incorporates it into his soul as insights – what has happened to the person? He has merged with something, has united with something, with which one only comes together when one goes out of oneself, when one alienates oneself from oneself. You will find no better, more realistic definition of love and the feeling of love than that which can be described as the state of mind that overcomes one when one penetrates, free of the body, into the entity of the outer world. If moral imperatives otherwise appear as a constraint, they can be cast in such a form that they appear imbued with the same mood that must permeate spiritual scientific knowledge. These moral impulses, these moral imperatives, can learn from the soul-attitude that comes to us through the assimilation of spiritual science; they can be warmed through by what must live in spiritual science in the highest sense: by love.

I tried to show this again in my Philosophy of Freedom, that love is the most dignified impulse for moral action in man. Within the modern development of the spirit, these things have already been spoken of more instinctively than can be the case today, when we can, if we want, have progressed in spiritual science. Kant once spoke of the compelling duty, of the, I would say, humanly restraining categorical imperative, which allows no interference of any sympathy. What one does out of moral duty, one does because one must. Kant therefore says: Duty, you exalted, great name, you carry nothing with you that means ingratiation or the like, but only the strictest submission. Schiller did not consider this slavish submission to duty to be humane. And he countered this Kantian argument with what he expressed so beautifully and so magnificently in his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”.

But we need only take a small epigram that Schiller coined in opposition to this rigorist, rigid concept of duty as propounded by Kant, and we have an important humanistic contrast with regard to the moral life: “I gladly serve my friends,” says Schiller, “but unfortunately I do it reluctantly. And so it often rankles me that I am not virtuous.” He believes that in the Kantian sense, one should not gladly serve one's friends, but rather submit to one's duty in obedience. But that which can make human life truly human is when we fulfill what Goethe says in a few monumental words: Duty, where we love what we command ourselves. But the mood to love what one commands oneself can only be kindled from that state of the human soul that comes about in the acquisition of spiritual science.

So when one delves into spiritual science, it is not something that runs alongside life, like preaching morals, but there is a development of strength within it that directly takes hold of the moral will. It is a grounding of morality. It is there that which pours into the human being the moral love. Spiritual science does not merely preach morals; spiritual science, when taken in its full seriousness, in its full power, grounds morality, but by not giving words of morality, but giving strength for virtuous love, for loving virtue.

Spiritual science is not just theory, it is life. And when one acquires spiritual science, it is not just a matter of reflection, it is something like absorbing life, like breathing. This is what spiritual science can offer modern civilization in the moral sphere, what it must offer. For in ancient times, as I indicated the day before yesterday, people also had a spiritual science, but it was instinctive. Where did the spiritual science of the ancient, millennia-old developing Oriental wisdom come from? It was a dull, dream-like visualization of the world. It came from human instincts, from human drives. This spiritual science was instinctive. People saw into nature through a kind of clairvoyance. And this clairvoyance was connected with their blood, was connected with their outer physicality. But the moral impulses of that time were also connected with this blood, with this outer physicality. Both came from one source. Humanity is undergoing a development and believes that we can be like people thousands of years ago; this is the same as believing that an adult man can be like a child. We can no longer stand on the standpoint of the primitive clairvoyant arts of the ancient Orient or ancient Egypt. We have advanced to Galileism, to Copernicanism. We have advanced to the point of observation that arises in the intellect. In those ancient oriental ways of looking at things, the intellect had not yet developed. But for that, we must also get the impulses for our moral action from the spirit, not from instinct. That is the worst thing today, that people, when they talk about ideals or impulses for life, always make everything absolute. When some party member or enthusiastic theorist appears on the scene today, dreaming of a thousand-year Reich, they say: I want this or that for humanity and they think to themselves that what they are saying is good for humanity in all times to come and for the whole earth. That it is good in the most absolute sense. Anyone who really looks into the life of developing humanity knows that what is good, what is valid for the world view, is always only appropriate for a certain age, that one must know the nature of this age. I have often said in earlier lectures here: spiritual science, anthroposophically oriented, as I express it here, does not imagine that it is something absolute. But it does believe that it speaks from the heart of the present and the near future, that it says for human souls what these human souls need in the present and in the near future. But she knows full well that this spiritual science: if in five hundred years someone will again speak of the great riddles of the world and of the affairs of humanity, he will speak in different tones, in a different way, because there is nothing absolute in this sense, nothing that lasts forever.

We are effective in life precisely because we are able to grasp it in its liveliness, in its metamorphosis, even where we stand in it. It is easier to set up absolute ideals in abstractions than to first get to know one's age and then, from the essence of this age, to speak what is appropriate for it. Then, when, through the assimilation of spiritual-scientific impulses, man, as has been said, permeates himself with what comes to him from the spirit, then he will know that he is spirit as man, is soul, then he will know that he lives through the world as spirit and soul. And then he will address every other human being as spirit and soul. One would be inclined to say that something tremendous will come about when this becomes spiritual science in human life, when it becomes an attitude that permeates human life to such an extent that one consciously encounters another human being as a riddle to be solved, because with each person one looks into infinity, into spiritual depths and abysses.

What emerges from this real observation of our fellow human beings as spirit and soul will give rise to social and moral forces that must form the basis for a real treatment of the burning social question of our time. I cannot imagine that those who see through the whole essence of the social question and at the same time let today's human condition take effect on them do not suffer certain mental anguish. We live in a time when the social question needs to be resolved in a certain way. We also live in a time when the promoters of the social order are inspired by the most anti-social instincts, when the demand for social organization of life seems to be in opposition to what lives in human souls as anti-social instincts. No matter how beautiful the programs may be that are drawn up, no matter how beautiful the ideas that are entertained as to what should be done to solve the social problem, a way to solve it can only be found when the spirit is seen, felt and sensed among people, when people treat each other with respect, protection, honor and love, and not just the physical part of their fellow human beings.

That is why I have called in my book “The Essentials of the Social Question” for the separation of spiritual life from the rest of social life, so that this spiritual life can be placed only on its own foundations, independent of the state and independent of economic impulses, purely of human nature. Only such a free spiritual life will truly spread social instincts, social views and attitudes among people. Social morality also depends on people taking in their spiritual state what can become them in the pursuit of what can be said from the research of spiritual science.

And that in which man must rest as a whole, worthy and dignified, so that he does not feel as a mere lonely wanderer, but as a member of the world, the religious element, can, in the sense that modern man needs it, only be kindled and fanned by that which is attained as an inner mood in the pursuit of spiritual science.

The events of the world order or of human development that religious feelings point to stand there as fact. The Mystery of Golgotha, for example, stands there as fact. What took place in Palestine at the beginning of our era, when the Christ came into the flesh in Jesus, is a fact. One must distinguish this fact, this objective fact, from the way in which man approaches the understanding and contemplation of such a fact. In the times when Christianity first spread, it was able to flow within the human attitudes that still came from the ancient Orient. What happened in Palestine as the event of Golgotha was understood with the ideas that in a certain way came from ancient times, from primitive human attitudes. For centuries, those who were able to do so were honest and sincere in their understanding of the event of Golgotha through such ideas. But then came the time when Galilean science arose, when Giordano Bruno overcame space in such a remarkable way for the human conception by showing that what is up there the blue firmament is only that which lives in ourselves, the boundaries that we ourselves set, while in a far-flung sea of space the stars are in infinity. All that Copernicus brought, all that has been brought to the newer world-picture of externals by the spirits who have lived up to the present day, has come. In this time men have inwardly become accustomed to a different way of looking at the world than that through which Christianity was first comprehended. In this time a new relation must also be won to the religious foundations of the evolution of mankind. The point is not to shake the facts on which the religious development of humanity is based. But the point is to appeal to modern human conscience in such a way that the man of today, out of his state of soul, can understand the Christ event as he must.

Those who say that a new path must also be sought to the old facts on religious ground mean it most honestly and reverently with regard to religion. Spiritual science, oriented towards anthroposophy, will be the best preparation for understanding Christianity or other religious content in a modern way. Those who do not honestly mean it with religious life do not admit this, because they want to preserve ways to the foundations of religious life to which man today, when he otherwise pays homage to the views of his time, cannot pay homage.

We have come to materialism in modern times. Certainly, different types of people have become the instigators of materialism; but among these people there are also those who have retained certain old habits of life in the development of humanity, habits of life that have led to a monopoly being given to the denominations for everything that can be said about the spirit and soul. Because the confessions alone had the right to decide what should be believed about the spirit and soul, natural science was left without a spirit to guide its research. Today, natural science believes that it has taken on this form because it had to, when researching nature, one must exclude the spirit. Oh no, natural science has become so because in earlier times it was forbidden to research nature with spirit, because the church had to decide about spirit and soul. And today, people continue the habits and even trumpet them as unprejudiced scientific judgment.

One only has to look at such researchers, who in the sense of materialistic research must be highly praised, as for example at the Jesuit priest and ant researcher Wasmann, the excellent materialistic researcher in the field of natural science, a researcher who, however, does not allow a grain of spirit to flow into what dogma is. Spirit and soul must be excluded. Therefore: external science is materialistic. The founders of the religions of the book are not in the least the originators of modern materialism. However paradoxical it may sound today, it is true: because the church did not allow the spirit to be brought into the contemplation of nature, natural science has become spiritless. The others have only adopted this as a habit. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must bring the spirit back into the study of nature. Let me say once more: this spiritual science is not based on the idea that spirit only makes occasional or brief visits, as in materialism, so that man can convince himself that there is a spirit. No, this spiritual science wants to show that in the small and large, in all material things, there is always and everywhere spirit, that one can always and everywhere follow the spirit. But because spiritual science oriented to anthroposophy always and everywhere investigates spirit in the most material form, it shows that there is no such thing as a material substance that is independent of spirit, just as there is no ice that is independent of water. Ice is transformed water, water that has cooled down; matter is spirit that has solidified. One must only explain it in the right way in each individual case. By showing, as everywhere, where there is matter, where there is outer life, there is spirit, and by leading man to connect with the ruling spirit, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science also provides the impetus for a real religious deepening today.

But one experiences many things in this field. You see, an experience of a man who is even well-intentioned is the following. Someone says: I cannot examine spiritual science as Steiner presents it; it may contain truths, but it should be kept very far from all religious life, because religious life must represent a direct relationship, a direct unity of man with God, far from all knowledge. And now the person in question says, very strangely: in our time we have too much of religious interest, of religious experience; people just always want to experience something religious. They want to have religious interest. You don't need any of that in religion. In religion, you only need direct unity with God. Away, says the churchman in question, with all religious interest, with all religious experience.

Now, an unprejudiced person must say today that even if people still long for an unclear religious experience, even if they still awaken an unclear religious interest in themselves, that is precisely the beginning of the yearning to really find a way into the religious element, as I have described it to you now. Whoever is honest and sincere about religious life should take hold of that urge for religious interest and religious experience. Instead, the clergyman condemns religious experience and religious interest. The question today is whether real religious understanding is to be found in those who speak as they do or in those who try to speak as I have spoken to you today. However, you also have to recognize people by their fruits.

In a recent lecture, a man who is also a churchman, but also a university professor, tried to refute anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Two young friends of mine were in this lecture, and they were able to speak afterwards in the discussion. Because of the context, these two young people, who had absorbed the impulses of spiritual science well, brought forward words from the Bible to prove how what is written in the Bible, if properly understood, agrees with what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has to say in this area. And at one point the chairman, who was a real churchman, didn't know what else to do but say, “Here Christ errs!” It could be retorted, “So you believe in a God who errs!” A fine religious sentiment. It produces strange blossoms today. Religious sentiment is only genuine when it enters into real moral life. There one certainly has strange experiences. I now find it pretty much the most disgusting thing that can be said about what appears as a social consequence in this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, from beginning to end, and that it has been lied about by a whole series of German newspapers. But people today find it compatible with morality to say that the following can happen as a moral consequence of religious practice. Recently, a canon, that is, a churchman of the Catholic kind, gave a lecture in a city about the spiritual science presented here, and at the end he said: find out from the opposing writings what kind of worldview the man represents, because you are not allowed to read his own writings and those of his followers. The Pope has forbidden Catholics to read them.

The recommendation to get to know something from the evil-intentioned, from the most malevolent opposing writings, is the moral consequence of some religious practices of the present day. No wonder that what we have experienced in the last five years has poured out over the world from such underground life. Or was it not a surfacing of lies and hatred of humanity and much more that was rooted and still is rooted in the depths of human souls? Should not the fact that one has experienced give cause to seriously consider whether a thorough re-education is not necessary? Has not something like world-historical immorality come to the surface of world history in the present? Or is it religious sentiment that has been acted out in the world in the last five years? Those attitudes that have not had centuries, but millennia, to work on improving humanity, are now seeing their fruits! Nineteenth-century theology no longer recognizes anything of the spirituality of the event of Golgotha. This spirituality, this divine Christ in the man Jesus, will be rediscovered through the path of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. From there, he will again enter into human souls, to prompt them not merely to preach morality, but to establish within themselves the right instinctive motivation for moral action and work in the world. Is there not an obvious need for renewal and reconstruction? Does this necessity not emerge when one looks at the events of the last five to six years? Do we not see the fruits of that which has been living under the surface for centuries and has now come to the surface? Should this not be proof that thorough religious and moral work is necessary?

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would like to collaborate on this work, the necessity of which any unbiased person must admit today if they are not asleep in their soul within the great events of the time. And anyone who wants to criticize it, who wants to condemn it, should first raise the fundamental question: does it honestly want to collaborate on the real progress of humanity? And only when he has conscientiously informed himself about it so that he can form an opinion about it, will it become clear to what extent this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has the right to participate. Because it wants to honestly and sincerely participate in the necessary progress, in the necessary rethinking and relearning of humanity.

It gives me great joy to be able to greet you again today on my journey through and to be able to speak with you about some theosophical matters on this day. In doing so, we may touch on a topic that is more closely related to the emotional life and yet it points us upwards and can point us upwards into perspectives that will teach us about the connection between human beings and the great starry worlds, with what we call the macrocosm.

Today I would like to start with an observation, a motto that runs through human history and which, on the one hand, expresses man's longing to come close to his higher self, but on the other hand, says how little he can reach his divine self. In Greek history we find Socrates going about teaching people, directing them to virtue by means of simple concepts, to everything that is close to the human mind. Socrates, the Greek sage, wanted to turn the gaze of his contemporaries away from the external world of nature. While his predecessors thought about the underlying principles of the great natural phenomena and sought to explain them, it is said of Socrates that he is supposed to have said: What do we care about nature, the trees, the birds? They cannot teach us how to become better human beings. — This sentence contains an error. But what matters here is not whether Socrates makes a mistake, but what he wanted. He was one of the greatest sages in the world, who even paid for what he wanted with his life.

One of his maxims has been preserved. Its content strikes every human soul that wants to know itself: he taught virtue, morality. If man could truly understand it, he would act accordingly. If man departs from morality, it is only because he does not yet fully understand it. Virtue can be taught. The human heart objects that human nature is weak, that it often fails in virtue. He who gave this saying the form in which it lives in many hearts, lives in such a way that it is an expression of the deepest regret, of apology, Paul, gave this saying the form: Strong is the spirit, the flesh is weak. Many see what virtue consists in and yet cannot follow it. This dichotomy runs through all human nature. You only need to write this saying in your soul and you have recorded the dichotomy of human nature. There is something in man that transcends him: higher human nature transcends lower human nature.

Through Theosophy we are accustomed to seeing human nature not as something simple. The soul of man appears to us as a trinity. Here we must remember the development of our planet, its earlier incarnations, which it has gone through and in which man has also been developed with it. The first incarnation of our planet was the Saturn state. Here the germ was laid for the physical body of man. After this state had lasted a long time, the planet disintegrated and reappeared as the sun, with the powers of the life ether. In this state, the etheric or life body was added to the physical body in the germ. After a long time, the planet disintegrated and reappeared in the state of the moon. In this state, the astral body was added to the human physical and etheric bodies. And after this state had also gone through dissolution, the earth embodied itself in the form it has now. As a fourth principle, the germ of the self was now added to man.

Saturn, the sun and the moon are a trinity: the past of the earth. During this time, the human trinity has developed: physical body, etheric body, astral body. These are the human past. The I is the present. Its future lies in what it works out of the lower trinity, what spiritualization is achieved in the process. By penetrating and learning to control the astral body, the I transforms it into the spirit self or Manas. By penetrating the etheric body, the I transforms it into the life spirit or Buddhi. By penetrating the physical body, the I transforms it into the spiritual man or Atman. This is the upper trinity, the future of man.

Now the I is also threefold, for the soul has three aspects, three basic powers of which it consists, which can never be separated or torn out of it. These three powers are what we have called the sentient soul, the mind soul, and the consciousness soul. They are parts of the individuality that is gradually emerging into consciousness. We can also describe them in our own words as wisdom, individuality and morality. In the sentient soul, we feel the inner soul; the astral body can be regarded as the exterior of the sentient soul. The I, which is becoming conscious, struggles out of the soul of understanding. Within the adult I-forces, the consciousness soul is experienced as the inner self, the spiritual self as the outer self.

Is there anything that can suggest to us that what has just been said is true? To answer this question, let us consider what we have become through the stages of human development. We stand in the middle of the past lower triad and the luminous spiritual-soul triad. Today, we want to describe this triad with words taken from direct life, not as in the book “Theosophy”, where it is scientifically presented. What is it that can mean so much to us, our deepest spiritual shortcomings, our spiritual longings and dissatisfaction, what is this trinity when we look at our cleverness, individuality and virtue, at all our striving that can fill us with bliss or disharmony? This is the trinity that we can describe as faith, hope and love. They are the three fundamental powers of the soul that can never be taken from it. Faith – what is faith? Faith is a power of the soul that can never be completely wrested from the human soul, and it lives in every human being. There has never been a nation that did not have it, no religion has allowed itself to be deprived of speaking of it. It is the yearning for faith that permeates the world. The soul always wants to have something to hold on to. If this yearning for faith is not satisfied, then the tormented soul is in a bad way. If it is deprived of what it can believe in – as happens through materialism – then it is as if the human body were deprived of the air it needs to breathe. Only that the process of suffocation of the body takes a very short time, that of the soul takes a very long time.

One often reads sayings like: knowledge is power – and the like. Now, at the beginning of the Bible, a peculiar word has been found that has not yet been properly appreciated to this day. There is talk of the tree of knowledge and of the fruit of the tree of knowledge that is eaten. This is to be taken quite literally. Knowledge is nourishment, knowledge is nourishment for the soul. The soul eats of that which we absorb as concepts from Theosophy. It eats of that which it believes, and it has healthy nourishment only from that which Theosophy offers it.

Faith, say the scientists and materialists, is an outdated point of view. I only believe what I know, says the modern man. This is a mistake. Belief is not a regression into the past, because belief and knowledge do not form a contradiction. But knowledge is changeable and cannot satisfy the need for faith in the human heart. When material science claims that the world is composed of atoms and came into being by chance, the human heart quite rightly says: I cannot believe that, I find no satisfaction in this hypothesis. And because man cannot believe, because he has nothing to cling to with his sense of faith, that is why the human soul is not healthy, and this unhealthy soul makes the body sick. This is how nervousness in the modern sense arises and gets worse and worse. This is how the soul affects the body and the person who has become so affects his environment, which he drags down and makes sick, and his descendants. This is why humanity is degenerating more and more, and unfortunately it will continue to get worse and worse. It is materialistic science that gives people “stones instead of bread”. The soul has no nourishment, although the intellect is overflowing with knowledge. And such a person then goes around not knowing what to do with himself, he does not know what to hold on to, and just as if one were to take away the air to breathe, the human soul suffocates from not having any nourishment, no spiritual sustenance. Theosophy has therefore come into the world to provide humanity with nourishment.

When we come together to study Theosophy, we do not do so like other associations that deal with literature, fine arts, social problems and the like. We do not practice Theosophy out of curiosity, but to satisfy the urge to believe, to nourish the soul. Therefore, we allow the theosophical concepts, feelings and sensations to affect our soul.

If we now consider this in terms of the evolution of the world and of humanity, we must remember that during the lunar state of the earth the astral body was added to the human being. What is this astral body? It consists of forces that must always grasp something, that must always attach themselves somewhere. In their effect, these forces are what we experience as faith, as the power of faith. The astral body is the source of faith itself. It must therefore receive nourishment if it is to develop, if it is to live. The desire for nourishment is the yearning of faith. If this power of faith cannot be satisfied, if the faith is deprived of one thing after another that it could hold on to, if it is not offered good spiritual nourishment, then the astral body becomes ill and through it the physical man also. But if he receives satisfaction from the concepts, ideas and feelings that Theosophy draws from the truth, from the depths of world knowledge, then he has the spiritual nourishment that appeals to him, then he has his satisfaction. He becomes strong and healthy, and the person himself becomes healthy. The views have changed a great deal over the past century, right down to the word. A hundred and thirty years ago, a man was called nervous who was a strong fellow, with strong muscles and full of strength. Today, a nervous person is a dissatisfied, weak person, a sick person, one whose soul searches unsatisfied for what it can draw nourishment from. From all this it follows that we can justifiably call the astral body the body of faith.

A second basic power is love. No one lacks it, it is always there, it cannot be eradicated. Anyone who would believe that the greatest hater, the greatest egoist, has no love, is mistaken. To think so is quite wrong. The longing for love is always present here. Whether it is sexual love, love for a child, for a friend, or love for something, for a work, it is always there. It cannot be torn out of the soul because it is a fundamental power of the soul. But just as man needs air to breathe, so he needs the work of love, the activity of love, for his soul. Its opponent, its hindrance, is egoism. But what does egoism do? It does not allow love to work outwards, it presses it into the soul, again and again. And just as air must flow out when breathing, so that man does not suffocate, so love must flow out, so that the soul does not suffocate from what is forcibly pressed into it. Better said: the soul burns from its own fire of love within itself and perishes.

Let us now remember that on the old sun, the human being was given the ether body as an inclination, that this fiery, luminous, shining part of the sun is the ether body. In it, however, there is given only another aspect of love, that which love is in the spirit: light is love. In the ether body, therefore, love and the yearning for love are given to us, and we can justifiably call the ether body the body of love: light and love.

It is a true saying: love is the greatest good. But it can also have the most disastrous consequences. We see this in everyday life, and I will give you an example that has been experienced. A mother loved her little daughter very much, and out of love she let her do everything, no matter what she did. She never punished her and fulfilled her every whim. The little daughter became a poisoner, and out of love she became so. Love must be combined with wisdom, it must become an enlightened love, only then can it truly work for good. The theosophical teaching is called upon to bring this wisdom, to give this enlightenment. And when man has absorbed in himself what is said and taught concerning the evolution of the world, concerning this apparently so far, so distant lying, what is communicated about the connection of man with the macrocosm, then man will become such that his enlightened love will face his fellow man in order to see into him, to be able to understand him, and thus become enlightened human love.

We often hear that life is dull and empty. This feeling even causes a kind of discord in the body. This is the effect of the unsatisfied power of love. When the world rejects our love, we feel pain. When we do something out of love, we must do it because the soul needs it, just as the lungs need air. Not out of scientific curiosity or to present a scientific opinion to the world – we have more than enough of that, because there are a thousand questions waiting to be solved – but to give humanity a sense of fulfillment, that is why Theosophy came into the world. We still gather in small groups, but these groups will soon grow larger and larger, and we will one day be able to solve the thousand questions of today.

Who will solve the social question? Those who theorize and debate about it? Never. The theosophical worldview and love will solve it. And truly, as paradoxical as it may sound, humanity will soon no longer even be able to grow potatoes – because the potatoes are already getting worse and worse – it will not even be able to grow potatoes without Theosophy! How can this be explained? Much of what mankind does today is instinctive, based on a certain instinct. However, this instinct must increasingly disappear. Why? Because the time has come for it to become conscious. People will therefore not be able to know agriculture without learning the truths of theosophy about the nature of the earth, the forces at work in it, and so on.

"The third basic power is hope. The human soul must hope, everyone knows that. Unsatisfied and searching, people go around in the world, and all too often one finds people to whom everything seems stale, to whom nothing gives satisfaction, to whom one thing after another slips through their fingers. It is dark around them, without prospect, without hope – so they say.

A great man once said: “Virtue without hope is the greatest crime, eternity without hope is the greatest lie!” And yet the power of hope is written into the soul; it is an ineradicable force that no power will ever be able to wrest from man. But if mankind is deprived of what it needs to climb upwards, the souls that are robbed of it will lose their security, support and stability, and so people will collapse in insecurity, they will be stupid and senseless. The theosophical principles of karma and re-embodiment satisfy the human soul's need for hope. They offer the lasting, that which leads into the future. What is an act, what is a thought, a word, that is thought by man and then torn away? Man and his deeds, man and his thoughts belong together, and it is illogical to regard an evil deed, an insult, for example, as atoned for if the perpetrator has not made amends for it himself. The law of causation speaks here: Man's life is bound to man, and he must go from embodiment to embodiment.

Lessing left behind the book “The Education of the Human Race” as the final result of his entire life. The thought that is the culmination of this work is that man returns again and again. What else have great minds, such geniuses as Lessing, thought of as the doctrine of reincarnation, namely, that the human soul develops further from stage to stage, that it continues to experience that which it has caused, on and on. It will only take a short time before the doctrine of reincarnation and the doctrine of karma will also be recognized in external science. And with that, humanity will receive something again that has been taken away from it by materialistic science: hope.

Why do we understand the essence of past cultural epochs? It is not literature or art history that gives us what the Greeks left behind. Far too little do both bring, it would not even be necessary to know about it. We have the achievements of Greek culture within us simply because we were alive at the time, because we lived through this epoch of culture, and we could not be what we are today if we had not lived through this epoch at that time. Hebbel left behind notes of a thought that he was no longer able to shape dramatically. In a school, a professor was practicing Plato with his students. The reincarnated Plato is among the students and gets one very bad grade after another, even punishments, because he - the Plato - does not understand the Plato! Again, the idea of reincarnation comes from the soul of a genius.

If the fruit of virtue did not depend on man, what would be virtue? How could evil be atoned if man himself did not have to atone for it! Eternity would remain a lie if man himself did not depend on eternity, if it did not concern him. Continuity through incarnations and reincarnations, that is what constitutes hope, and only through this can the hopeless souls, who cannot satisfy their longing for hope, become whole.

The germ of the physical human being was laid on the old Saturn. How so? Spiritually it was laid there, namely in that which should continue: hope. Therefore, the physical body can justifiably be called the body of hope. The characteristic of the physical body is its density. When the waves of the soul's life beat against the human body over and over again and penetrate it more and more, it is permeated by hope, by the certainty that something will develop out of it that lasts forever, that is imperishable. This desire for the satisfaction of hope, for a continuation of life, is a consequence of the soul's power of hope, and it is deprived of nourishment by external science.

Theosophy, its concepts, ideas and perceptions, gives it back to it, and that is the great mission of Theosophy: to make people strong in faith again, happy in love and enduring in hope.

If we take only the truths that Theosophy transmits to us and give them to the soul's power of faith for nourishment, then Manas will arise by itself, the transformation of the astral body into Manas will take place by itself. If we take only the truths and give them to love for nourishment, then buddhi will arise by itself. If we take the theosophical truths and give them to hope for nourishment, then the spirit man, atman, will arise by itself.

That is why theosophy is studied and thought about, not out of scientific curiosity. It is wrong to say out of laziness that one does not need to know all this. For the theosophical truths have been taken from the truth itself, they have been brought down from the great All, they serve the human soul as living nourishment, like bread, like air. If man, if humanity is not to suffocate, if it is to fulfill its mission, this nourishment must be brought to it, and that right now, because it is so extraordinarily necessary. That is the purpose of the theosophical study, and not a thirst for knowledge, not curiosity, or something even worse perhaps.

If we wish to understand what lies at the foundation of the two impulses that penetrate so deeply into human life—that of the so-called free will and of the so-called necessity—then we must add still other thoughts to the various ideas already gained as a foundation. This I will do today, in order that tomorrow we may be in a position to draw the conclusion, or inference, in regard to the concept of free will and necessity in the social, ethical-moral, and historical processes of human life. In discussing such things it becomes more and more evident that people—especially modern people—strive to embrace the highest, most important and significant things with the most primitive kinds of thoughts. It is taken for granted (I have often mentioned this) that certain things must be known in order to understand a clock; someone who has not the slightest idea of how the wheels of a clock work together, etc., will hardly attempt to explain, on the spur of the moment, the details of a clock's mechanism. Yet we wish to be competent judges of free will and necessity in all situations of life without having learned anything fundamental about these things. We prefer to remain ignorant concerning the most important and most essential things, which can only be understood if we consider their whole relationship to human nature, and we wish to know and judge everything imaginable of our own accord. This is particularly the desire of our times. When it is shown that the human being is a complicated being, organized in manifold ways, a being that penetrates deeply, on the one hand, into all that is connected with the physical plane, and on the other, into all that is connected with the spiritual world, then people often object that such things are dry and intellectual, and that the most important and essential things must be grasped in quite another way.

The world will have to learn (perhaps just the present catastrophic events may teach us something) how much lies hidden in man and in his relationship with the course of the world's evolution. For years we have emphasized that we can differentiate roughly in man what we may call his physical nature, or his physical body; his etheric body, or the body of formatives forces, as I have called it; his astral body, which is already psychic; and the actual ego.

We have emphasized recently from the most varied points of view that—in reality—man, as he lives between waking and sleeping, in his usual waking day-consciousness, has some knowledge only of the impressions given to him by his senses, and of his thoughts; but he dreams away the real contents of his life of feeling, and sleeps away the real contents of his life of the will. Dream and sleep stretch into the world of waking life; during our usual waking consciousness, our feeling life is hardly more than a dream, and the real contents of our will reach our consciousness just as little as a dreamless sleep. Through our feelings, through the contents of our will, we dive down into the world (we have pointed this out specially during these considerations) in which we live together with the dead, in the midst of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies, the Angeloi, the Archangeloi, Archai, etc. As soon as we live in a feeling—and we live constantly in feelings—all that lives in the kingdom of the dead lives with us in the sphere, or in the realm of feeling.

Now something else must be added to this. In the life of ordinary waking consciousness we speak of our ego. But in reality we can only speak of this ego in a very unreal sense as far as our usual waking consciousness is concerned. For what is the real nature and being of this ego? The usual waking consciousness cannot gain knowledge of this. When the clairvoyant dives down consciously into the true being of the ego, he will find that the true ego of man is of a will-like nature. What man possesses in his everyday consciousness is only an idea of the ego. This is why it is so easy for the scientific psychologists to do away entirely with this ego although, on the other hand, this is really nonsense. These scientists and psychologists say that the ego develops gradually and that the human being acquires this ego in the course of his individual development. In this way he does not acquire the ego itself, but only the idea of the ego. It is easy to eliminate the ego, because for the everyday consciousness it is merely a thought, a reflection of the true, genuine ego. The real ego lives in the world in which the true reality of our will also lives. And what we call our astral body, what we designate as the actual soul life, lives in the same sphere as our life of feelings. If you bear in mind the things that we have thus considered, you will see that we dive down with our ego and our astral body into the same region that we share with the dead. When we penetrate clairvoyantly into our true ego, we are also among the egos of the dead, as well as among the egos of the so-called living.

We must realize such things quite clearly, in order to grasp to what an extent man lives, with his everyday consciousness, in the so-called world of appearance, or in Maya, as it is called by a oriental term. We are consciously awake in the world of our senses, in the world of our thoughts; but the sense impulses give us only that portion of the world that is spread out as Nature. And our world of thoughts gives us only that which is in us and corresponds to our own nature between birth and death. That which is our eternal nature remains in the world that we share with the dead. When we enter the life of the physical plane through incarnation, it remains indeed in the world in which also the dead live.

In order to understand these things fully we must grasp thoughts which are not so easy to digest (but these things must be said because they are so)—thoughts that cost us an effort to think out. Man has no such thoughts in the course of his everyday waking consciousness. He prefers to limit his knowledge to that which is stretched out in space and that which takes its course in Time. A frequent pathological symptom is this one: to imagine even the spiritual world spatially, although these thoughts may be nebulous, thin and misty; yet we somehow wish to imagine is spatially; we wish to think of souls flying about in space, and so on. We must go beyond the ideas of space and time to more complicated ideas, if we really wish to penetrate into these things. Today I wish to draw your attention to something that is very important for the understanding of the whole of human life.

Let us bear in mind once more the fact that—roughly speaking—we possess this four-fold nature—the physical body, the body of formative forces or etheric body, the astral body, and the ego.

Now, when someone speaks from the standpoint of the usual waking consciousness, he may ask:—How old is a person—How old is a certain person A? Someone may give his age, let us say 35, and he may believe that he has made an important statement. In stating that a certain person is 35 years old he has, in fact, said something of importance for the physical plane and for the usual waking consciousness; but for the spiritual world, in other words, for the etheric being of man, this implies only a part of the reality. When you say: I am 35 years old—you only say this in regard to your physical body. You must say: My physical body is 35 years old—then this will be correct. But these words express nothing at all as far as the etheric body, or the body of formative forces is concerned, and nothing at all as far as the other members of the human being are concerned. For it is an illusion, it is indeed quite fantastic to think that your ego, for instance, is 35 years old, when your physical body is 35 years old. You see, here we must bear in mind different speeds, different rapidities in the development of the various members.

The following figures will make you realize this. A human being is, let us say, 7 years old; this means nothing less than this:--his physical body has reached the age of 7 years. His etheric body, his body of formative forces, is not yet 7 years old, for his body of formative forces does not maintain the same speed as the physical body and has not yet reached this age. We are not aware of such things just because we imagine time as one continuous stream, and thus we cannot form the thought that different things maintain different speeds within the course of time. This physical body that is 7 years old has developed according to a certain speed. The etheric body develops more slowly, the astral body still more slowly, and slowest of all, the ego. The etheric body is only 5 years and 3 months old when the physical body is 7 years old, because it develops more slowly. The astral body is 3 years and 6 months old, and the ego, 1 year and 9 months. Thus you must say to yourself—when a child is 7 years old, its ego is only 1 year and 9 months old. This ego undergoes a slower development on the physical plane. On the physical plane this ego develops at a slower pace; it is a slower pace, the same pace that we find in our life with the dead. Why do we not grasp what takes place in the stream of the experiences of the dead? Because we do not grow accustomed to the slower pace of the dead, and do not admit this into our thoughts and especially into our feelings, in order to hold them fast.

Hence, if someone is 28 years old as far as his physical body is concerned, then his ego is only 7 years old. As far as your ego is concerned, which is the essential part of your being, you thus maintain a much slower pace in the course of development than that of the physical body. You see, the difficulty consists in the fact that, generally, we consider speed, or velocities, merely as outer velocities. When things move one beside another, we say that one thing moves more quickly and the other one more slowly because we use Time as a comparison. But here the speed within Time is different. Without this insight into the fact that the different members of the human being have different speeds in their development, it is impossible to grasp the connections with the true deeper being of man.

From this you will see how in everyday consciousness people simply throw together entirely different things contained in human nature.

Man consists of this four-fold being, and the four members of this being are so different from one another that they even have different ages. But man is under a great illusion in making everything depend on his physical body. He says something that has absolutely no meaning whatever for the spiritual world, in stating that his ego is 28 years old, when he is 28 according to his physical body. His statement would only have a meaning if he would say:—My ego is 7 years old—in the case of the ego, a year is naturally four times as long as in the case of the physical body. One might also say that the age of the four different members of the human being must be reckoned according to four entirely different measurements of time; for the ego, a year is simply four times as long as for the physical body.

Pictorially you might conceive this as a projection from the physical plane—for instance, one human being may normally become 28 years old, while another child may grow more slowly and after 28 years be like a child of 7. Thus the whole matter appears at first like an abstract truth. But it is a fundamental reality in man. Just consider that our ego is the bearer of what we call our understanding, or our thinking consciousness of self. When our understanding and our conscious thinking are within our ego, then this understanding and conscious thinking are really essentially younger than we ourselves apparently are, according to our physical body. This is indeed so.

But this will show you that when a human being of 28 gives the impression of one whose understanding has developed to the age of 28, only one fourth of this understanding is really his own. It cannot be helped; when we have a certain quantity of understanding at 28, only a quarter of this is our own; the rest belongs to the universe, to the world in which we are submerged through our astral body, through our etheric body, and through our physical body. But we only know directly something of these bodies through ideas, through sense perceptions, in other words, again within the ego. This means that during our development as human beings between birth and death we are indeed mere apparitions of a reality. We make the impression of being four times as clever as we really are. This is true. All we possess, in addition to this one fourth, we owe to what holds sway in the historical, social, and moral processes within that world we dream away and sleep away. Dream and sleep impulses, which we have in common with the universe, seethe up, above the horizon of our being and fructify this fourth part of our understanding and soul, and make it four times as strong as it really is.

You see at this point arises the illusion concerning the freedom of man. Man is a free being; he is, indeed. But only the real, true man is a free being. That fourth part, of which I have just spoken, is a free being. Other beings play into the remaining three fourths; these cannot be free. This gives rise to the delusion in regard to freedom so that we continually ask:—Is man free or is he not free? Man is free when he connects this idea of freedom with the one fourth of his being, in the sense in which I have just explained it. If the human being wishes to have this freedom as an impulse of his own, then he must develop this fourth part in a corresponding, independent way. In usual life, this fourth part cannot assert itself, for the simple reason that it is overpowered by the other three fourths. In the remaining three fourths is active all that man calls his desires, his appetites, his emotions and passions. These slay his freedom, for what is contained in the universe in the form of impulses works through these desires, emotions and passions.

Now the question arises:—What shall we do to make this one fourth of our soul-life, which is a reality within us, really free? We must place this one fourth in relationship with that which is independent of the remaining three fourths.

I have tried to answer this question philosophically in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, by attempting to show how man can only realize the impulse of freedom within himself, when he places his actions, his deeds, entirely under the influence of pure thought, when he reaches the point of transforming impulses of pure thought into impulses of action, into impulses which are not in any way dependent upon the outer world for their development. All that which is developed out of the outer world does not allow us to realize freedom. Only that which develops in our thinking, independently of the outer world, as the motive of our actions, enables us to realize freedom.

Where do such motives come from? Where does that which does not come from the outer world come from? It comes out of the spiritual world. The human being need not be clairvoyantly conscious in every situation of life of how these impulses come from the spiritual world; they may nevertheless be within him all the same. But he will necessarily conceive these impulses in a somewhat different way than they must be conceived in reality. When we rise in clairvoyant consciousness to the first stage of the spiritual world, we come to the imaginative world; the second stage is the world of inspiration, as you know; the third stage, the world of intuition. Instead of allowing the impulses of our will or of our actions to rise out of our physical body, our astral body, and etheric body, we can receive them as imaginations, behind which stand inspirations and intuitions. That is, if we receive no impulses from our bodies, but only from the spiritual world. This does not need to be the conscious clairvoyant perception: “Now I will something and behind this stand intuition, inspiration, and imagination.”—but, instead, the result appears as an idea, as a pure thought, and has the appearance of an idea created within the element of fantasy. Because this is so, because such an idea, which lies at the foundation of free actions must appear to everyday consciousness as an idea created out of the element of fantasy, I call it moral fantasy in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. (That which lies at the foundation of free actions.) What, then, is this moral fantasy? This moral fantasy is the reverse of a mirrored reflection. What lies spread out around us as the outer physical reality is a mirrored reflection; physical reality sends us reflections of things. Moral fantasy is the image, through which we do not see. For this reason, things appear to us as fantasy. Behind them, however, stand the real impulses—imagination, inspiration, intuition—which are active. When we do not know that they are active, but only receive the influences into our usual consciousness, then this appears as fantasy. And these results of moral fantasy, these incentives to action, which do not lie in desires, passions and emotions—are free. But how can we attain them?

Moral fantasy can also be developed by a human being who is not clairvoyant. Everything that implies a real progress for humanity has always been born out of moral fantasy, insofar as this progress lay within the ethical sphere. The point in question is that man first develops a feeling, and then an enhanced feeling (we shall hear immediately, what is to be understood exactly by “enhanced feeling”)—that he is not merely here on this earth in order to accomplish things which concern him personally, or individually, but in order to accomplish things through which the will of the Time Spirits can be realized.

It appears as if something quite special were implied when one says: Man must realize the will of the Time Spirits. But a time will come when people will understand this much better than now. And a time will come when the contents of human teaching will not be that of the present. At present only ideas dealing with nature can be conveyed even to the most educated people; for what is imparted to people in regard to ethical and social life is in most cases an unreal, schematic abstraction; indeed, the greatest abstraction.

In this connection we have not yet attained what earlier ages already possessed. Only with great difficulty can a modern man immerse himself in earlier times. Earlier times possessed myths—myths that were connected with the vital life of the people, myths that penetrated into poetry, into art, into all manner of things. In Greece one spoke of Oedipus, of Hercules, and of other heroes, one tried to emulate those who had done things which were exemplary deeds, and first deeds, and one wished to tread in their footprints. Everyone wished to tread in these footprints. The thread of ideas, the thread of thought and feeling, led backwards. One felt at one with those long dead. What went out as an impulse from those who had died was told in myths; and these men lived in experiencing, in becoming one with the impulses of these myths.

Something similar must again be created and will be created if the impulses of spiritual science are rightly understood. Except that, in the future, souls will gaze forward much more than backward. The contents of public teaching must be that which binds human beings together with the creative activity of the Time, and above all, with the impulses of the Time Spirit, the corresponding Being from the Hierarchy of the Archai, concerning whom I have said, in an earlier description, that the so-called dead, as well as the living, are connected with him. People will learn in the public teaching of the future the meaning of such a period of culture as the one that began in the 15th century and closed the Greco-Latin period; in this fifth post-Atlantean period people will learn to know the real intentions of the universal World-All. They will take up the impulses of this fifth post-Atlantean period and they will know:—This must be realized between the 15th century and one of the centuries in a coming millennium. They will know: We belong to our period of culture in such a way that the impulses of this coming age stream through us. In future, even the children, as they learn to name the flowers and the stars (they do this less today—but it is at least something outwardly real) will learn to take up the real, spiritual impulses of the period. First they must be educated to do this. What is told as “history” today must first cease to be called “history.” In not too distant a future, instead of speaking of all the things contained in history as it is told today, people will speak of the spiritual impulses standing behind the historical evolution, impulses which are dreamed by human beings. These are the spiritual impulses that call man to freedom, and make him free, because they raise him to the world from which intuition, inspiration, and imagination come. For what happens outwardly on the physical plane, what constitutes outer history (I have explained this even in public lectures) loses its meaning as soon as it has occurred; in reality it does not justify our saying that the former event is always the cause of the latter. There is nothing more senseless than to recount history by describing, for instance, the deeds of Napoleon at the beginning of the 19th century, and then assuming that the events after Napoleon's exile are the consequence of Napoleon's actions. Nothing is more senseless than this! Descriptions of Napoleon imply exactly the same, as far as reality is concerned, as the description of a human corpse three days after death, as far as the dead man's life is concerned. What is now called “history” is a “corpse-history” compared with reality, even though this “corpse-history” has a great importance in the minds of many people.

What happens outwardly becomes a reality only when it is revealed in its development from spiritual impulses. Then it will be seen clearly that a human being's deeds, let us say, in a certain decade of a certain century, are the consequence of what he experienced before entering into his incarnation on earth; they are in no sense the consequence of events that occurred in the course of decades of physical experience on the earth, and so on. Spiritual Science, in the meaning of Anthroposophy, will have to bring more depth and more life—especially in regard to historical, social, and moral life—into the sphere of history above all. When this knowledge of the spiritual impulses will have become one of the essential demands of our time—it will then correspond to the living reality of the myths in ancient times—it will permeate human beings with impulses leading them to deeds and actions that will make them free. These things must first be understood; they will indeed influence real life when this understanding spreads over an ever-wider sphere.

But these considerations will show you something else besides. You will realize that the impulses of feeling, the impulses of will, which place us within the same sphere of life as the so-called dead, are a higher and more intensive reality than the one we know through our waking consciousness, in the form of ideas and sense impressions. For this reason, what has just been brought forward as a demand of our age, as something that must become an object of public teaching, can only be truly fruitful when it is grasped not merely with the understanding, but goes over into the impulses of feeling and into the impulses of will.

This can only come about when spiritual science is really seen as a reality, and not simply as a teaching. spiritual science is easily looked upon merely as a teaching, as a theory; but spiritual science is not a mere teaching, a mere theory, spiritual science is a living Word. For what is given out as spiritual science is the revelation from the world which we share with the higher Hierarchies and with the so-called dead. This very world speaks to us through spiritual science. And he who really understands spiritual science knows that the soul music of the spiritual world continues to resound in spiritual science. What we read, not from the dead letters, but from the real happenings in the spiritual world, can indeed permeate our feeling with true life, when we grasp spiritual science in this sense, as something which speaks to our inner being from out the spiritual world. I have emphasized at different times how the matter stands, when I described how, on the one hand, since 1879, spiritual life has the opportunity of streaming down to the physical plane in an entirely new way, and how, on the other hand, it must indeed face an opponent in the Spirits of Darkness, of whom we have spoken. Everything must still be achieved, before the content of spiritual science really enters the life of our feeling and will. And this can be achieved when certain things change fundamentally, in regard to which modern man has reached a cultural blind alley.

Something else must also work its way through; namely, evolution must develop in such a way that, on the one hand, the events of history may be compared to a growing tree (I have already used this picture during these considerations): but when the leaves have grown as far as the periphery, the tree ceases to grow. Here the dying process begins. It is the same with historical events. A certain group of events takes shape—let us describe it quite schematically:—Certain historical events have their roots. A definitive group of historical events may have their roots in the last third of the 18th century. I shall speak of this more clearly tomorrow. Other influences are added to these in the course of the 19th century, and so on. But you see, these historical events expand and reach their extreme boundaries. In this case the boundary is not the same as in the case of a tree or a plant, which does not grow beyond its periphery; but here a new root of historical events must begin. For decades, already, we have been living in a time in which such new historical events must spring out of direct intuition. But in the historical life of man, illusion can easily spread also over these things. To be sure, you can watch the growth of a plant, which grows according to its inner laws until it reaches a certain periphery and cannot grow beyond it. But now you can call forth an illusion—you can take wires, hang paper leaves on them, and give yourself the illusion that the plant continues to grow up to this point.

Such wires do indeed exist where historical events are concerned. While historical events should long ago have adopted another course, such wires are there instead; except that in historical evolution these wires are human prejudices, human indolence, which continue to maintain, on dead wires, what has died long ago. Certain people place themselves at the ends of these dead wires—in other words, at the outermost ends of human prejudice—and these people are often considered historical personalities; indeed, the true historical personalities. And people do not realize to what an extent these personalities sit on the wires of human prejudice. One of the most important tasks of the present is to begin to understand how certain personalities who are looked upon as “great” are, in reality, merely hanging on the wires of human prejudice; this is indeed one of the chief tasks of the present.

If you take up one of the ordinary school books, or any other of the usual presentations of the Middle Ages, dealing with the period of which we are now going to speak—the 8th or 9th century—you will find that the personality of Charlemagne (768–814) occupies an inordinate space in it. Following the feats and triumphal marches of Charlemagne in this way, you will hardly understand what it was that actually made the significance of this epoch. All this was only an external expression of much deeper events in the Middle Ages, events which will appear as the converging of many significant factors. In order to study these factors, we must mention certain things which we have already touched upon, and which will throw light on this subject.

If you remember the description of European conditions after the folk migrations, when, after these occurrences, the Germanic tribes came to rest in different places, you will think of the way these races brought their ancient institutions, their manners and customs, with them into their new homes, and developed them there. And we see that they preserved their own peculiar character, a kind of social order, consisting in the distribution of private and common property. There were little social assemblies, which formed their original organisation: village communities, then, later, hundreds and cantons; and in all these, what could be common property was so: forest, meadow, water, etc. And only what a single individual could cultivate was assigned to the private family and became hereditary; all the rest remained common property.

Now we have seen that the leaders of such tribes received much larger territories at the conquest, and that on this account certain positions of mastery sprang up, especially in Gaul, where much land was still to be reclaimed. For the working of these domains, it was partly members of the former population, partly the Roman colonists or prisoners of war, who were taken. In this way, certain legal conditions grew up. The large landowner was not responsible to others for what he did on his own property; he could not be brought to book for any orders that he gave. Hence he could rescind for his own estate, any legal prescription or police regulation. So, in the Frankish Empire, we meet with no united monarchy; what was called the Empire of the Merovingians was nothing more than such a large landed estate. The Merovingians were one of the families which possessed much land; according to civil law—through the struggle for existence—their rule extended farther and farther. New territories were constantly added to it. The large landowner was not such a king as we have been accustomed to in the 13th, 14th, yes, even in the 16th century; but private government gradually became legal rule.

He transferred certain parts of his domain, and with them his rights; to others with less land; that was called being “under exemption"; this judicial authority had grown out of the irresponsible position in such circumstances. In return, this type of landowner must pay tribute, and do military service for the king in time of war. In the expansion of such proprietary relationships, the Merovingian stock as conquerors took precedence of all others, so that we must retain the formula: the ancient Frankish Empire progressed through purely private legal conditions.

Again the transition from the Merovingian to the Carlovingian stock, from which Charles Martel descended, took place in the same way, out of the same conditions. The Carlovingians were originally stewards of the domains of the Merovingians; but they gradually became so influential that Pepin the Short succeeded in putting the imbecile Childeric into a monastery, and, with the help of the pope, in deposing him. From him was descended his successor, Charlemagne. In a cursory survey we can only touch upon the external events; for, indeed, they have no further significance. Charlemagne made war on the neighbouring German tribes and extended his control in certain directions. Even this empire, however, cannot be called a State. He waged lengthy wars against the Saxons, who clung to the ancient village organisation, the old manners and customs, the old Germanic faith, with great tenacity. Victory was won after wearisome wars, fought with extraordinary ferocity on both sides.

Among such tribes as the Saxons, one personality in particular would stand out, and would then become a leader. One of these was Widukind, a duke with great possessions and a strong military retinue, whose courage withstood the most violent opposition. He had to be subdued with the greatest cruelty, and then submitted to the rule of Charlemagne. What did the rule amount to? It amounted to this: if the authority of Charlemagne had been withdrawn, nothing special would have happened. Those tribesmen who in their thousands had been obliged to submit to baptism, would have gone on living in the same way as before.

It was the form Charlemagne had given the Church which established his powerful position. Through the power of the Church these territories were subdued. Bishoprics and monasteries were founded, the large properties formerly possessed by the Saxons were distributed. The cultivation of these was in the hands of the bishops and abbots; thus the Church undertook what had formerly been done by secular landholders protected by “exemption,” namely, judiciary authority. If the Saxons did not acquiesce, they were coerced by fresh inroads of Charlemagne. Thus the same things went on as in western France: the smaller landowners could not carry on alone, hence they gave what they had to the monasteries and bishoprics, to receive it again under feudal tenure.

The one condition was, then, that the large properties should belong to the Church, as in the newly established bishoprics of Paderborn, Merseburg and Erfurt, which were cultivated for the bishop by the conquered tribes. But even those who still had their own possessions held them as fiefs and had to pay ever-increasing taxes to the bishoprics and abbeys. This was how the rule of Charlemagne was established: with the help of the great influence obtained by the Church whose suzerain he was, his position of authority was achieved.

Charles extended his authority in other regions, just as he was extending it here. In Bavaria he succeeded in breaking the power of Duke Tassilo and sending him to a monastery, so that he might bring Bavaria under his own dominion. The Bavarians had allied themselves with the Avars, a people who may be called the successors of the Huns. Charles was victorious in this struggle and fortified a strip of land as a boundary against the Avars, the original Avarian limit of the land which to-day is Austria. In the same way he had protected himself also against the Danes.

Like Pepin he fought in Italy against the Longobards, who were harassing the pope; again he was victorious, and established his authority there. He experienced too against the Moors in Spain, and almost everywhere he was the victor. We see Frankish rule established over the whole of the European world of those days; it merely contained the germ of the future State.

In these newly won regions, Counts were inaugurated, who exercised justiciary authority. In the places where Charlemagne alternatively held his court—fortified places called Palatinates—were the Counts Palatine, mostly large landowners, who received certain tribute from the surrounding districts. It was not only tribute from the land and soil, however, which fell to their share; they also received revenues from the administration of justice. If a murder were committed, the public tribunal was convened by the Count Palatine. A relative, or someone who was closely connected with the victim, brought the indictment. At that time certain compensation could be paid for murder, a recognised sum, differing in value for a free man and an unfree, paid partly to the family of the murdered man, partly to the justiciary of the canton, and partly to the king's central fund. Those who looked after communal concerns—actually only such as concerned taxes and defense—were the land-graves, who travelled from one district to another, ambassadors with no special function.

Under these conditions, the divergence between the new nobility of landowners and the serfs became more and more marked, and also between the landowners and those freemen who were indeed personally still free, but had fallen into a condition of servile dependence, because they had to pay heavy tribute and to render compulsory military service. These conditions grew more and more critical; secular and ecclesiastical property became increasingly extensive; and soon we see the populace in bitter dependence, and already we meet with small conspiracies—revolts—foreshadowing what we know as the Peasant Wars. We can understand that, in the meantime, material culture developed more and more productively. Many Germanic tribes had had no concern with agriculture before the folk migrations, but had earned their living by cattle raising; now they were developing agriculture more and more; especially were they cultivating oats and barley, but also wheat, leeks, etc. These were the essential things which were important in that older civilisation. There was, as yet, no actual handicraft; it was only evolving under the surface; weaving, dyeing, etc. were mostly carried on by the women at home. The arts of the goldsmith and the smith were the first crafts to be cultivated. Still less important was trade.

Actual cities were developed from the 10th century onwards, and therewith a historical event began to take shape. But what sprang up with these cities, namely trade, had at that time no importance; at its best it was only a trade in valuables from the East, carried on by Israelite merchants. Trade usages hardly existed, although Charlemagne had already had coins minted. Nearly everything was barter, in which cattle, weapons, and such things were exchanged.

This is how we must picture the material culture of these regions; and now we shall understand why the spiritual culture also was bound to assume a certain definite form. Nothing of what we picture as spiritual culture existed in these regions, either among the freemen or the serfs. Hunting, war, agriculture, were the occupations of the landowners; princes, dukes, kings, even poets, unless they were ecclesiastics, could seldom read and write. Wolfram von Eschenbach had to dictate his poems to a clergyman and let him read them aloud to him; Hartmann von der Aue boasts, as a special attribute, that he can read books. In all that secular culture catered for, there was no question of reading and writing. Only in enclosed monasteries were Art and Science studied. All other students were directed to what was offered them in the teaching and preaching of the clergy. And that brought about their dependence on the clergy and the monks; it gave the Church its authority.

When we read descriptions today of what is called “the dark Middle Ages”—persecution of heretics, trials of witches, and so on—we must be clear that these conditions only began with the 13th century. In the older times nothing of this kind existed. The Church had no more authority than the secular large landowners. Either the Church went hand-in-hand with the secular authority, and was only a branch of it, or it was endeavouring to cultivate theology and the science of Christianity.

Until the current of spiritual influence came from the Arabs, all spiritual concerns were fostered only in the monasteries; the activities of the monks were completely unknown to the world outside. All that was known outside the monasteries was the preaching, and a kind of spiritual instruction given in the primitive schools.

The authority of the Church was enhanced by the fact that it was the clergy themselves who carried out all the arrangements for promoting knowledge. The monks were the architects; it was they who adorned the churches with statues, they who copied the works of classical, too, the emperor's chancellors, were, for the most part, monks.

One form of culture which was fostered in the monasteries was Scholasticism. A later was Mysticism. This scholasticism, which flourished until the middle of the 14th century, endeavoured—at least at one juncture—to inculcate a severely disciplined way of thinking. There were severe examinations to undergo; nobody could make progress in absolutely logical discipline of thinking without hard tests; only those who could really think logically, were able to take part in the spiritual life. Today that is not considered. But actually it was because of this training in consistent logic that when the Moorish-Arabian culture came to Europe, this science found disciplined thinking there already. The forms of thought with which Science works today were already there; there are very few arrangements of ideas, which are not derived from thence.

The concepts with which the Science—still operate today, such as subject and object, were established at that time. A training of thought, such as does not appear elsewhere in world history, was developed. The keen thinker of today owes that which flows in the veins of his intellect to the training fostered between the 5th and 14th centuries. Now some may feel it to be unjust that the masses at that time had nothing of all this; but the course of world history is not directed by justice of injustice, it follows the universal law of cause and effect. Thus we see here two definite currents flowing side by side: 1. Outside, material culture, absolutely without science; 2. A finely chiseled culture, confined to a few within the Church. Yet the culture of the cities was based on this strict scholastic way of thinking. The men who carried through the great revolution were ecclesiastics: Copernicus was a prebendary, Giordano Bruno was a Dominican friar. Their education and that of many others, their formal schooling, was rooted in this spirit of the Church. They were not powerful men, but simple monks, who, indeed, often suffered under the oppression of those in power.

Nor was it bishops and rich abbots, but on the contrary, poor monks, living in obscurity, who propagated the spread of Science. The Church, having allied itself with external powers, was obliged to materialise itself; it had to secularise its teachings and its whole character. Very long ago, up to the 12th century, nothing was held more solemn, more sublime, by the Christians, than the Lord's Supper. It was regarded as a sacrifice of grateful remembrance, a symbol of the intensifying of Christianity. Then came the secularisation, the lack of understanding for such exalted spiritual facts, especially as regards the festivals.

In the 9th century there lived in the land of the Franks, at the court of Charles the Bald, Scotus Erigena, a very distinguished Irish monk, in whose book De Divisioni Naturae we find a rich store of profound intellectual thought—though, indeed, not what the 20th century understands as Science. Erigena had to fight against hostile criticism in the Church. He defended the old doctrine that the Lord's Supper represented the symbolism of the highest Sacrifice. Another, materialistic, interpretation existed, and was supported in Rome, namely, that the bread and wine was actually transformed into flesh and blood. This dogma of the Lord's Supper originated under the influence of this continuous materialisation, but it only became official in the 13th century.

Scotus Erigena had to take refuge in England, and at the instigation of the pope, was murdered in his own monastary by the fraternity of monks. These struggles took place, not within the Church, but through the interpenetration of secular influence. You see that spiritual life was confined to a few, and was closed to the masses, upon whom lay an ever-increasing pressure, both from the secular and the spiritual side. In this way discontent continued to grow. It could not be otherwise than that dissatisfaction should increase among these people of divided loyalties. In country, on the farms, new causes of discontent kept cropping up. No wonder that the small towns, such as those already established on the Rhine and the Danube, should continually grow larger and form themselves anew from the influx of those who could no longer get on in the country. The fundamental cause of this reorganisation of conditions was the people's thirst for freedom.

It was a purely natural motive which gave rise to the culture of the cities. Spiritual culture remained undisturbed for the time being; many cities developed round the bishoprics and monasteries. From the city-culture rose all that constituted trade and industry in the Middle Ages, and afterwards brought about quite different relationships.

The need to develop the full life of the human personality, was the cause of the founding of the cities. It was a long step on the path of freedom; as, indeed, according to the words of Hegel, history signifies the education of the human race towards freedom.

And if we follow the history of the Middle Ages farther, we shall see that this founding of the city-culture represented, not an insignificant, but a very important step on the path of freedom.

The truth of spiritual science and the practical life demands of the present. At the same time, a defense of anthroposophical spiritual science against its accusers.

Ladies and gentlemen, One might imagine that even the title of today's lecture would give rise to misgivings here and there. The title combines two aspects of spiritual science: the spiritual science that I have been privileged to represent here in Stuttgart for almost two decades and that is primarily concerned, as many believe, with the highest spiritual, with the supersensible aspects of the human being, and the directly practical life challenges of the present. And it will be my task today to overcome such prejudices, which the two fields cannot be reconciled with, and to show precisely how much depends on a correct understanding of the connection between spiritual knowledge and the most immediate practical demands of life, which we need today to get out of the great distress and misery of the time. I would therefore like to start with something directly practical.

Perhaps it might seem as if this has no connection with my lecture today: I would like to start with the temporary end of the English miners' strike, which was so frightening for the civilized world. The outcome, as you know, was quite uncertain for quite some time. The strike has been settled for the time being, settled through the negotiations of the parliamentarians with the working population. Anyone who has taken note of the way in which the parliamentary body and the working population have settled this strike through negotiations and who has an unbiased view of the course of events will have to say to himself: The way in which the measures have been agreed, it depends entirely on the development of the English economic situation in the next few years how quickly this strike will have to be repeated. For the question is: Will it be possible for the English economy to fulfill the conditions that have been agreed upon? In all likelihood it will not. It may be said that the clever Lloyd George sensed this. But this man has the ability to achieve results everywhere through forceful parliamentary speech. He has less opportunity to understand the conditions of reality and to bring about something through his measures that could have the necessary duration. He probably foresaw that too. That is why he advocated measures to the parties that would serve to bring into effect the forces of the state machinery the moment such a strike recurred. Now something very strange happened: the parties of the right, well into the center, were actually afraid of such measures. They did not really want these measures to become law. Everyone spoke out in favor of not letting these measures become law because they did not dare to point out what strict measures the state would take if the strike were to be repeated. Lloyd George gave a half-hour speech, and all doubts and fears were swept away. The speech had the effect that what he intended was seen as a necessity of state. This man, the very type of parliamentarian, had overwhelmed the people with his speech.

It is important to point this out if we want to consider the most important thing in the state of mind of the present, because it is actually in the processes of practical life that we see this state of mind of the present most clearly. The man had something to defend, something that pointed entirely to uncertainty, something whose outcome could not be known. He had no ideas that could have led to measures that seemed realistic, that would have been such that one could have said: these parties are throwing something into economic reality that promises to really help this economy. He had nothing like that. But he had the speech that dispelled people's fear, that motivated them to do something, which may not be realistic, but which first of all satisfies the way of thinking, the attitude, the state of mind.

This is characteristic of the present time. Above all, it is characteristic of what has emerged more and more in recent times, and is only now, in this time of great and terrible need, beginning to falter. It is characteristic of the particular conception of parliamentarism and its tasks. In parliamentarism, there are people who have general ideas about the course of necessary events, and there are people who take measures according to the interests they have, or even according to general, more or less even abstract ideas that they have of reality. And basically, for a long time within modern civilization, it was decided to intervene in reality based on ideas that could be talked about beautifully, but which did not have the power to intervene in reality based on an understanding of reality. And basically, this kind of thinking, this kind of outlook of present-day humanity is such that this outlook, this way of thinking, is alien to reality, that it is powerless to think out of reality and in turn to work through thoughts into reality.

Many examples could be cited of contemporary events that would prove the same as the settlement of the English miners' strike. One could point to many things that would show how people's way of thinking floats, as it were, above reality, but how, precisely at the points where decisions have to be made, the ideas that float above reality and should make the decisions cannot make them. Despite our materialism, despite our naturalism, despite our science that insists on experience, we have become a humanity that is out of touch with reality. This is basically the tragic fate of the present, that we have become a reality-alienated humanity. And do not the events of recent years stand before all of European humanity in their devastating, destructive effect? And do they not face the powerlessness of thoughts, the powerlessness of ideas, to conquer these events, to give them a form within which man can really live?

What does the truth of spiritual science have to do with all this? To answer this question, I must refer to a few things that I have repeatedly dealt with here in Stuttgart over many years, albeit before a smaller circle, I must first point out that this spiritual science is based on a special research method of soul development that conveys to man the view of his eternal core: of what man is before birth, before conception, and what he will become after death, but also what the soul and spiritual essence of man works on in the world of the senses between birth and death.

But in recent years, in addition to the spiritual-scientific knowledge that the human soul needs, in addition to the human yearning for knowledge, all kinds of practical institutions have been established. The Federation for the Threefold Social Organism has been added, which, from the particular type of spiritual-scientific way of thinking, wants to work in the social shaping of contemporary life in such a way that not ideas floating above reality in cloud cuckoo land are to prevail, but ideas that come from reality and can therefore also shape reality. Ideas that are practical in terms of reality are to be juxtaposed with social demands precisely from this spiritual science.

And it was out of this spiritual science here in Stuttgart that the Waldorf School was created, whose pedagogy and didactics, whose entire educational system does not seek to spread the world view of spiritual science, to instill it in children - that is not the case at all - but to apply the teaching and educational practice in the school that can arise from spiritual science. The Waldorf school wants to apply those practices through which the child, because it is educated by the spirit, can also become a truly practical human being through this spiritual education, to use Goethe's words, a human being who can stand in reality with his whole personality.

And even in recent times, the spiritual scientific way of thinking has given rise to the very practical institution of the “Coming Day”, which, from its circle, would like to have a healthy effect on economic life by replacing mere business routine with spiritual business and economic practice. And if these things are understood, my dear audience, then they will undoubtedly have many other things in their wake, because spiritual science is there for life, not for an unworldly brooding and pondering. In order to recognize it in this task, however, it must indeed be pointed out with some reference to its special nature.

This spiritual science, as it is meant here, grows directly out of the scientific spirit of the present, that scientific spirit that has emerged in the last three to four centuries within the development of civilized humanity, which has produced the special scientific attitude that today has such great authority. And I must point out, even if it may not seem popular at first, how, on the one hand, the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that is meant here grows out of today's recognized science, but how, on the other hand, it completely transforms this recognized science, making it something completely different. The Dornach School of Spiritual Science course last September/October was intended to show that these individual sciences can become something different through spiritual science than they were before. This is also what the School of Spiritual Science course announced today and organized by the School of Spiritual Science students is intended to show.

To look at what spiritual science actually is, let us first consider the nature of today's recognized science, rightly recognized in its fields. This science, which has indeed celebrated its great triumphs particularly in the field of natural knowledge, and which has provided humanity with such indispensable services, attaches particular importance not only to recognizing the laws of nature, but also the laws of the historical development of humanity and other things, including social life, which are completely detached from the subjectivity and personality of the human being. Today's science regards it as its ideal to have ideas and to register the results of observations in such a way that these ideas of natural and other laws, these results of observation, are completely independent of the person who records them, who makes them. Today's science regards it as its ideal that man, as it were, completely eliminates himself by recognizing. And the more he eliminates himself, the more he lives completely impersonally in the abstract ideas, the stronger - one thinks - he is scientifically. But what does this science produce? The one who lives in this science can feel what it produces. It produces something like images of external reality, which, precisely because they must be impersonal according to the ideal of science, actually leave the human being completely cold, so to speak, inwardly separate from the human being.

Dear attendees, I would like to use a comparison to characterize what man experiences in today's science. Man strives to get external nature, external reality in general, through this science into himself in such a way that it lives in him like the mirror images that arise in a mirror from that which stands in front of the mirror. The content of this science is indeed something abstract, something pictorial. And no matter how much of this science one has within oneself, when one has, so to speak, crammed one's head full with the results of this science and one looks into one's inner being, into everything that lives in man in the form of a yearning for knowledge in relation to what he himself is, what lives in him, in order to warm himself to the world, so to speak, in order to find his way in the world, it is as if someone, in order to get behind the images of the mirror, would reach out his hand and grasp behind the mirror. Because one has only images, one does not grasp anything behind the mirror. Science is proud of the fact that its concepts and ideas are such that when one reaches into the immediate, warm human life, there is nothing of these images in it. Through this science, only recognition takes place, recognition in images, but it is not experienced. Nothing flows into the human being through the images of this science that answers the great, directly felt questions of existence: about the eternal in his being, about that which goes beyond birth and death. Nothing flows from the objective images of this science into the human being that points to the power that directly affects life from his inner warmth.

The nature of this science has often been described. Basically, it can only be described by someone who approaches it with a sense of insight, with a sense of what is truly human, and who then perceives in direct experience what I have just described, perceives how reaching into the soul of man, into the spirit of man, in relation to the images of science, is like reaching behind the mirror, into nothingness, in order to get behind the origin of the mirror images. The more we realize that we are grasping at nothing, especially when this science seizes upon its highest ideal in its field, the more we will also find why that which comes from this science cannot flow into practical life.

Yes, in the factory, in the industrial enterprise, in the commercial context, there is a need for leaders who work out of warm love for their fellow human beings, but also out of warm love for production and human interaction, for all external processes, who work out of the warmth of the soul. But our universities, our educational institutions, with their objective science, with their science that wants to be as impersonal as possible, send out into practical life those people who, on the one hand, look up to science, which lives only in cold images, and who, on the other hand, in practical life – because it cannot be warmed through by a spiritual life which starts from such spiritual science -, in this practical life only become routiniers, only become experimenters: no bridge between what the mind wants to see as science, which has the greatest authority in the present, and what one must do daily in direct life, and which therefore lives without ideas, purely according to routine!

Spiritual science, as it is conceived here, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, seeks to develop such a soul life, to shape such knowledge that one can say of it - I will again use a Goethean sentence -: this spiritual science should give an account of its method, of its entire procedure, to the strictest mathematician. But even though what is worked out in this spiritual science is to be completely permeated by the conscientiousness of the science of the present, which has celebrated such triumphs, even though this spiritual science is to have learned the full discipline of this science, it must, precisely because it works from this science, but with this spirit of science, not stop at the door of this science and rave about the limits of science, precisely for this reason this spiritual science must differ from ordinary science.

Ordinary science recognizes, it recognizes in unrealistic images; spiritual science experiences its spiritual content. The difference between the recognition and the experiencing of the soul is the difference between the external, scientific method and the spiritual scientific method. The one who wants to come to spiritual science in a searching way must come to the conclusion that in the depths of the human soul lie forces that can remain as hidden for the whole of human life as certain forces remain hidden in the child's soul if the child is not educated. One could imagine: If a child were not educated, it would remain at a certain stage of savagery. In this way, a sum of powers lives in every human soul, of powers of direct insight, which our present-day science - which wants everything to be impersonal and therefore does not want to develop the human being - does not want to extract from the soul, because that would be something personal, which is disregarded by this ordinary science. Spiritual science, however, proceeds as I have described in detail in my book “The Occult Science in Outline” or in “How to Know Higher Worlds?”. Spiritual science teaches that when the human soul undergoes certain exercises - exercises of which you can read the nature and essence in these works - the forces hidden in the soul emerge into consciousness and the human being becomes aware that he has other powers of perception than the powers of knowledge of ordinary science.

In the last lecture, I already pointed out that under our ordinary way of knowing, we have something that is very abstract, but which, in a certain way, aims at what is also decisive in the spiritual scientific method: it is mathematics. What we come to know as mathematical truths, we know through the direct intuition of the mathematical content arising from our soul. We need not establish anything externally. We also need not find anything externally confirmed. We know what we know through what arises from our soul. We consider the Pythagorean theorem to be true when we have understood it, and even if someone were to contradict it, we know through direct experience that it is a mathematical truth, and we do not demand any external confirmation. That which is admitted by the present-day scientific spirit only for mathematics can be comprehensively developed in the human soul, so that not only lines and line connections, numbers and number connections arise from this human soul, but that solutions to mighty world riddles arise, that truths arise about the essence of man and the essence of the world.

Why is this so? The person who does not gain an unbiased insight into the deep, intimate connection between man and the world will at first be amazed when he is told that truths about the nature of man and the nature of the world can arise from within man in a mathematical way. But the one who looks at what intimately connects the human being to the world, who realizes how everything that is out there in space and time basically lives in the human being, because the human being is born from the whole world and develops out of this whole world every day, it will not be surprising that the human being, who was formed out of the whole world, can also gain an insight into the whole content of the world. Spiritual scientific experience shows that this can arise because the human being is connected in his inner being, firstly, through his physical body with everything mineral, vegetable and animal in his environment; he carries these realms of nature in a higher form in his physical body. Secondly, however, he also bears within his spiritual-soul all that is spiritual-soul in the world. Therefore, if he only applies the appropriate methods for soul development, he can allow truths about the secrets of humanity and the world to arise from within him, just as mathematical truths arise within him.

But what is present in ordinary knowledge, which only comes to images, is different in this spiritual science; after all, it has to be brought forth from the most personal. The whole human being must go within himself to extract from within himself the treasure of truth about the world and about himself. In this way, the human being is also connected with what arises in him like a mathematical truth, but now like a truth that is intimately connected with his and the world's being. Those who only want objective images of the world can talk. It may be their need to have such objective images – but they will not come to the intimate truths about the life of the world and human beings through such images. The personality must be fully thrown into the process of recognition. But then recognition becomes experience. Then, my dear audience, by methodically developing the soul beyond the ordinary life, just as one must unfold the soul of a child in the ordinary life, the human being is inwardly transported in his entire soul-condition into an experience that is thoroughly different from the ordinary life of science.

In our ordinary, external life, we take an interest in what concerns us directly. We feel warmth when a friend tells us his fate; we feel anger when injustice is done; we feel pain when there is hardship around us, and so on. We are with our whole being, with our whole experience, with what confronts us in the external environment, which we experience through our senses and through other things in people, perceive. This is not the case in the experience of abstract science, which is of course good for nature, but not the case. After all, nature is basically dead to us. No wonder that dead science, which leaves us cold, is best suited for nature. But when man experiences that which can arise from his soul like a spiritual mathematics, then he takes a warm, living part in everything that really arises as an intuition of the world and of human life.

I would like to use two examples to clarify what I actually mean by this interest in the science that has been experienced. Some time ago, I gave a lecture here in Stuttgart that took up the famous book by Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West. Those of you who were present and heard this lecture will not accuse me of underrating Spengler. I have said many words of praise; I have even called Oswald Spengler's expositions ingenious, and they are so. But at the time I also pointed out the fundamental error in Spengler's arguments. Today I would like to draw particular attention to another aspect of these arguments. I would like to point out the whole way in which the ingenious ideas of Spengler settle in the soul of someone who has come to experienced spiritual science. One can follow these ideas, which are ingeniously taken from all sciences that are currently in vogue, in detail; one can absorb them. If one is a spiritual scientist, one has knowledge that has been experienced in oneself, and if one then brings Spengler's ideas into one's soul, then one cannot simply experience one idea after another in one's soul, nor can one point out the contradictions of one's own ideas with the other ideas of today's science or with Spengler's entire world of ideas with cold cleverness. That would be abstract knowledge. That would be mere logic. A scholar in the humanities cannot stop at such mere logic, at such mere abstract knowledge. The scholar in the humanities takes up, for example, Spengler's ideas, which are born entirely out of the scientific spirit of the present. But as he lets one idea take effect in him and lets the other idea take effect in him, as these ideas live in him because he has absorbed experiential knowledge into himself, one idea disturbs the other. One idea, so to speak, skewers the other; one experiences within oneself the pain of being skewered. One experiences within oneself something like one experiences the external contradictions of life that are close to us. That is the difference between the science of experience and mere knowledge. What we otherwise only know from ordinary life – that we experience pain and joy, rapture, warmth and cold – is bestowed upon us through ideas when we have absorbed the science of experience, when we have absorbed what I have been calling anthroposophically oriented spiritual science for almost two decades now. What streams in from the whole human being into soul and spirit is that which is pain and suffering and joy and delight, that which is personality - and yet the human being remains objective in relation to the outside world. Just as one cannot say that a person is being subjective when they feel pain in the face of a painful external event, so too one cannot say that a person becomes subjective when they radiate their personal experience into what would otherwise be a cold world of ideas, because they radiate the power of their personality into their knowledge and into their experiential knowledge.

And I would like to give another example. It often happens in the present day that mere cognitive wisdom, that wisdom that lives in abstract ideas, develops into philosophical thinking. This wisdom, which to a certain extent only produces mirror images, impersonal, bloodless mirror images of external reality, can celebrate its great triumphs when it develops directly from external experience, because then this external experience acts on the senses, and the sensual impressions contain the vitality. But if we disregard these external sensory impressions, if we do not describe minerals, plants, animals, clouds, rivers, etc., but instead spin out into philosophy the ideas, mere mirror-image ideas, that we have gained from the external world, then something like Keyserling's philosophy results – this Keyserling philosophy, which is particularly evident today, consisting of the most anemic abstractions, which develop ideas that are mere mirror images of external experience and spin them out, thereby naturally squeezing out the content that is otherwise gained from external experience. In spinning out these mirror-image ideas, they arrive only at the most empty-content, most phrase-like ideas.

Those who have truly living knowledge, experiential knowledge within themselves, also feel something personally and directly about the anemic Kaiserling abstractions that are now being imposed on humanity in the “schools of wisdom”. He feels something like the way one feels physically when one lives in a room that is not airy enough, when one suffers from a lack of air, when one gasps for air that does not come. The one who has learned to grasp reality with these ideas, who has learned to submerge his cognitive faculty in reality, feels a painful sensation as if he were in a vacuum in which he cannot breathe when he has to digest the bloodless abstractions of Count Hermann Keyserling. But it is precisely such things that are characteristic of the present, for they express what the present develops out of the science of mirror images, which becomes unworldly, which believes that it is developing something particularly noble when it floats in this unworldliness, but which can never submerge itself in reality.

And, my dear assembled guests, if we now look at practical life in the world, we say of the old religious creeds: certainly, they are there - they should, as I explained in the last lecture, be collected and united by well-meaning people, so that a spiritual impulse may again pass through humanity. But they have become, so to speak, abstract; they are cultivated only to warm the abstract inner life of man. They no longer intervene in real, outer life. Just ask yourself how many of the real ideas of the denominations are still present in today's economic life, for example; they no longer have the strength to have an effect on it. And also, what people, out of a certain conservatism, retain of the spiritual life from ancient times: it is certainly venerable and also contains immeasurable truths, but it no longer has any life force today. What I would call the mirror-image scientific spirit seeks to have life force, but cannot have it due to its own inner essence.

This mirror-image scientific spirit has been absorbed by all those who are reflecting today on the possible shaping of social life. Lenin and Trotsky basically took up this mirror-image scientific spirit and wanted to implement it in the shaping of economic life; they wanted to create something new. The destructive spirit of a militarized economic state lives in Eastern Europe, and it is already conducting fairly insistent propaganda far into Asia. The spirit of mirror images wants to bring into reality of social life, and it will only be destructive. Because people believe in social theories and social paradises that are made out of this spirit of mirror images, the worst illusions arise, for they will plunder what practical life has brought forth in the past; what will be consumed and destroyed that which an economic system no longer appealing – perhaps more or less justifiably no longer appealing – has brought forth, but nothing new will emerge, because no reality can develop from mere images if it is to penetrate into practical life. But this spirit, which to a certain extent has emerged from mere thinking, schooled in the reality of the last centuries, especially the 19th century, this spirit has prevailed wherever those powers have emerged that then led to the terrible catastrophe disaster of 1914, because – I would like to say – you can see with your own hands how this spirit, which gradually gained more and more authority, but lost more and more and more of its sense of reality, how this spirit worked. I would just like to give a few examples.

I have already pointed out how a personality like Lloyd George, who is basically imbued with this spirit of unrealistic ideas, has a parliamentary effect but not an effect on reality. But one can cite something else: with the newer times, with the same times in which the spirit of science just described developed, humanity's call for freedom and democracy has also arisen. The states wanted to imbue themselves with freedom and democratic forces. It has been mentioned many times: in the Germany that has now been thrown to the ground by its enemies, what was the external state configuration in this Germany? It was expressed in the words “universal, secret, equal suffrage.” From the point of view of the right to vote, it was the freest constitution one could imagine. But where did this live? It lived on paper. The constitution was there; people were so little involved in reality with what was expressed there in an unrealistic idea that they could even bear that a person in the German Reich had the most free right to vote, but that the same person, who had the general, secret, equal right to vote for the Reich, voted in the most restricted right to vote in the individual state.

So one lived in a reality-alienated way, in a reality lie. And a personal regime, which basically had nothing to do with what was on paper, that was reality. There was no bridge between the beautiful ideas that were on paper and were therefore abstract, and what was external reality. And, ladies and gentlemen, after all, we also live now in some beautiful things that only exist on paper. Compare what people's aspirations are with what happens daily in intellectual, state and economic life, and you will see how, on the one hand, people have illusions, unworldly ideas, learned from unexperienced scientific and on the other hand, live in a reality that degenerates into routine because it is uninspired and devoid of ideas, and in which everything that is educated because it is unrealistic only gets as far as the word. There, I would like to say, one can point out the most painful things.

For example, in the country in which I myself spent three decades, half of my life, in Austria, there lived a man who particularly loved the German influence on Austrian civilization, who had grown entirely out of this German influence on Austrian civilization. The man understood what the word “fatherland” means. He had a living sense of the word “fatherland”. He was a man whose mind reached out beyond the mirror-image ideas of the present into a realistic view of the soul, even if he did not get very far with it, which was impossible in his age. He wanted to think in a realistic way, and he looked at his Austrian fatherland at least with a realistic feeling; his fellow countrymen, the Germans, lived there. He wanted to experience the feeling of home and country together with them. The political configuration of Austria, which was born out of the unreal spirit described today, learned from modern science, made him feel with pain that over there, beyond the Erzgebirge and the Bohemian Forest, his kindred Germans lived, with whom he felt he belonged to the same fatherland, but with whom he could only share the feeling of home. The person I am referring to is Robert Hamerling, the German-Austrian poet. I would like to say that out of a yearning for reality he coined a word that only those who have suffered greatly from the unreality of the present, through which the individual structures [of Austria] were gradually imbued with unreality as state structures, will feel in all its depth. Hamerling, with his sense of reality, could not bring himself to say what millions of Germans on the other side of the Ore Mountains and the Bohemian Forest have said in the phrase: “Austria is my fatherland”. For in saying that, they were saying something that was out of touch with reality, something born of cloud-cuckoo-land ideas, something that had no basis in reality. Hamerling said: “Germany is my fatherland, Austria is my motherland”. He needed a supplement to find reality. Spirits who want to be connected with reality had to resort to such expressions as Hamerling's “Austria is my fatherland, Germany is my motherland” if they wanted to assert their sense of reality against the sense of unreality that surrounds them, that surrounds us all in the surrounds us all in the present – that sense of unreality that grasps ideas only like mirror images, that, when it wants to reach behind these ideas into the human, into the reality of the human, finds emptiness, just as one finds nothing when one reaches behind the mirror. In past epochs, the best minds suffered from a longing for a reality that is completely practical, that directly engages life and yet is not spiritless, not without ideas, that can carry into reality that which is most valuable to man, that must be most meaningful to him, that can carry the ideas he has experienced.

Thus spiritual science is that which, on the one hand, through knowledge, strives towards the highest spiritual content that man can experience. But these are not experienced in mirror images; on the other hand, they are experienced in connection with the whole human being, and are drawn out of the whole human being. They therefore educate the human being to reality again. If spiritual science becomes a cultural element in the present and in the near future, as its representatives strive for, then it will not be what emanates from the existing educational institutions and what does not find the bridge to life, but rather something that connects idea, knowledge, and realization with warm human life at its very source, with that through which the human being is also involved in practical life. Anyone who strives for spiritual research on the one hand and on the other hand still has warm interests in everything human will have encountered many people in the recent past who have been placed in this or that place in life by the routine of life, the mindless mechanism of life. They felt the mechanistic aspect of their profession, which consisted in their standing in one place like a wheel in the state or economic machine. They felt, to a certain extent, that the way they stood was degrading to humans, because these professions sucked the essence out of people. After all, everything that existed as a configuration of economic and state life had emerged from unrealistic ideas. Oh, how alien to external reality were the ideas that people thought out of the science of mirror images, just as the ideas of the mechanic are alien to the machine. There we experienced science in all fields, whose ideas were as alien to external social life as the ideas of the mechanic are to the machine. There we experienced social politicians and statesmen, whose ideas were just as unrealistic in relation to practical life. No wonder that we are immersed in a practical life that absorbs people like a mechanism, like a machine. This feeling of being in a machine is the terrible, underlying cause of the burning social issues – unfortunately, they are not seen in their true form, everything else are just their offshoots.

If, instead of abstract science, instead of mirror-image natural science, the personality-warming spiritual science will radiate from the educational institutions, then this science will shape life in such a way that there can be no people who, at some point in their lives, feel as if they are in a wheel. For whatever is thought out from the deepest, most intimate humanity and really enters into social life as a social form will in turn have a human impact on everyone, even on those who, so to speak, occupy an outwardly low social position. What is recognized and seen as human at the top will resonate down into the human heart of the worker. What is already connected with the human being in theory, which is life, will be able to be life when it takes hold in practice at the bottom. Such a spiritual science can only flourish in freedom. Therefore, what has grown out of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science as a social impulse demands the free development of spiritual life, not state paternalism, not state supervision, and not the dependence of spiritual life on the economy, but its self-government. This is necessary so that the human being may find in the free spiritual life what he can only find in such a life: living knowledge, not mere mirror-image knowledge. This mirror-image knowledge is what the state and the economy in its abstractness squeeze out of itself. A living spiritual life that sets people free will be able to arise through the free self-administration of the individual members of the social organism.

And economic life will never be able to develop among people in such a way that one only talks, so to speak, about ideas that are unrealistic, that one only talks like routine parliamentarians, for example like Lloyd George, that one talks about ideas that have so little to do with economic life and so little prospect of being realized in the near future. In our parliaments, much is said about unrealistic ideas, learned from the wisdom of mirror images. What we need is a prosperous development of the economy, which is cracking at the seams. We can only achieve the recovery of our economy by handing over the economy to the people who manage it, that is, to all people, for free self-management, just as we hand over the spiritual life to free self-management.

Some people feel that economic life can only flourish if the economic operators themselves have it under free administration. But, again, they demand half-measures out of touch with reality. They demand, for example, that decisions be made in parliaments, where they are made by the majorities of the parties, who naturally do not judge from a technical and objective point of view. They demand that parliaments be advised by colleges of experts, formed from the professional associations and from the combination of consumers and producers and the like. But that, in turn, is an unrealistic half-measure, because imagine the sovereign parliament, advised by the economic body – and then the decisions are again made by the majorities.

No, that is not the issue. The only issue is that what happens in economic life should arise from the associations themselves that arise from the economy. The economic entities must conclude their contracts among themselves. They must disregard what people say who are not involved in any branch of the economy. Each branch of the economy must assert itself through direct negotiations from association to association. A free economic life based on objective and professional negotiations between economic entities must be established. Economic life, just like intellectual life, in free self-government – that is the only thing that can lead to a healthy future.

Then, between the self-governing spiritual life and the self-governing economic life, there will be the remaining area in which all people, as equals, can democratically deliberate in parliament. If we first eliminate the spiritual life, which must be based on abilities and grow out of abilities, and the economic life, which must be shaped out of the factual and the technical, if we first eliminate the right and the left, then what remains is the reality that depends on speeches, on the effects of words. Then there remains that into which constitutions can be fulfilled if they are not to remain merely on paper, as was the case with the former constitution of the German Reich.

This threefold order emerges directly from the true, inner character of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science as a way of satisfying practical demands in life. And many other practical things arise from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, for example the Waldorf school, which is set up in such a way that it already serves the free spiritual life in its configuration, which depends on nothing but only on the abilities that can arise from the human being, from teachers and students.

This, I believe, characterizes what makes spiritual science eminently practical. Spiritual science does not take hold of abstract knowledge, or mere conceptual knowledge, but of the essence of knowledge. It therefore educates the human being in such a way that he can also carry into the management of everyday life that which is first taught to him in science. The science of the spirit is practical in its origin, and therefore it will establish a practice that, in its ramifications, despite being full of ideas, can be life-affirming and liberating for people.

And now, dear assembled guests, allow me to characterize the following with a few words: Like everything that has ever presented itself to the world as such a radical view, this spiritual science is also fought by those who simply cannot imagine that man could get out of the accustomed tracks. Today, most people who have anything to do with science have become so immersed in the spirit of unexperienced, merely conceptualized science that they cannot imagine that there can be a living spiritual knowledge as I have described it here over the past decades, and which I have only sketched out in its basic features. And they are capable of saying that what this spiritual science sees could perhaps be based merely on suggestion, whether it be self-suggestion or suggestion from others.

One hears very strange things – I must, especially when I am characterizing the nature of spiritual science as I understand it, conclude with a few words about such externalities – one hears very strange things. For example, it is said that what I have presented could be based on suggestions that came to me from reading the books of such personalities as Blavatsky and Besant. And now it is even being pointed out with a certain scientific rigor that I immersed myself in the writings of Blavatsky and Besant from 1900 or 1901 and that what is found in these writings is recurring in my spiritual science. Well, there is much in these writings that is ancient tradition. Just as the person who presents geometry today must present the geometric truths of the centuries again, so naturally much of what is in earlier books is also found in my writings again. But anyone who then claims that everything in my books can already be found in earlier ones [by Blavatsky and Besant], that nothing has been added, is either blind or is blatantly lying, because it is not true — as can be seen by anyone who compares my books with these other books.

But the approach is even more seemingly scientific. For example, it is said: Yes, Steiner was an esoteric disciple of Besant from 1901 to 1913. Well, I will tell you a fact. In 1900/1901 my book “Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im 19. Jahrhundert” (World and Life Views in the 19th Century) was published, which those people who like to fish for contradictions in my work count among my “naturalistic” books. Almost at the same time, my essay “Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life and its Relationship to the Modern World View” was published. This writing was translated and published in an English magazine immediately after its publication. I was invited to give lectures within the Theosophical Society and was also invited to attend Theosophical meetings in London itself. There, my English translation of the writing 'Mysticism at the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life' had already been read. And one of the most important authorities among these English 'Theosophists' told me quite clearly at the time – I am just reporting: 'What is written in your “Mysticism” actually contains much of what we are striving for with our Theosophy.' – Well, the person to whom this was said truly had nothing to learn from Besant or Blavatsky. I am not saying this out of immodesty, but simply based on the facts.

But they went about it in an even more scientific way, thoroughly scientific. They even, as has been stated, went to Weimar, where I lived from 1889 to 1897, and made a fuss about it. And as a result of this trip, one could even claim that some lady, whose name one is willing to mention, said: “Steiner was an atheist during his time in Weimar.” Well, I have often had to explain that scientific conscientiousness sometimes goes as far as gossip. But I would like to tell you a small fact from my time in Weimar, so that you can get an idea of the alleged atheism of that period: it was roughly in the middle of my time in Weimar, at least after the publication of the first edition of my “Philosophy of Freedom”, when a Protestant clergyman who was extremely well respected in Weimar at the time gave a lecture in Weimar on “The Free Christian Personality”. You can read this lecture in the journal “Die Wahrheit” (The Truth), published by Christoph Schrempf; I don't know in which year, but not many were published, so it should be easy to find. There is a reference to the “Philosophy of Freedom” at one point. But at another point in this lecture there is a reference to me again, only the lecturer omitted to mention my name at this point. Of course, that doesn't matter; but it may be important, especially in view of the gossipmonger's claim about my Weimar atheism, to point out this passage in the lecture, which was also printed and given by a serious personality. This personality said roughly the following in the lecture:

Recently someone said to me that if one sees in the right way that God has infinite love within himself, one cannot speak of God's existence in the way one speaks of the existence of ordinary things, because love is devotion to another. And if God has the fullness of infinite love within himself, then he passes out of the fullness of this love into all beings through an outpouring of his being, and then one can no longer speak of God's self-existence in the ordinary sense.

This personality said at the time, from his purely evangelical point of view: Why should love be the Moloch that drives God out of Himself? —

Now, the deeper philosophical question that lies in this, I will of course not deal with today. But the one who spoke of divine love for this man in this way was I. And I ask you whether someone who speaks about the personality of God in such a way can be called an atheist? That is a truth, and this truth is to be documented. And as far as this truth is concerned, it makes no difference to me what can still be asked about my alleged atheism from this or that Weimar personality today.

And so I could cite fact after fact in refutation of the accusers of spiritual science, but the accusers are mostly not interested in really looking at the facts. They are only interested in shining their own light and therefore putting spiritual science in a correspondingly different light. I am never curious to hear what these people say, because it can usually be predicted what, for example, Count Hermann Keyserling, whom I have already mentioned today, said as a characteristic of my anthroposophy in his abstract book, which has the character that I have described today. This could be constructed from the outset out of Keyserling's empty wisdom. This is just as well known as what such a person has to say about spiritual science, who parrots Eduard von Hartmann's ideas like Drews. These people, even if they are Count Hermann Keyserling, always have one thing in common: since they basically lack the will to go into the matter, they always have one thing in common at one point, and I say this with all radicalism: they always have to lie. You find in one place in the book “Philosophy as Art” by Hermann Keyserling the assertion that I started out with what he considers my “materialistically shaped spiritual science” - which he only calls that because he has no idea about it, not even a blue one. You find there the assertion that I started from Haeckel's ideas, that the origin of my anthroposophy lies in Haeckel's ideas.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I wrote about Haeckel at the end of the 1890s, and I must mention a fact here: in 1893, I presented the one-sidedness of Haeckel's world view in a lecture on a spiritual monism at the Vienna “Scientific Club”. I then returned to Weimar, where I had written my essay about the Society for Ethical Culture in one of the first issues of “Zukunft”. Haeckel wrote to me about this essay, and I sent him a copy of my Viennese lecture against materialistic monism. And Haeckel established the connection that led to Haeckel being very friendly towards my endeavors at the time. And it also led to a confrontation with Haeckelism, which was necessary from the scientific and spiritual development of the time, because Haeckelism was a force to be reckoned with. From this one can see - I say this truly only forced by what is being said by the enemy side, I have not said it long enough, I am not saying it out of any immodesty -: It is not true that I sought any connection with Haeckel; Haeckel approached me on his own initiative, in the way of the aspirations that I cultivated. I did not pursue Haeckel, but Haeckel, despite being Haeckel, came to me, just as I did not pursue the Theosophical Society, but the Theosophical Society came to me and requested my lectures. Hermann Keyserling is lying when he says that I started with Haeckel, because it can be proved that he is lying if you read the relevant chapter of my arguments with Haeckel in my “Einleitungen zu Goethes naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften” (Introductions to Goethe's Scientific Writings) from the 1880s. Anyone who claims that I started from Haeckel, despite the fact that this dispute with Haeckel is available, can be said to be lying, even if he founds wisdom schools.

This is the peculiarity of opponents of spiritual science: because they have no will to go into the matter, they always have to lie at a certain point. Whether they lie like Count Hermann Keyserling, somewhat more refined, in patent leather boots, or whether they lie like Professor Traub, or whether they lie so crudely, so “ferkelig” as the neighboring Rohm in Lorch, it does not matter. For there is an inner reason why these people, in what they bring forward against spiritual science, pass over to lies. If there were anything that would scientifically speak against spiritual science, I would be the first to take it up and discuss it. As I said in my last lecture here: the one who really goes through the psychological development that I have characterized, which must be gone through to become a spiritual researcher, knows that it cannot be a matter of suggestion. Just as I know that when I lift a kilogram weight, I have to strengthen my inner strength to do so, that in a sense my ego has to strengthen itself through the resistance, so I know that my ego has to strengthen itself if I want to have spiritual insight, whereas it does not strengthen itself through suggestion.

But people also put forward other arguments. For example, the absurdity is being repeated today that one should not recognize and pass on the spiritual-scientific knowledge that lives in my anthroposophy through mere thinking, but that it should be verified in the same way [as it has been researched]. Now, my dear audience, what is the reason for this verification? Mathematical truths are the model for spiritual-scientific truths. For example, approval and recognition by others of the Pythagorean theorem is not necessary; one learns to understand it from one's inner experience, others agree with it out of their free judgment, not out of any external experience. Spiritual truths need no confirmation, any more than mathematical truths do. They arise out of the free spiritual experience of the human being, not in the way that some of the opponents of spiritual science today believe. And then I have often said: spiritual training is part of the process of exploring spiritual knowledge, but not of processing it; this can be done with ideas, with ordinary common sense. Mathematics is also a model for this. To make mathematical discoveries, special mathematical abilities are necessary. Once the discoveries have been made, anyone who has mathematical ideas and has developed them to a corresponding level can substantiate, prove and carry them further. And so it is in spiritual science. And those who want to pick on such points simply do not understand the inner structure of spiritual science.

Now, I could continue this litany – I myself feel it is a litany – which actually only serves to hold up the proceedings, for a long time. And if those who now act as accusers of spiritual science, and there are very, very many of them, would go down to the ground on which spiritual science stands – which, to use this Goethean saying again, would like to give account to the strictest mathematician with regard to their methods and their discipline. If these accusers would only enter the terrain of spiritual science, they would realize that spiritual science is not at all opposed to today's scientific method, but that it recognizes this scientific method in terms of its discipline and its strict methods. Spiritual science recognizes this scientific method in its strict methods, only it leads them beyond themselves, as it should be shown by the thirty lecturers at the Dornach University courses and is to be shown here at further university courses. Other things would be brought to spiritual science, and indeed those things that - but in their true form, not in their caricatured and distorted form - have often been mentioned and refuted by this spiritual science itself as possible objections.

Today, my dear attendees, if you are completely grounded in spiritual science, as it is meant here, you are basically dealing with more important matters than with such a confrontation with insubstantial opposition. Today you are dealing with the answer to the question: How does the human being move from his life-filled knowledge to a social practice of life that is permeated by love? Cold mirror-image science introduces into practice what is loveless and empty of love. The knowledge that must be inwardly experienced as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science appears to the human being in such a way that he brings his whole personality into his outer activities, including his immediate life. And no matter how complicated the community may be, anyone who has been educated in spiritual science can also carry into their outer social life what they experience in spiritual science with the most intense part of their personality, regardless of whether they are in a leading or a non-leading position. For what is experienced with the whole personality also becomes an experience when it is put into action. But the outer experience in which the personality must be completely involved is the experience in love. A knowledge that strives for the world of ideas in the spirit, that engages the whole human being in such a way that this human being places himself in love in the social life, that he lets love permeate social ideas. Just as in spiritual research the direct experience of the spirit lives inwardly, so through the threefold social organism spiritual science brings love into the social life, into the community. It places the ideas as such into reality, so that love can be the bearer of these ideas in reality. Love in the social life can only be connected with experienced, not merely with cognitive science. Therefore, when one is grounded in spiritual science, as it is meant here, one's gaze is first of all directed to the connection between these spiritual scientific insights, this spiritual scientific life, with social love, with socially loving practice, which is not merely routine, but which is carried in love, by radiant ideas. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we need if we do not want to descend into barbarism but want to arrive at a new civilization.

We need a spiritual life that does not live in cloud cuckoo land, but that descends into practice; a practical life that does not look down on the unworldly spirituality with contempt, but that allows itself to be permeated with love by real ideas. We need a spirit that does not float ethereally in clouds, but that lives in practice. We need a practice that does not become an uninspired routine, but a practice that is filled with the Spirit. We need a spirit that illuminates the practice; we need a practice that is warmed by the Spirit. Then we can embark on a fruitful path into the future.