The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the year 1902, Rudolf Steiner definitely resolved to become the Herald of Spiritual Science, and to proclaim its message to a materialistic world; by so doing he laid himself open to its scorn, ridicule, and enmity. The most gifted and talented man of his time; one who shunned every mark of approbation and willingly renounced every claim to the highest worldly honours, which honours were within his easy reach. This he did, in order that he might devote himself to the consummation of a momentous forward movement, destined to lead mankind to a reasoned and proper conception of spiritual verity. Thus might the impulse given to thought and will, enable humanity to span that dread abyss in which, even yet, Nietzsche (the great apostle of consistent materialistic philosophy) must sink, and with him a countless number of his lesser followers, who can find no way whereby they may save themselves from spiritual dissolution.

To such as these, Rudolf Steiner became at once the saviour and the helper; it was for them and for mankind that he decided upon this altruistic deed, which in itself implied a bold courageous upward sweep in the path of human progress.

This wholly unselfish action, however, called for determination, inflexibility of will, and a moderate and rational apprehension of spiritual reality, permeated throughout with a profound sense of its fundamental substantiality. But here was no worn-out intellectual faculty, no ecstasy, no mystic intoxication with Eastern tinge—austere, resolute and calm, he went his way, ever imparting spiritual enlightenment.

Rudolf Steiner made no concessions when offering spiritual blessings; but on the other hand he never wearied of expounding once again from the beginning, in each city where he lectured, those basic principles upon which he built a solid mental structure, to conform with the demands and claims arising from modern intellectual power and discernment. While insisting upon due and proper consideration, he freely acknowledged the right to challenge and to question. He praised the achievements of Natural Science, and recommended the employment of its methods in the Science of the Spirit. He cursed the ignoramus and the extreme Kantian line of thought, and refused to accede to limits of knowledge already prescribed and confined.

No wonder that the hatred of the spiritual despots of our time, tyrants in many and varied ways, was piled mountain-high—for everywhere he brought that new animating, revivifying life, which would yet become all-potent in the future. He that would bring this life to humanity, must himself endure martyrdom, and stand as if held fast between envy, ill-will, and abuse, on the one hand—and insuperable inertia, or fool-hardy levity, and immaturity on the other. In truth,—a daily torment this bearing up against the ever-breaking waves of an hostile, or an aid-imploring clinging humanity, always in renewed and never ceasing exhausting activity. He who takes that step which anticipates future progress in evolution must bring upon himself such martyrdom; but the power, of love helps enormously in carrying the burden, while the capacity for endurance increases with the measure of the overflowing fullness of work accomplished.

Berlin was the first radiating point from which centre the lecture activities of Rudolf Steiner were spread outwards. The discourses were to serve in opening up a way toward the understanding of all that he purposed to present to the world, under the title of Spiritual Science. That which he gave in less detailed and isolated lectures in other towns in Germany, could be dealt with here in the form of a compact course, having the character of a systematic introduction to Spiritual Science; it was also planned that part of these lectures should periodically recur, even though the public could not be counted upon to respond in large numbers.

I will now give a summary of these discourses which were held at the ‘Architektenhaus’ (Hall of Architecture) in Berlin; as they are of historical interest. We commenced in a small hall, shortly however to pass on to one of intermediate size, and from there to one still larger. During the last year of the War, the Architektenhaus was commandeered by the War Department, and then the lectures had to be held, partly in the ‘Scharwenka-Saal’, and partly in the ‘Oberlicht-Saal’ of the ‘Philharmonie’ (Philharmonic Hall). When we at last came to the large hall of this latter building, the ‘Köthener-Strasse’ (Koethener Street) had to be closed to wheeled traffic, because of the enormous concourse of people. Here we found the opposing factions so well organized, that it seemed as if preparations might be afoot, with the object of bringing Rudolf Steiner's public lecture activities to a premature and violent conclusion.¹

From the very beginning Rudolf Steiner had chosen the word ‘Anthroposophy’, to designate the matter and the theme which was his to impress upon the world; in public, however, he generally used the more simple term, Spiritual Science. After he had decided to give way, under the pressure of Theosophical Circles, and to undertake the leadership of the German Theosophical Society, he did all that lay within his power to win back for the name of Theosophy, that esteem and respect of which it was in danger of being deprived, owing to the want of maturity of that body; and his endeavours in this direction were clearly marked. It is a fact, that the burden thrust upon him due to the misuse of this name, was increased by the regrettable attitude, and the alienation of certain people; albeit these acts were condemned by many friends. Rudolf Steiner shouldered every burden which fate laid upon him, when by so doing he could serve the spirit; he regarded only the task, and the love to labour, and took no heed of the cold indifference of humanity.

As far back as the year 1900 he drew the attention of various literary societies in Berlin to his efforts in furthering the cause of spiritual revival; this he did, in the beginning, through lectures upon Goethe's fairy-tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. From October, 1901, to March, 1902, he spoke concerning German Spiritual Life in the Nineteenth Century. The impulse to thought thus created was continued by means of a series of lectures during 1902 to 1903 entitled Zarathustra to Nietzsche, treating of the evolution of man's spiritual life from the oldest times to the present day. It was Zarathustra who gave the initial impulse to that current of thought which urged humanity to call upon the active power of the spirit, that through its aid it might strive to overcome all that is material, and thus cause the physical element to become subservient to its needs.

Rudolf Steiner drew attention to the task allotted to German patriotism in the totality of human spiritual evolution, as the bearer and upholder of the ‘Principle of True Self’ (Ich-Prinzips), so deeply merged in all that is of the spirit. He stated that the true ‘Ich’, the Ego (endowed with the soul's achievements) must be made both the receptacle and the radiating point of the divine essence. He pointed to the hidden choked up stream of German spiritual life, which although predisposed within itself, was thrust aside by a materialistic culture, and the new imperial idea of Might and Power. He recalled with sorrow and anxiety those words of Nietzsche's—‘Extirpation of the Spirit from Germany, in favour of the Empire’, and declared that what Germany awaits, and what it would so gladly welcome, is the beneficence and the blessings of the Spirit. Already at that time Rudolf Steiner spoke quite unequivocally regarding the necessity of clearly differentiating between the Western and the Eastern spiritual paths. Humanity owes, indeed, a great and inestimable debt of gratitude to the Orient, for the gift of that wondrous knowledge which has come to it from the East.

The Mystery of Golgotha forms a ‘Turning-Point’. Mankind with its eyes upon modernity can never hark back to those conditions which were there before that decisive juncture, that divine source of knowledge and of upward progress; the world must learn to understand the need for the transient darkness and the gloom.

It is during that period when, by slow degrees, the personality is striving to cast aside its earthly factors and to detach them from all that is real and of the spirit, that it must learn to know itself, must grasp its essence; it dare not become obdurate, and thus descend to dust and annihilation. The very act of forcing a way through the material quality brings about the moment when it shall realize it is once more upon the further shore. Hence, the personality which has indeed made ready to pass through death's portal and onward to resurrection, finds, at last, that it is again in the true Ego, the veritable ‘I’—a spiritually conscious and individualized member of the cosmos—a part of the whole, and yet ‘I’. Once freed from all earthly nature, the material element falls away, even as an amputated limb from the human organism. When truly at one with the great cosmos it expands beyond all previous limitations, outward into the realms of the spirit. It was in order that such things might come to pass—yes—that man's freedom and self-determination could be won by effort and by travail, that the Mystery of Golgotha—God's own sacrifice—was needful and must be consummated.

No power on earth can ignore this fact nor stem the tide of evolution. Happenings which appear at first sight to be hindrances and restraints, do but serve to aide us in our onward progress. The power to differentiate between good and evil is the first step toward man's freedom; the narrow confines imposed upon him by materialism have placed him in the position of being unable to grasp the meaning of this earthly life, and to realize his true personality; but now he must rise above his limited conceptions and the achievement lies in the province of his conscious will. The Deity has, as it were, relinquished the guidance, and the control. Man must decide whether the Divine Will shall quicken within him or whether he shall give himself over to disavowal and negation. Here, then, humanity comes upon a new ‘Turning-Point’, and its present task is to make ready, so that it may be met with open eyes, and not blindly and in ignorance. Such was the work to which Rudolf Steiner found himself committed.

In the Anglo-Indian theosophical movement there was a certain risk attached to the revival of the Yoga-Exercises by the uninitiated, for these were suited to another period, and a differently constituted human organism. Again, in reviving the mysticism of the Middle Ages lay a danger that there might be a turning away from true life, and an increased egotism in a soul which had yielded itself to selfishness. Both these currents of thought failed to take into consideration the requirements of the times and the laws of evolution. The future and the salvation of humanity lies in the understanding of the real significance of the Mystery of Golgotha, and in extending and strengthening the power of human consciousness in order that it shall advance beyond the narrow limits of man's present intellectual powers, and not in its repression and constraint. Those who opened their hearts to words such as these, were certainly not to be found among the celebrities of science; they were modest, unassuming people, knowing of no course which they might follow that was suited to the times, and who, therefore, gave themselves over to the study of Oriental Wisdom, in that form in which it was presented by the Theosophical Society. These people approached Rudolf Steiner with a request that he should become the teacher and leader of their association; but he definitely declined to consider their appeal. Never, so he said, would he do otherwise than point out the difference between the two paths, and advocate the necessity for the development of Western methods, suitable to modern requirements. No longer can there be a mere reaching back, in order to obtain primeval wisdom; forward progress must be made with true regard to all that has been acquired since those ancient times, through intellectual achievement, and must in future follow that path marked by history, wherein the essentials of development in the unfolding of the human spirit are clearly indicated.

Although the wisdom of the East deserves our warmest feelings of admiration and wonder, nevertheless, the fundamental principle underlying its historical onward progress does not appear as a vital factor; this element must now be introduced by the West, to which task it should regard itself as directly committed. The Mystery of Golgotha is the central point, that mystery which is neither recognized nor understood by the Orientals nor by the New-Theosophists. As far back as the Autumn of 1900, I have heard such words from the lips of Rudolf Steiner, when harassed by the importunity of ardent followers of the Theosophical school of thought. Those who listened with understanding, fully realized that here, indeed, was an inflexible will, and the expression of an urgent historical need. One could not help but wonder that people really existed, who would attempt adverse argument and persuasion. It was, however, on account of this attitude that Rudolf Steiner gave a course of interesting lectures on Mysticism at the Beginning of Modern Spiritual Life, which were followed, in the Autumn of 1901, by others entitled Christianity as a Mystical Fact.

Soon after the commencement of these discourses, I had an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the most distinguished among the Theosophical Leaders. I had joined the Theosophical Society and was requested to undertake some special work at Bologna, the representative of the Anglo-Indian movement having founded a branch in Italy. In the spring of 1902, during a period of three weeks, I translated from English into Italian the lectures of the Indian Theosophist, Jinarajadasa, who has since been nominated as the future President of the Theosophical Society. While thus engaged, I frequently found it difficult to write and to voice the ideas which I had to express, concepts that were oft-times entirely at variance with my own inner reasoned feelings. I stood aghast before the sentences, so material was their essence and their spirit. At such times, my thoughts would hark back to the words of Rudolf Steiner, regarding the vital difference between Western and Eastern mysticism; but I knew that the truth and the solution lay in the Christ-Mystery, of which he had both inner knowledge and understanding. Veritable primeval wisdom contains the heart and principle; while in the ever onward progress of man's evolution are found the metamorphoses—death and resurrection—where, then, is the point of juncture?—IN THE CROSS—and it is Rudolf Steiner who reveals its secret.

About this time a memorable incident occurred, namely, the German Theosophists invited me to go to Berlin, in order to take over the work of their retiring representative. After some hesitation I decided to accede to their request. Shortly after this event came the joyful news that Rudolf Steiner had yielded to the pressure of the Theosophists, and had accepted the directorate of a new section which was about to be formed; this he had done, however, under the specific condition that he should introduce into the movement that current of thought which he himself advocated. There was indeed universal rejoicing; and the General Secretary of the Theosophical Society in England—a good German scholar—who highly esteemed Steiner's two works—Mysticism at the Beginning of Modern Spiritual Life and Christianity as a Mystical Fact—expressed himself as completely in accord with the new programme. This illustrious scholar, Dr. Bertram Keightley, who is Professor at the University of Lucknow, has since that time, become a member of the Anthroposophical Society.

Thus it was that the work began, environed by the activities of the Theosophical Society and undertaken with the greatest loyalty in respect to that body. The subject matter of the public lectures delivered at the Architektenhaus in Berlin in 1903 was as follows:

19 March—Theosophy, and the onward progress of Religion. (The Tower of Babel.)
26 March—The Cardinal Teachings of Theosophy. (Reincarnation and Karma.)
2 April—Theosophy, and the Modern Scientific Spirit.

In the spring of 1904, also in the Architektenhaus, Rudolf Steiner spoke concerning certain subjects which contained within them the germ of his later pioneer work in social and pedagogical spheres; these were included under the title, Psychic Teachings in Theosophy, as follows:

16 March—I. Body and Soul. How can we study the life of the Soul? Religion, Science, and the Soul Question.
23 March—II. The Soul and Human Destiny. What are Desire and Suffering? What is Destiny? Has man earned his fate? Optimism and Pessimism. Genius and Insanity.
30 March—III. Soul and Spirit. Immortality. Hypnotism and Clairvoyance. Spiritual Healing. Education in the light of Spiritual Cosmic Conception.

Another series of lectures took place in Vereins Haus, at 118 William Street (Wilhelmstrasse), Berlin; in these discourses Rudolf Steiner endeavoured to throw light upon that border-land existing between the perceptual and superperceptual worlds; a subject which has claimed the attention of science and in which lie concealed so many dangers for the uninitiated. The dates and titles of these discourses are given below:

Regarding the above, I find among my notes the following entry: ‘The two latter themes were subsequently used as subject matter for lectures which were held in the “Architektenhaus” from April onwards, every second Monday in the month; a further series which took place in the same building during the autumn of 1904, were especially directed towards the development and extension of the scientific rudiments of Theosophy.' The subjects were:

In the spring of 1905 Rudolf Steiner set forth and expounded his views before various Faculties; his introductory lecture held on 4th May, was on Schiller and the Present; those which followed were:

A series of lectures which were started in October, 1905, commenced with ‘Haeckel, “The Riddle of the Universe” and Theosophy’. It was indeed essential that Rudolf Steiner should take Haeckel as the starting-point for these discourses, because he was of opinion that in virtue of the outstanding nature of his achievements in the sphere of natural science, Haeckel was worthy and entitled to become a decisive spiritual power in our present philosophical outlook, [would he but apprehend and acknowledge the divine spirit latent within his works—and at this point lay the parting of their ways (Ed.)]. On the other hand, Steiner repudiated entirely the claims made by the courageous and ingenious Haeckel, who was already venturing to encroach and become active in the domains of Philosophy, and the formation of world opinion. Here must the bolt be shot and the mischief averted. This Rudolf Steiner did with the greatest energy and consistency, but it did not prevent him from expressing himself in words conveying the warmest appreciation whenever he could perceive the positive element in Haeckel's works.

Never have I found this side of Rudolf Steiner's nature rightly understood; people always seemed wilfully to regard it as inconsistent that the same man should at one time praise, and at another find fault; but this he did with whole-hearted enthusiasm on the one hand, or with merciless severity and logic on the other, the while, however, he never allowed his personal feelings to influence either his praise or his censure. He rose above all such bias, and was ever delighted to observe productive and creative capacity in others. He enraptured those who heard him when he expressed his approval through the warmth of his approbation; but, when he made reference to that which was harmful and pernicious, he evoked surprise by the unexpected keenness and rigour of his demonstrations and reasoning. He ever maintained the greatest affection for Ernest Haeckel, and it was a delightful experience to be present when these two met—the youthful freshness of Haeckel, his elasticity of tread—the waving of the broad-brimmed, wide-awake hat—his beaming childlike blue eyes—all in one who judged by years, should have been already numbered with the aged. Haeckel was no mere philosopher, but a man of deeds with a penetrating flashing glance as of one profoundly observant. He was ever moved by an impetuous warmheartedness, his true being filled with loving patience and tolerance; he was a factor in the world's history, and his influence will continue to be felt in days yet to come.

• 1. This is no exaggeration, for about this time, and at Munich, an attempt was actually made upon his life by the Communist Party. [Ed.]

A future study of history will record these days as belonging among the most significant ones of European history, for today central Europe's renunciation of a will of its own became known.¹ It remains to be seen in what direction matters will develop further in the next few days, but whatever takes place, it is, after all, an action that much more so than many that have preceded it in our catastrophic age, is connected with human decisions of will that originated in the full sense of the word from the forces of decline in European civilization. Such a day can remind us of the periods from which emerged everything within European civilization, the origin of which I described in the past few weeks. It has its point of departure, as it were, in what is described so superficially by history but what so profoundly influenced the civilization of mankind after the fourth Christian century.

We have characterized these events from several perspectives. We have outlined how after the fourth century the element that could be termed the absolutely legalistic spirit invaded the ecclesiastical and secular civilization of the Occident and then became more and more intensified. We then indicated the sources from which these matters originated. Indeed, already earlier we have called attention to the fact that in the middle of the nineteenth century modern humanity underwent a crisis that, although given little notice, can even be described from an anatomical, physiological standpoint, as we saw here a few weeks ago.² All that then took its course in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in the last third, culminating in the unfortunate first two decades of the twentieth century, stands under the influence of what occurred in the middle of the nineteenth century.

This day in particular gives us cause to introduce these considerations we intend to pursue in the next few days with the contemplation of a certain personality. This is something we have done already on several occasions, but it might be especially important from the viewpoint I wish to assume today. One could say that this is an individual who, partly as a spectator and partly as one undergoing the events of history as a tragic personality, experienced what was present in the form of forces of decline within European civilization in the last third of the nineteenth century. I am referring to Friedrich Nietzsche.³

We are not assuming our standpoint today in order to biographically consider the personality of Nietzsche in any way. We only do so in order to demonstrate a number of aspects of the last third of the nineteenth century through the person of Nietzsche. After all, his activities fall completely within this period of the nineteenth century. He is the personality who participated, I would like to say, with the greatest sensitivity in all the cultural streams pervading Europe during that period. He is the one who sensed the forces of decline inherent in these trends in the most terrifying manner and who, in the end, broke down under this tragedy, under these horrors.

Naturally, one can approach the picture we have in mind from any number of directions. We shall focus on a few of them today. Friedrich Nietzsche grew up in a parsonage in central Germany. This implies that he was surrounded all through his childhood by what can be designated as the modern confinements of culture, the narrowness of civilization. He had around him all that expresses itself in a philistine, sentimental manner and yet simultaneously exhibited smugness, conceit, and trivial contentment. I say complacent, conceited, for this culture believed it had a grasp on the untold number of secrets of the universe in threadbare, superficial sentiments. I say content with trivialities because these sentiments are indeed the most commonplace. They penetrate philistine sentimentality from the very simplest human level and, at the same time, are valued by this philistine sentimentality as if they were the pronouncements God uttered in the human mind.

Nietzsche was a product of this narrowness of culture, and as a young man he absorbed everything someone can acquire who passes through the present-day higher forms of education as a, let me say, unworldly youth. Already during his early teens, Nietzsche was attracted with all his heart to everything that streams out of Greek tragedies such as those by Sophocles or Aeschylus.⁴ He imbued himself with all that strives out of Greek humanism towards a certain spiritual-physical world experience. And with all of his human nature, with his thinking, feeling, and willing, Nietzsche wanted to stand within this experience of world totality of which Man can feel himself to be a part, an individual member.

Time and again, the soul of young Friedrich Nietzsche must have confronted the mighty contrast existing between what the majority of modern humanity in its philistine sentimentality and narrow, trivial self-contentment calls reality and the striving for loftiness inherent in the tragic poets and philosophers of early Greek antiquity. Certainly, his soul swung back and forth between this philistine reality and the striving for sublimity in the Greek spirit that surpasses all trivial human striving. And when he subsequently entered the sphere of modern erudition, the lack of spirit and art, the mere intellectual activity of this modern scholarship was particularly irritating to him. His beloved Greeks, through whom he had most intensely experienced the striving for loftiness, had for him been remolded by modern science into philological, formal trivialities. He had to find his way out of the latter. Hence he acquired his thorough antipathy against that spirit he considered the source of modern intellectualism. He was seized with profound antipathy against Socrates⁵ and all Socratic aspirations.

Certainly, there are the impressive, positive sides of Socrates; there is all that one can learn in a thorough manner through Socrates. Yet, on the one hand, we have Socrates as he once existed within the world of Greece and, on the other hand, there is Socrates, the ghostly specter haunting the descriptions of modern high school teachers and university philosophers. With whom could young Nietzsche become acquainted when he initially observed his surroundings? Only with the ghostly specter Socrates! This is how he acquired his dislike against this Socrates, out of what has arisen through this Socratism within European civilization. Thus, he saw in Socrates the slayer of human wholeness that in the art and philosophy of the pre-Socratic age had streamed through European civilization. In the end, it seemed to him that what overlooks the world from the foundation of existence is a reality turned philistine and desolate. He felt that any lofty, noble striving to ascend to the spiritual spheres of life must struggle to overcome such a reality.

Nietzsche was unable to discover such noble tendencies in anything that could have emerged from the prevailing striving for knowledge; he could find it only in what originated from efforts of artistic character. For him, what had developed as tragic art out of ancient Greece illuminated the philistine atmosphere into which Socratism had finally turned. He saw Greek tragedy reborn, as it were, in what Richard Wagner was endeavoring to create as tragedy out of the spirit of music towards the end of the 1870's and beginning of the 1880's.⁶ In the musical drama to be created he saw something that by ignoring Socratism was connected directly with the first Greek age of total humanism. Thus, he recognized two streams of art, on one hand, the Dionysian, orgiastic one that, arising from unfathomable depths, attempts to draw the whole human being into the world, and, on the other hand, the one that eventually was so perverted in Europe that it lost all its luster and decayed into the absolute spiritual sclerosis of modern scholarship, namely, the Apollonian stream. Nietzsche strove for a new Dionysian art. This pervades his first work, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (Die Geburt der Tragoedie aus dem Geist der Musik). Right away, he had to experience how the typical philistine railed at what expressed itself in this book out of a knowledge borne aloft by wings of imagination. Immediately, the leading philistine of modern civilization, Wilamowitz,⁷ mobilized. (Subsequently he became the luminary of the University of Berlin and clothed the Greek creators of tragedy in modern, trivial garments that won the undying admiration of all those who penetrate as deeply into the Greek word as they are distant from the Greek spirit.) Right away the collision occurred between the stream that, borne by the spirit, tried to penetrate the artistic element based on knowledge and the other that does not feel comfortable within this richly imaginative spirit of knowledge, this knowledge borne by the spirit, and that therefore escapes into philistine pedantry.

Everything his soul could experience through this contrast was then poured out by Nietzsche in the beginning of the 1870's in his four so-called Thoughts Out of Season⁸ (Unzeitgemaesse Betrachtungen). The first of these contemplations was dedicated to the educated philistine proper of the modern age. These Thoughts Out of Season have to be considered in the right light. They were certainly not intended as attacks against individual persons. In the first contemplation, for example, the otherwise quite worthy and upright David Strauss⁹ was not meant to be attacked personally. He was to be considered as the typical representative of modern philistinism in education which is so infinitely content with the trivialities developing out of this modern life. We actually experience this again and again, because, basically, matters have not improved since those days, they have only intensified.

This is approximately the same experience as the one we have when we attempt to contribute something to the comprehension of the world out of the depths of spiritual science. Then people come and say that although what is being said concerning an etheric and astral body and spiritual development may all be true, it cannot be proven. One can only prove that two times two is four. Above all else, one has to consider how this unprovable spiritual science relates to the certain truth that two times two is four. You can hear today in all possible variations—although perhaps put not quite so bluntly—that the objection that two times two is four must be raised against every utterance concerning soul and spirit land. As if anybody would doubt that two times two is four!

Friedrich Nietzsche wished to strike out against the philistinism of modern education when he described its prototype, David Friedrich Strauss, the author of Old and New Faith (Alter and neuer Glaube), this arch-philistine book. He also tried to demonstrate how desolate things stood with modern spirituality. We need only recall some important facts to show just how desolate they are. We need only remember that in the first half of the nineteenth century there still existed fiery spirits, for example, the historian Rotteck,¹⁰ who lectured on history in a one-sidedly liberal form but with a certain fiery spirituality. We only have to recall that in Rotteck's History (Geischichte) something of the totality of man holds sway, albeit a somewhat withered one, something of the human being who at least brings into the whole experience of mankind's development as much spirituality as there is rationality in it. We need only compare this with the people who said later, It will lead nowhere to try and develop a national constitution or social conditions out of human reason. Instead, we ought to study ancient times, concentrate on history. We should study the way everything developed and accordingly arrange matters in the present.

This is the attitude that, in the end, bore its dull fruits in the teachings of political economy represented, for instance, in somebody like Lujo Brentano,¹¹ the attitude that only wished to observe history, and actually held that anything productive could only have been brought into humanity's evolution in ancient times.

It held that nowadays one would really have to empty out the human being and then, like a sack, stuff him full with what can still be gained from history so that modern man, aside from his skin—and at most a little of what lies under the skin—would, underneath this tiny area, be stuffed full with what former ages have produced, and would in turn be able to utter ancient Greek insights, old Germanic knowledge, and so on. One did not think nor wished to believe that the modern human soul could be imbued with any productivity. History became the catchword of the day. Nietzsche in the 1870's was disgusted by this and wrote his book The Use and Abuse of History in Life (Vom Nutzen and Nachteil der Historie fuer das Leben) in which he indicated how modern man is being suffocated by history. And he demanded that productivity be attained once again.

The artistic spirit still lived in Nietzsche. After he had turned to Wagner, “a philosopher, as it were,”¹² he again dealt with another philosopher, namely Schopenhauer.¹³ In Schopenhauer's ideas he saw something of the reality of the otherwise dull and dusty spirit of philosophy. Nietzsche regarded Schopenhauer as an educator of modern humanity, not only as someone who had been but as someone who ought to become such a teacher. And he wrote his book Schopenhauer as Educator (Schopenhauer als Erzieher). He followed this with Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, pointing out in an almost orgiastic manner how a revival of modern civilization through art would have to come about.

Strange indeed are the depths from which Richard Wagner in Bayreuth originated. Friedrich Nietzsche himself had painstakingly edited out everything he had written in addition to what was then published under the title, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. One could almost say that for each page of this book, printed in 1876, there exists a second page that contains something completely different. While Bayreuth and its activities are enthusiastically celebrated in this book, in addition to each page Nietzsche wrote another, as it were, different page filled with deeply tragic sentiments concerning the forces of decline in modern civilization. Indeed, even he could not believe in what he was writing; he could not believe that the power to truly transform the forces of decline into those of ascent lay in Bayreuth. This tragedy prevails especially in those pages, deleted at that time, that remained in manuscript form and were made public only after Friedrich Nietzsche had fallen ill. It was at that time that the great change came over him, actually already in 1876. This period of Nietzsche's life ended tragically in the agony over the forces of decline inherent in modern culture.

Already in 1876 the disgust concerning the decline was stronger in his mind than the joy over the positive forces he had initially noted in Bayreuth. Above all, his soul was inundated by the observation of all that has pervaded modern civilization of untrue elements, of the present-day lack of truthfulness. And I would like to say this concentrated itself in his mind into a picture of what affects this modern civilization on the human level. He was actually no longer able to discover in this modern culture any redeeming spirituality that could surmount the philistine view of reality. Thus, he entered his second period in which he opposed the distorted self-concept of human beings in modern times with what he called the “all-too-human” (Allzumenschliche), with the true concept of the human being, of which people these days do not want to know anything.

One would like to say, Just look at those individuals who have celebrated modern history in this manner, such as Savigny,¹⁴ Lujo Brentano, Ranke¹⁵ and the other historians and ask what they are actually doing? What is woven into the tapestry of the active spirit of the times? Something is being produced that is supposed to be true. Why is it presented as truth? Because those individuals who speak of such a truth are in reality themselves spiritually impotent. They deny the spirit because they themselves do not possess it and cannot discover it. They dictate to the world: You must be thus and thus—for they lack the light they are supposed to shed over the world. The all-too-human, the whole all-too-narrow attitude is what is built up to the human element and presented as absolute truth to mankind. From 1876 on, this dwelled as a feeling in Nietzsche while he wrote his two volumes Human, All Too Human (Menschliches, Allzumenschliches); then Dawn Morgenroete, and finally, Joyful Science (Froehliche Wissenschaft), by means of which Nietzsche plunged as if intoxicated into nature so as to escape from what had actually surrounded him.

Nevertheless, a tragic feeling was present in him. Northern Germany, northern Europe in general and central Europe had had an effect on him; he absorbed all that and from Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner in particular he found his way to Voltairism; the text Menschliches, Allzumenschliches was dedicated to Voltaire.¹⁶ He attempted to revive Socratism by trying to breathe new life into it, but he did this by seeking the all-too-human truth, human narrowness, behind the lie of modern civilization. He tried to reach the spirit out of this human narrowness. He did not find it behind the accomplishments of men of more recent times. He believed he could find it through a kind of intoxicated plunge into nature. He endeavored to experience this intoxicated plunge into nature in his life by traveling south repeatedly during his vacations in order to forget, in the warm sun and under the blue sky, what men have produced in the modern age. This drunken plunge into nature underlies his Morgenroete and the Froehliche Wissenschaft as the basic feeling. He did not find joy through it; his sense of tragedy remained. It is especially pronounced when we see him express his sentiment in poetry and hear:¹⁷

Die Krähen schrei'n
und ziehen schwirren Flugs zur Stadt:
bald wird es schnei'n,—
wohl dem, der jetzt noch—Heimat hat!

(The ravens shriek
and fly with flutt'ring wings to town;
soon it will snow,—
how fortunate is he
who now still has—a home!

Nietzsche, too, had no home. “Fly, bird! Rasp your song in sounds of wasteland birds.” He had no home because this is the impression he had of himself, as if ravens were shrieking round him when he fled again and again from Germany to Italy. Soon, however, it became evident that he could not remain in this mood. There are verses by Nietzsche in which he remonstrates against anybody who takes this mood expressed in the lines, “The ravens shriek and fly with flutt'ring wings to town,” too seriously. He did not wish to be considered only as a tragic person; he also wanted to laugh about everything that had occurred in modern culture. As I said, just read the few lines that follow after the above poem in the most recent Nietzsche edition. So in the last third of the nineteenth century we have, in a sense, in Nietzsche a spirit predestined to abandon everything people in the modern age have produced, to flee everything the arts and the sciences have accomplished, in order to find something original, to discover new gods and smash the old

We might say that this individual was too deeply wounded by his age for these wounds to heal, much less for them to give rise to a productive new impulse. Thus, from these wounds sprang forth creations and ideas devoid of content. The Superman appeared, pervaded by sensuous, bleeding lyricism. In the last third of the nineteenth century, it was no longer possible for Nietzsche to penetrate to the true human being on the basis of natural science, which had extinguished man, or on the basis of sociology or the social structures of the last century, an age that possessed machines but no longer the human being, except as he stands in front of the machine. Nietzsche did, however, experience the urge to escape through negation, to flee what was no longer known and felt to be human. Instead of a comprehension of the human being out of the whole cosmos, instead of an “occult science,” there emerged the abstract, lyrical, sultry and overheated, pathological and convulsive Superman, appearing in visions before his soul in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra;¹⁸ visions that in part touch the deepest aspects of human nature but that basically always sound disharmonious in some way, expressing intentional disharmony.

Then, there is the other negation, or rather idea devoid of content. This life between birth and death cannot be understood if it is not at the same time seen as extending beyond the one earth life. Those who truly possess a feeling for grasping the one life between birth and death, who take hold of it with such a profound feeling and lyricism as did Friedrich Nietzsche, those sense in the end: This life cannot be comprehended as a single one, it must be viewed in its development through many lives. But as little as Nietzsche could bestow a content on the human being and therefore proceeded in a convulsive manner to his negation, the Superman, as little could he give substance to the idea of repeated earth lives. He hollowed these lives out; they turned into the desolate, eternal return of the same. Just think for a moment what can arise in our mind concerning repeated earth lives, which are linked to each other in karma through a mighty progression of destiny. Just picture how one life pours content into the following one; then imagine these earth lives as shadowy, empty husks, emptied of all content, and there you have the eternal return of the same, the caricature of the repeated earth lives.

Impossible to penetrate to the image of the Mystery of Golgotha by means of what the modern confessions represent—this is how what could have disclosed itself to him through Christianity appeared to Nietzsche! It was impossible to penetrate the religious conceptions that had come about since the fourth century and to arrive at an idea of what had occurred in Palestine at the beginning of the Christian era. Yet, Nietzsche was filled with a profound desire for truth. The all-too-human had come before his soul in a saddening form. He did not wish to participate in the lie of modern civilization; he was not fooled by an image of the Mystery of Golgotha such as the one presented with absolute mendacity to the world by the opponents of Christianity, by the likes of Adolf Harnack.¹⁹ Even in the lie, present as actual reality, Nietzsche still tried to discern the truth. This was the reason for his distortion of the Mystery of Golgotha in his Antichrist.²⁰ In the Antichrist, he depicted the image one has to present on the basis of the modern religious conceptions if, instead of lying, one wishes to speak the truth based on this form of thinking and yet, at the same time, is unable to penetrate what modern knowledge offers and to come to what in truth is present in the Mystery of Golgotha.

This is approximately Nietzsche's state of mind in the years 1886 and 1887. He had abandoned everything offered by modern cultural insights. He had passed on to the negation of man in the Superman, because he could not attain to the idea of man in modern knowledge, which has eradicated the human being from its field. From his feeling concerning the one earth life he had received an inkling of repeated earth lives, but modern thinking could not give him any content for them. Thus, he emptied out what he sensed; he no longer had any content; only the formal continuation of the eternally same, of the eternal repetition, stood before his soul. And in his mind, he beheld the travesty of the Mystery of Golgotha, as he described it in his Antichrist, for if he wished to cling to the truth, he could find no way leading from what modern theology offers to a conception of the Mystery of Golgotha

He had been able to study quite a bit concerning the Christian nature of modern theology in the writings of Overbeck,²¹ the theologian from Basle. The fact that this modern theology is not Christian is in the main proven in Overbeck's texts dealing with modern theology. All the unchristian elements pervading modern Christianity had lived deeply in Nietzsche's soul. The hopeless lack of vision in this modern knowledge had deprived him of a true overview of what is produced in the human being in one life for the next one. Thus arose in him the empty idea of the return of sameness. The Christian impulse had been taken from him by what calls itself the Christian spirit in the modern age, and he saw the untruthfulness of his age, and he could not even believe any longer in the truthfulness of art in which he had tried to believe at the beginning of his ascending career. He was already filled with this tragic mood when utterances burst forth from his soul, such as “And the poets lie too much ...”²² Out of their innermost human nature, poets and artists of the modern culture have indeed lied too much and lie too much to this day. For what the forces of the future need most and what modern civilization possesses least of all is the spirit of truth.

Nietzsche strove for this spirit of truth; which alone can present to the human being the true idea of himself. Through the development in repeated earth lives, it alone can bestow on this one earth life a meaning other than that of the senseless return of the same. Through a sense for truth, he thirsted for the true conception of the One Who tread the earth in Palestine. He found only a travesty of it in modern theology and present-day Christian demeanor. All this broke him. Therefore, the personality of Friedrich Nietzsche expresses the breakdown of the spirit striving for truth amid the falsehood that has arisen since the point of crisis in modern times, namely, since the middle of the nineteenth century. The rise of this untruthfulness is so powerful that people do not even have an idea of how deeply they are enmeshed in its nets. They do not even give a thought any more to how truthfulness should replace falsehood at every moment.

In no other way, however, than by realizing that our soul has to be imbued with this fundamental feeling that truth instead of falsehood must prevail, only through this profound feeling can anthroposophical spiritual science live. Modern civilization has been educated in the spirit of untruth, and it is against this spirit of falsehood—this can really be cited as an example—that anthroposophic spiritual science has to fight the most. And today, matters have reached the point, as I mentioned already at the conclusion of my last lecture,²³ where even in regard to our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science we find ourselves in a deep, intense crisis. What we need to do very much is to work, to be intensely active out of enthusiasm for truth. For the malaise our culture suffers from is exemplified in what is happening hourly and daily, the malaise that will cause its downfall if humanity does not take heart.

In the last issue of a weekly magazine,²⁴ which usually expresses widely prevailing public opinion, we read of agitation against Simons' political policies. It goes without saying that neither anthroposophic spiritual science nor the threefold social order have anything to do with Simons' politics. Anthroposophic spiritual science, however, is thrown together today with Simons' politics by a far-reaching spirit of falsehood. People know what is achieved by such means, and much will be achieved. Something of the whole rotten mendacity comes to expression when one reads a sentence that with quotation marks, appears in this magazine and is supposed to characterize Simons: “He is the favorite disciple of the theosophist Steiner, who has prophesied a great future for him. He stands firmly on the gospel of the threefold social order, but in the spirit of his home town of Wuppertal he is also a devout Christian.”

Well, there are as many lies here as there are words! I did not say there were as many lies as there were sentences, I said on purpose, There are as many words as there are brazen lies—with the exception of the last sentence—but the first sentences are lies word for word.

By adding this last sentence to the preceding ones, absolute paralysis is added to mendacity. Just imagine the creature that would come into being if somebody would become my favorite pupil, if I would predict a great future for him, if he would firmly cling to the “gospel of the threefold social order” and, on top of that, if he would be a pious Christian in the sense of the good citizens of Wuppertal! Imagine such a person! This, however, is present-day civilization. As insignificant as it may appear, it is a clear symptom of modern civilization. For those who frequently attack such things, attack with the same lies and the same paralysis. And the others are not even aware of the strange figures that are “conjured up before their stupid eyes”²⁵—forgive me but I am merely quoting something that is said by the gnomes in one of my mystery plays. They do not notice at all what is conjured up before their, let us say, “intelligent” eyes—intelligence in the sense of modern civilization. People actually swallow anything today, because the feeling for truth and veracity is lacking, and the enthusiasm is missing from the assertion of truth and truthfulness in the midst of an untruthful, lying culture.

Things cannot progress as long as these matters are not taken seriously. A different picture must be placed before the soul today. These days, it becomes quite clear that Europe is intent on digging the grave of its own civilization, that it wishes to call on something outside of Europe so that, above the closed grave of the old civilization as well as above the already closed grave of Goetheanism, something completely different can arise. We shall see whether anything can still come out of that culture for which the politicians are now digging the grave. We shall see whether something can emerge from it that will truly receive the forces of progress; that will discover the human being, find the only true impulse of the idea of eternity in repeated earth lives, and discover the true Mystery of Golgotha and Christianity as the right impulse in the face of all that appears in this area as untruth and falsehood.

• 1 . This refers to a petition by the German government, sent to the President of the United States, “to assume the mediation in regard to the question of reparations and to determine the sum which Germany is supposed to pay to the allied powers.” At the same time, it included "the urgent request to bring about agreement among the Allies for such a mediation. The undersigned solemnly declare that the German government is ready and willing without restriction or reservations to pay the allied powers that amount of reparation deemed fitting and suitable by the President of the United States after a thorough investigation. (News report of the Wolf Agency on April 22, 1921. Evening edition of Nationalzeitung Basel, April 22, 1921.)
• 2 . See lecture of April 2 in this volume (Lecture I)
• 3 . Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844–1900. See Rudolf Steiner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom (RSE 473); Rudolf Steiner Publications, New Jersey, 1960.
• 4 . Aeschylus, 525–456 B.C.; Sophocles, 496–406 B.C. The first famous poets of tragedy in the flowering of Greek culture.
• 5 . Socrates, 470–399 B.C., Greek philosopher, teacher of Plato and the main discussion-partner in the latter's dialogues.
• 6 . Richard Wagner, 1813–1883, German opera composer. Composed Ring of the Nibelungs.
• 7 . Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, 1848–1931, professor of classic philology, at the end in Berlin. Author of Zukunftsphilologie. Eine Erwiderung auf Friedrich Nietzsches “Geburt der Tragoedie” (“Philology of the Future. A Rebuttal of Friedrich Nietzsche's ‘Birth of Tragedy’ ”), Berlin, 1872.
• 8 . Unzeitgemaesse Betrachtungen by Friedrich Nietzsche, written between 1873 and 1876. They contain: 1. David Strauss, der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller (“David Strauss, Confessor and Writer”); 2. Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fuer das Leben (“The Use and Abuse of History for Life”); 3. Schopenhauer als Erzieher (“Schopenhauer as Educator”); 4. Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. Friedrich Nietzsche, Works in 3 Volumes, published by Karl Schlechta. Munich 1954–56, vol. 1, p. 135–434.
• 9 . David Friedrich Strauss, 1818–1874, theologian and author. Der alte und der neue Glaube. Ein Bekenntnis (“The Old and the New Faith. A Confession”), Leipzig 1872.
• 10. Karl von Rotteck, 1775–1840. Allgemeine Geschichte (“General History”), 6 volumes, 1813–1818.
• 11. Lujo Brentano, 1844–1931, political economist.
• 12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, texts and outlines, 1872–1876; Complete works, vol. X, published by C. G. Naumann, Leipzig, 1896, p. 395–425.
• 13. Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788–1860, German philosopher.
• 14. Friedrich von Savigny, 1779–1861, historian of law.
• 15. Leopold von Ranke, 1795–1886, historian.
• 16. Francois de Voltaire (actually d'Arouet), 1694–1778, French philosopher of the Enlightenment.
• 17. Nietzsche's Works vol. VIII, published by C. G. Naumann, Leipzig 1896, p. 355–56. The Poem, “Vereinsamt” (“Desolate”) is followed by the poem, “Antwort” (“Reply”), to which reference is made here. It goes:
  
  Dass Gott erbarm'!
  Der meint, ich sehnte mich zurueck
  Ins deutsche Warm,
  Ins dumpfe deutsche Stubenglueck!
  
  Mein Freund, was hier
  Mich hemmt und haelt, ist dein Verstand
  Mitleid mit dir!
  Mitleid mit deutschem Quer-Verstand!
  
  (May God have pity!
  He thinks I long to return
  To German warmth,
  Into dull German happiness of mundane homes!
  
  My friend, what hampers, holds me here
  Is your reason,
  Pity for you!
  Pity for German perverse reason!)
• 18. See Friedrich Nietzsche: Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), 1882; Edition: Schlechta vol. II, p. 177–562.
• 19. Adolf von Harnack, 1851–1930, Protestant theologian. Das Wesen des Christentums (“The Nature of Christianity”). Sixteen Lectures at the University of Berlin, Leipzig, 1910.
• 20. Der Antichrist. Fluch auf das Christentum (“The Antichrist. Curse on Christianity”), 1888 Edition: Schlechta vol. II, p. 1161–1236.
• 21. Franz Overbeck, 1837–1905. Veber die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie (“Concerning the Christian Nature of Modern Theology”), 1873.
• 22. See in Also sprach Zarathustra, part II. Edition: Schlechta vol. II, p. 382.
• 23. See lecture of April 17,1921 in this volume (Lecture VI).
• 24. The name of this magazine could not be determined.
• 25. See Rudolf Steiner's Mystery Drama, The Soul's Awakening, in Four Mystery Plays, Steiner Book Centre, Toronto, 1973.

So far a number of different approaches have been used to consider the effective forces in human evolution which we must know about if we want to arrive at a proper understanding of current events. We must above all understand where the root causes lie that have led to the disastrous situation we are facing today. Only then can we find the right way of taking effective action ourselves, and work for the real progress of humankind. Unfortunately far too little attention is paid to the changes which those forces effective in human evolution have undergone in very recent times, compared to times that relatively speaking were not that long ago.

Perhaps I may again be permitted to take the great disaster that has happened in recent years as my starting point. This will lead us to the event I referred to in just a few words at the end of my last talk, to the specific Christ event that belongs to the first half of the 20th century, as I have mentioned a number of times.

Taking a genuinely unbiased view of the disastrous events and of their consequences that continue into the present and will still make themselves felt for a long time, we cannot fail to notice how much the whole fabric of the destiny of civilized humanity differs from earlier times. Let me point out immediately that large numbers of people, including those in authority, have not yet become fully aware of what has come upon us. They have been, and still are, acting in accord with the demands of earlier times and their actions are not at all in accord with the needs of the present age.

Again let me give an example, just by way of introduction as it were. We have a—well, they call it a ‘war’ behind us; a much greater war than any we know of in historical times. We have seen that at the time when the war started, something like a spectre from prehistoric times lived in the thoughts that were in people's minds, and that this spectre is still there in the minds of people today. We have seen that this spectre of ideas which has continued into the present from prehistoric times has given rise to opinions, all kinds of measures were taken, and people had no idea that really and fundamentallY something quite different was going on to what they imagined the events of the time to be.

Like earlier wars, the last one was a conflict between human beings; human beings were fighting each other. Unlike earlier wars, however, this war involved energies and forces coming from quite different sources than the form of energies used in earlier wars—energies deriving from the particular nature of human beings. We have seen a tremendous development of technology in recent times and the coming of this powerful technology has changed the whole situation, where the destiny fabric of human beings is concerned. This change determined the course of events in recent years. Yet there has been no corresponding change in people's ideas.

Let me present the major aspects of this. During the period preceding this disastrous war the human technology which had evolved in most recent times had reached a significant stage. Although people had no real awareness of this, human work—labour—had taken on quite a different form to what had gone before. You can get an idea of the different forms it took if you consider one of the fundamental aspects of modern technology, let us say coal-mining, in different countries in the civilized world. The amount of coal produced in the mines relates to the amount of energy gained by processing it; energies merely channelled and controlled by human beings that will then work more or less independently. I would say, therefore, that in recent times human work has come to consist more in stepping back and directing the actual work done by machines.

Considering the facts one will find, for instance, that during the period preceding the outbreak of war, 79 million 'horse power years' of that kind of energy were produced in Germany. These were energies controlled by humans, but in fact derived from coal-mining. They did not arise from something that human beings let spontaneously come forth from within them, but from completely external actions and processes. The energies expended in work are measured in units based on the work a horse does in a year. During the time immediately preceding the outbreak of war, Germany was producing '79 million horse power years of coal-derived energy per year.

What does this really mean? A very superficial comparison with the population figure for Germany shows that on average every single individual in Germany had a horse by his side. This means that the inhabitants of Germany did so much work in the field of technology that is was equivalent to every individual having a horse work for him all year long. The population figure was approximately 79 million, and the energy used was 79 million horse power years. The work done by machines, all kinds of machines, therefore had the same effect as if every individual had a horse to work for him. When war broke out, the potential was there for that much work to be done. A large proportion of this work was then used for the purposes of war, with the result that the purely technological effect of 79 million horse power Years was brought into action at the front.

Now let us take some other figures. For a start I will just add the fact that in 1870, a year when another great event⁶⁸ took place the way people see it—and rightly so, as people see it—no 79 million horse Power years were produced. Energy production was then six whole millions and seven-tenths of a million, a very low figure compared to human energy output. Six and a half million in 1870, 79 million in 1912. Clearly this means a complete change in the human situation.

Let me give you some more figures. During the time preceding the disastrous war, France, Russia and Belgium together had 35 million horse power years available. Great Britain on the other hand had 98 million. Due to the geographical position of Great Britain those 98 million horse power years could not immediately be fully brought to bear in the war zone; it took some years until this was achieved. When war broke out, therefore, not only were human beings opposing each other, but 79 million horse power years had been pushed into the front lines by the Germans, or a total of more than 90 million by the Central Powers [Germany and Austria]. A large part of those energies were of course used in the war industries and therefore reached the front lines indirectly. Those energies were opposed by Great Britain's 98 million horse power years that could only be brought to bear gradually, and a to of 35 million available in Belguim, Russia and France. You can see now that it would be quite correct to say that, basically, the contribution made by human beings only gave a preliminary result in the initial stages. The army's general staff could order the troops to march; that could be planned and projected by trained minds. But when the front lines had been established for some years, the actual confrontation was between the horse power Years that technology had produced—and these were quite independent of human beings. Thus the relative size of something that had really been taken out of the sphere of human activity determined the fate of this [part of] human evolution. If you now take the following and add it to what has been already said you will see that forces independent of humanity, particularly the most recent achievements of technology, have been responsible for the events that occurred.

The efforts of human beings were of course limited to a channelling function, or at best to stopping some things from happening. But their directions, or else their failure to stop things from happening' caused forces to enter the field of battle that objectively speaking were not under their control. Some of these were able to overcome the others, as it were, on the basis of objective laws that had nothing to do with human beings. Add to this the fact that the United States intervened in the process. At the time when the other countries were able to field the number of horse power years I have mentioned, the Americans were in a position to mobilize 179 million horse power years. This gives you the relative figures for energies mobilized through technology; energies completely independent of anything human beings are capable of producing. Indirectly they are of course connected with ideas thought up by human individuals and so on. The things people have thought up have however been channelled in this direction, and in the war the situation then was that objective force met objective force and in the final instance this had to decide the issue. In very recent times human beings directed their destinies to such effect that when something occurred that in the past would have taken quite a different course, human actions had caused the forces of destiny to be surrendered to the powers that were active in the objects they themselves had produced. Humans are dependent on the earth's productivity where these forces are concerned. They are dependent on many factors that do not lie within their own skins.

This reveals one of the characteristic features of the present age. I have merely given the most striking example of it. Examples like this can be used to illustrate a point. Yet the things that happened there on a gigantic scale—we cannot merely say on a large scale, because it was gigantic—happen on a smaller scale in every day of the life we are given, for we have been delivered up to the products of technology. In 1912 a point had been reached in Germany where fertile human brains had created something outside themselves that did the same amount of work for every individual as a horse would have done. That is the characteristic feature of modern civilization, and we must take a good look at it.

What is alive in those forces with their own objective activity that human beings have created outside themselves in modern civilization; forces that work for them day by day and determine their destinies? Looking at these forces and the way they influence human destiny we perceive the power that we have come to call the power of Ahriman. Ahrimanic powers are alive in these things. Looking at it like this, you will have to admit that the power of these ahrimainc forces has increased at a tremendous rate. Just consider those two figures I have given: in 1870, six and a half million horse power years were available in Germany; that is not very much per human being. In 1912, 79 million horse power years were produced in Germany. That is the sum total of these things influencing not only economic life but the rest of our life as well. So you see what goes on in a world constructed by human beings, that is quite independent of what really lies in human nature. These forces are completely at odds with everything that came into effect when people faced each other as human beings, in the battles fought in the ancient Orient, for instance. Only luciferic forces were involved in those, and this still held true when the Tartar hordes invaded Europe, for example. We often do not realize how different the world has become for modern humanity and how quickly this has come about, relatively speaking.

Spiritual science working towards Anthroposophy is, moreover, called upon to consider the full implications of such a fact. So far I have merely described the outer aspect. We begin to see the inner aspect when we consider the powers which are active in this. In the past they were luciferic powers and now they are ahrimanic. Human beings find themselves in the middle between the two. First of all, however, we must get a definite idea as to what we mean by ‘ahrimanic’ and ‘luciferic’.

Consider what went on in human soul life in those past times when the great struggles in which human beings were involved were largelY determined by luciferic elements. At that time people looked at the phenomena in the world and, as you know, they looked at them in such a way that they perceived a certain number of elemental beings—let us say demonic spirits. Materialistic scientists call this the ‘age of vitalism’, saying that people introduced all kinds of water sprites, gnomes and so on into the phenomenal world. We know that spirits are indeed active in the phenomena of nature. Today, people see only dry-as-dust, prosaic natural phenomena. In the past, people perceived the spiritual entities, the essential spirit of natural phenomena. This is called superstition, nowadays. That is the view taken by the present age. We know, however, that the people of the past used those names to describe something real, which their minds perceived when they looked at the phenomena of nature. They saw elemental in everything nature presented to them. Thus we may say that however instinctive, dim and dreamlike their conscious awareness may have been, some illumination was received as to the nature of those elemental spirits. spirits

During the times that followed, perception of the spiritual essence of natural phenomena no longer came clearly to awareness when people looked at the natural world around them, that did not depend on them for its existence. The modern intellectual approach that we call a scientific attitude came into being. This only concerns itself with forces that can be abstracted from nature and made comprehensible through abstract ideas, in short, the things that may form the content of the human intellect.

I would say, however, that without people being aware of it a completely new world developed in a relatively short time—just take the time from 1870, when six and seven-tenths million horse power years were used in Germany, to 1912, when 79 million were used. This is a world that did not exist before. These forces are present in the human environment, and in major events like those we have seen in recent years. Human destiny actually depended on them, just as formerly it had depended on natural phenomena. These forces and energies also exist and take effect independent of human beings, just as the forces of nature are independent of human beings. Demons elemental powers—are active in them, but their effects on human beings differ from those of the elemental powers that human beings Perceived in the phenomena of nature in the past. Then, people would look at the phenomena of nature and say: ‘Elemental spirits are at Work in there.’ That had an effect on their conscious awareness; the soul came to an understanding with the phenomena Of nature, and the conscious mind could relate to those phenomena. Today's enlightened' minds consider it superstitious to look for spiritual Powers in natural phenomena. They have not the least idea that demonic spirits are active in the whole world of technology created by the human race. Nor will they find it easy to see this, because those powers are acting on the will—and I have often told you that the will is alseep. They work at an unconscious level, taking hold of the unconscious human mind. The consequence is as follows. In the past human beings had at least some awareness of demonic powers. Today demonic powers are restively stirring in all products of technology;⁶⁹ their activities extend into the sphere of the human will, but human beings are not yet inclined to accept this. In the first place these things are at an unconscious level and in the second place people feel it would be superstitious to say that demonic spirits are active in the machines they have produced. They are active nevertheless. The spirits perceived in the phenomena of nature in older times were luciferic by nature; the spirits active in machines, in all products of technology, are ahrimanic by nature. Human beings are thus surrounding themselves with an ahrimanic world that is growing completely independent of them.

You will perceive the trend in human evolution. From a luciferic world that still influences their conscious minds and there determines their destinies, human beings are drifting into an ahrimanic world. And at present this is happening at quite a fast pace. This ahrimanic world acts on the human will, and the intellectualism of modern science does not enable people to gain immediate conscious awareness of the will. The great danger is that the ahrimanic world will take hold of the human will and human beings will completely lose their bearings among the demonic powers that are present in the products of technology.

In Eastern Europe present-day thinking has led to a desire to militarize the economy and make it into a vast machine. Even human beings are trained to be like machines, with human labour made into something quite separate from the human being. Behind it lies the will to call forth will demons, for it is their sphere into which people are sliding in Eastern Europe.

The road from the luciferic to the ahrimanic sphere—yes, it has to be said that the course of human evolution is going in that direction. Fundamentally speaking we are right in the middle of leaving the luciferic and sliding into the ahrimanic sphere. Luciferic elements are of course still present in many ways. The ahrimanic element is taking hold of people. The luciferic is more alive in feelings. The ahrimanic takes effect through the human intellect and comes to realization as it takes form in the products of technology.

And now the Christ event, which we may expect during the first half of the 20th century, enters into the situation to give human beings their bearings. The nature of this Christ event will be such that more people will be having objective experiences and will then know that the etheric Christ is walking on earth, the Christ who will represent the power that once walked on earth in the physical form of Christ Jesus, but now at the etheric level. If people come to know this Christ power, if they let it enter into them, they will find the right way of dealing with the forces influencing them that come from the ahrimanic powers which are now in the ascendant. The great problem of our time is that people slide into the ahrimanic sphere without having the support of the Christ force.

We are speaking of something very concrete and positive when we refer to this event that is entering into human evolution in the 20th century. In my first mystery [play] I referred to this as the reappearance of the Christ. I would also say that it is possible to perceive what will happen in human souls when they meet this Christ event in a living way.

The other day I was able to indicate in a public lecture⁷⁰ that the scientific thinking of the West, which is totally lacking in cohesive vision, reaches its limits when it comes to perceiving the nature of the human being. Science mostly grasps the non-living world. This is categorized and so on. Theories are developed concerning both the non-living and the living world. Darwinism does not go beyond the evolution of animals, however. The human being is then placed at the top of the tree, but this theory really does not include the human being. It is unable to perceive the nature of the human being.

The same applies to the comprehension of social concepts. I have shown that people really 'run on rails' when working in this field; their approach is ahrimanic, technical, and they do not go beyond this. They have got it all down in their books, where credits and liabilities are recorded. They fail, however, to consider the people involved. Those people want their dignity as human beings to be recognized, but no bridges are built between management and workers. Practical life fails to take account of the nature of the human being.

On one side all this is still more or less theoretical today—though perhaps we should not call it theory but rather the impotence of theory, of perception. On the other side we have something that is much to the fore in the social sphere today. The things that are not written down in the books are today making themselves felt in strikes and revolutionary movements. They show themselves in life and they arise out of the work done in industry, in commerce and so on, just as much as all kinds of goods result from industrial production. It is merely that this element, which is now causing unrest among the people, had not been included in the textbooks. It is therefore making itself felt in real life.

I believe it is true to say that very few people really think about these things—which I also discussed at that recent public lecture. The 19th century has really been clouding the issue where these matters are concerned. During the 18th century some people, certainly the more radical thinkers, did begin to get an idea as to what was coming. The 19th century brought events which caused grand-scale confusion. Pierre Bayle⁷¹ made a very peculiar statement in the 18th century. He was one of the 18th-century materialists who were the forerunners of 19th-century materialism. His statement went as follows: ‘States will know honour and dishonour, ambition, egotism and so forth, but there cannot be a state in which Christian attitudes play an effective role; it is possible to have a state system in which the old heathen virtues and vices play a role, but there can be no such a thing as a Christian state.’ Those were the words of Pierre Bayle, a radical materialist, and there was more truth to his words than to those of the 19th-century idealists. Those idealistic thinkers pretended to themselves that states were Christian. The truth is that they were not. Consider the Christian beliefs of the Middle Ages, for those were foremost in Pierre Bayle's mind. Those beliefs were based on a denial of this earth. It was considered a virtue to rise to a life that was not of this world. The life that developed during the 18th century was largely concerned with earthly matters. ‘There can be no such thing as a Christian state’, Pierre Bayle said, and that in fact was the truth. People were lying when, in the 19th and early 20th century, they pretended to themselves and others that the modern states which had gradually evolved had the Christ spirit in them. They cannot be Christian. Something else emerged from this, however. Whether they stood in the pulpit, or heard the words that were spoken from the people felt utterly convinced that they were true Christians. In the same way people going to their work in government offices, putting on their medals or using the titles conferred on them by the state, imagined themselves to be Christian. They were not in fact Christians, for they held those very positions on account of the fact that they were not Christians. People got into the habit of living a lie; they got out of the habit of seeing the truth when it came to major aspects of life. The result was a nebulous atmosphere where it was not even possible to develop an unbiased view of the progressive ahrimanization of the world.

There has been a lot of talk about the campaign of lies we have had in recent years. Yet in all most important respects people have actually got used to such campaigns of lies. What reason is there to tell the truth now about the lies that were told during that disastrous war? After all, during the 19th century people got into a habit where their souls no longer wanted to know the truth, when it came to the things that are most important in their lives.

It is uncomfortable to face up to these things, and the problem is that people are not facing up to them. Apart from anything else, therefore, modern people are in the difficult position that has arisen because of their inner untruthfulness. This atmosphere will cause a particular mood to develop. Until now it has been mere theory in many respects, merely something we know, that human beings can no longer get through to each other; that the nature of the human being cannot be understood and that this failure to get through to others is also having an effect in the social sphere. All this will become deposited on the human soul. The influence of the external products of technology on the will is going to make the unconscious react with the conscious sphere. There will be no conscious awareness of this, of course, for the whole is at a subconscious level, but a mood will be created. This mood will emerge more and more over the next few decades, or rather years, taking hold of large numbers of people. You will be teaching children in your school and you will note that these children come up with feelings that their elders never had. Something like this has also existed in earlier ages, but it will happen to a much greater degree in the near future. Profound spiritual insight into the present age will be able to judge what is evolving from the depths of the souls of these young people. A great longing is going to come, a kind of longing for something that is lacking. Initially, theories could not be developed that embraced the true nature of the human being, and in the social sphere it proved impossible to include human gifts and talents in business ledgers. All this will condense into feelings and emotions. There will be people—we shall find them among the young in the next generations—who will feel like this: ‘Well, here I am. My form is different from that of other life forms around me. I do not look like an animal, an ox, a donkey, a weasel or an eagle. I look different, but I do not know what it is that looks different. I do not know what a human being is; I do not know what I am.’ Despondency and neurosis will invade the souls of the coming generation. This will be the mood of the age that teachers perceive when they give their lessons. It will be a mood that spreads far and wide. People are so superficial nowadays that is is difficult to talk to them about these things. To show what I mean let me remind you that during the 18th century people who had some perception of the soul of that age were speaking of a ‘Werther fever’. Goethe wrote his Werther⁷²out of the whole mood of that age. Then another novel called Siegwart⁷³ appeared. This had been written out of the Siegwart fever' of the second half of the 18th century. Those were the moods of the times, but they only affected a limited number of people. A mood will however arise in the souls of vast numbers of people that may be brought to expression as follows: ‘Well, what am I as a human being? What kind of life form am I as I walk around on two legs? I have a science that I have taken to great heights; have a life in the social sphere—yet both of them do not touch on the reality of what I am.' This mood will be the great question mark of the age, a question mark as to one's own nature as a human being’ It will prepare the eye of the soul so that it may perceive something that is difficult to describe but will nevertheless come to be the new Christ event. Out of that longing, the power will arise to see the Christ made evident. Outer want will become an inner want for the soul, and out of this inner want is to be born the vision of the Christ who will be walking unseen among human beings, and they will need to hold on to him to stop them from sliding from the luciferic into the ahrimanic sphere, in a way that is quite unthinkable.

What good is the whole of science to us if it cannot help us get a really concrete grasp of human life in its immediacy? It has to be clearly understood that human beings as they are today already have a whole number of earth lives behind them. We live through repeated earth lives. In earlier earth lives we ourselves have seen elemental powers at work in the phenomena of nature. We have brought the fruits of those earlier earth lives into our present life. Then, we knew that nature spirits around us determined our destines, and that we had those spirits within us. Today we consider nature entirely with the intellect, with the head, and the products of technology we ourselves have produced are considered in the same way. All we see are the contents of our intellect. But out of the many earth lives we have lived through—though we refuse to consider them nowadays—something is restlessly astir in us that I have called a great longing, a longing for something that is lacking. We have been human beings who looked at nature and saw the spirit; this enabled us to develop an inner feeling for the true nature of human beings. Now we have a science and a social awareness that do not get as far as the human being. Our past vision of the world around us has given us the potential capacity to feel ourselves to be human beings. Today we look into a nature empty of human beings, we do not penetrate as far as the human being. This will create a great need in the souls of people in the decades to come. This need in the souls of people is a positive power, and out of this positive power will be born the ability to see the Christ.

The old way of approaching the Christ has been destroyed by the theology of most recent times. Our modern theology has made the Christ into the ‘simple man of Nazareth’. Surely it will be impossible for human beings to relate to the Christ event today unless there is a renewal of life in the spirit.

The Catholic Church knew very well why it did not want the masses to have direct access to the Gospels. In theory, catholics are still not permitted to read the Gospels. The Albigenses, Waldenses and others who would not accept this were, of course, declared heretics because the church was only too well aware what would happen if the Gospels became accessible to the masses. In the first place there are four Gospels. The divine spirit reveals itself to humankind in those four forms. You cannot, however, use the intellect to present an event in four different ways the way it has been done in the Gospels, for then contradictions, will arise. The moment you deny the Gospels their reality, considering them to be the products of the human intellect, they inevitably become contradictory, full of contradictions. What has emerged, therefore, is the total destruction of any way in which the Mystery of Golgotha may be perceived.

Again people live with the lie that they are supposed to be Christians, and yet the source has been blocked and brought to nought because modern theology no longer has anything in it that is Christian. To regain Christianity we must acquire a new spiritual vision. Access has to be again gained to the treasure we have gathered in our souls, a treasure we have carried with us through many earth lives.

Our present life, the life we now find ourselves in, is also the starting point for future earth lives. The abstract thinking we use for mathematics, and the various moods of which the soul has concrete experience, are the inheritance of earlier earth lives. Everything we take in of the outside world in this earth life will provide the germ for faculties we shall have in future earth lives. In the past, people came to see elemental spirits active in the world of nature outside. When we were on earth before we looked at nature and gained an Impression of elemental spirits; this is now part of us. Today life is largely determined by what the ‘horse’ beside us is producing, by technical things. This enters into us. Unless we do something about it this will form the basis for future earth lives in us. New demons, the ahrimanic demons, are active in it. What a way of preparing oneself for future earth lives—to allow ahrimanic powers to take over! Machines create something in us that will be the economic life in future earth lives. The roar of cannon fire at the front is something we make part of ourselves, for it is something that was alive in those machines. And so it really is our intention to be quite unconscious when we rise again in our next earth life. But human beings are more than just intellect; they also have feelings and sensibilities. These have to cope with everything entering the soul from the products of technology, from machines.

There arises yet another feeling, one I have not yet described. I was speaking of the longing for something that is lacking. At the unconscious level the soul creates something out of the products of technology, out of the ahrimanic powers, and this acts into higher levels, entering our awareness in form of thoughts and ideas. Yet it arises in a form similar to fear. You will find that children you teach at school in the years and decades ahead will show this longing for something that is lacking, and also an indefinite but nevertheless tangible fear of life. This will show itself as a form of nervousness, in a nervy, fidgety character—you will find this very obvious. The first signs of it are already to be seen today.

The only way to counteract this is to fill your soul with the one thing that will give strength, a strength the earth itself cannot provide. This is the strength that has come to the earth from outside through the essential Christ who is about to appear again. It is a power we cannot gain from the earth. The earth provides technical power, the 79 million horses by our side. We must develop in our souls the strength that comes from the Christ. Otherwise we shall be filled with nothing but the power provided by the products of technology in our next life. The only cure for the nervousness that must show itself in the growing generation is to prepare ourselves for the Christ event that is to come in the first half of the 20th century.

Our age should not be described by the way it presents itself on the outside. We ought to base our description on the feelings that are paramount in human souls. It would be magnificent and important to say of our age that human beings developed an eye for what is alive in human beings. As a rule only external aspects are described. People like Paquet,⁷⁴ for example—a writer who has been travelling in Eastern Europe—are in no position to give a true picture of what goes on in the hearts and minds of people who are already experiencing a great deal of the future; all such writers can do is describe things from the outside.

If spiritual science is to come alive in us it must be able to provide us with insight into the sphere of feelings and sensibilities. You do not know what life really is if you use abstract terms to speak of the Christ event that is to come; you only know what life really is if you speak of human souls moving ahead to meet this Christ event, partly with longing in their heart and partly with fear.

Surely it must be impossible for people, as they are today, to grasp such things as the way the fate of that disastrous war was sealed by ahrimanic forces quite independent of anything human beings were able to do? It was entirely determined by elements thought up in human brains that then became objective forces. It is impossible for modern people to get the right picture and assess the real effects of these things—unless they take account of spiritual science. Just think what it means that there were 79 million horse power years produced in Germany, 98 million in Great Britain, 35 million in Belgium, France and Russia, and finally the 179 million produced in the United States were added to this! We are speaking of something that takes no account of human nature, and those are the factors that truly determine human destiny today. Human beings have totally given themselves over to something that is no longer human. The statement that human insight does not go as far as the human being, now appears in a new light. Human beings remain limited to the non-human realm, even in the social sphere they will be limited to non-human aspects, unless they find the bridge that leads to the nature of the human being. That is how they fulfil their destiny today. They make their destiny partly dependent on elements that are no longer human; they produce elements which will partly determine human destiny, and yet human beings themselves will no longer be able to influence these elements. We ought no longer to be speaking of courage, of the brilliance of the general staff and the like when we want to speak of the way destinies are determined, but of the ratio of horse power years produced in different countries. Human destiny has to be discussed without reference to human beings. People will need tremendous strength to rise and face this human destiny which is determined by non-human elements and to call out: ‘The destiny of the human race must be determined by human beings again!’ That can only happen' of course, if people let the power of Christ enter into them. This power of Christ is approaching and it will restore them to their human powers. We can only become sure of ourselves as human beings if we walk the road created by the whole of technology, but do not let our lives be governed by the products of technology, and grow able to behold the Christ power that can become part of us and overcome all those products of technology.

These are the lessons to be learned today. These are the words that tell us how we can prepare ourselves for the Christ event. All the mediocre stuff that makes up the bulk of modern literature, all the empty talk one hears nowadays, will not help humanity to progress; it will only mean regression. Progress can solely and only be achieved with the things we gain by going down to the spiritual bedrock. And we will make no progress at all unless we become fully aware again of the seriousness of these things. It is necessary for us to understand that humanity has created a completely new world around itself today; human beings themselves have developed the energies and forces that now determine their destinies. This certainly does not merely mean the events of war. Step outside and you will see the factories that determine our destiny, and the same principle is to be found in ordinaly life; it is not limited to the destinies of 1914. Ahrimanic forces are producing those smoking chimneys. The human being no longer counts there.

Walking on past the factory we come to the church. The church still has it traditional message but this has grown abstract. It no longer has relevance in ordinary life. The church concerns itself with things that have no application in practical life. All this is luciferic, just as the things that go on in factories are ahrimanic.

The dreadful thing connected with the destiny of modern humankind is that in the places where people speak of the things of the spirit all ability has been lost to relate to real life. In a public lecture I recently gave⁷⁵ I spoke of American preachers coming to Switzerland and other neutral countries and saying something like this: ‘The League of Nations must be created, for it will be a great blessing for humankind; but it cannot develop from the ideas of statesmen. It will be necessary to win people's hearts instead, so that they will believe in the League of Nations.’ Anyone with an unprejudiced mind will realize that these gentlemen make very fine speeches; yet if that is enough to please us, and we find it sufficient to praise the beauty of those speeches, we fail to understand the signs of the times. Those may be honeyed words, but their sweetness does not penetrate to the hearts of the people. Those hearts are full of worry about the economic situation, and no bridge exists to words that take their origin in old religious persuasions. You cannot use them to create a League of Nations, nor can you do so with the words uttered by Woodrow Wilson, Clemenceau⁷⁶ and others. What matters today is that the two must be brought together, life must be imbued with spirit, and life must be taken forward to connect with the spirit. The Christ spirit from outside the earth entered into the flesh in Jesus, a human being, uniting itself with the physical world. The Christ who will be coming during the first half of the 20th century will not use the language of abstract religious confessions—oh no! He will use the language of everyday life. People who are all the time merely looking to unearthly mystical heights for moral uplift will not understand this language. The Christ will however be speaking of the spirit even when He is speaking about everyday life. The spirit will unite with everyday life in the same way as the Christ spirit came from spheres beyond this world, beyond the world of the senses, and united with the physical human being Jesus. Such is the new understanding we must gain for the Christ event; otherwise we shall not be able to appreciate its true value when it comes upon humankind.

A question we may ask even now is the following: ‘What will be the attitude of the people who are preaching official Christianity to the Christ event when it occurs during the first half of the 20th century?’ If we understand the Gospels rightly, they actually provide an example for us. The Gospels speak of ‘scribes and Pharisees’. Our judgement would be wrong if we were to place Adolf Harnack⁷⁷ among those who testify for the Christ; we only judge him rightly if we follow the example of the Gospels and place him among the scribes and Pharisees. And there are others of the same kind who must also be counted among them. It is essential to judge these things in the right way. We must get to the truth! The materialist Pierre Bayle said that a state could not be Christian, that states might know honour and dishonour, ambition and egotism, but that a Christian state was an impossibility. A social community in the name of Christ will however be possible, providing we do not insist on a political state but rather establish an independent life of the spirit. That can be Christian through and through. And this independent life of the spirit will be able to illumine the sphere of life where we have government and states, a sphere that simply cannot be Christian. The result will be that an economic life based on associations can develop; though this, too, cannot be Christian in itself. The people who are involved in it will be Christian, however. They will be filled with the Christ impulse. What we must do is to let people enter into an independent life of the spirit. Then it will be possible to make the whole of social life Christian.

First of all we must have truth, however. We shall not prosper with lies. These are the things we must come to accept today, inscribing them deeply in our hearts. If we fail to do so we will be siding with the people who follow Spengler and believe that we have to become barbarians. Yet it also will not help if we make the facile statement that Spengler is wrong. We would simply be lying to ourselves. We will only base ourselves on the truth if we say: 'The power has to be produced that will get us forward. This, however, can only be produced out of the living spirit, out of the spirit which spiritual science working towards Anthroposophy is seeking. Spiritual science has something that must enter into the impulses of the present age if we are to have a life of the spirit that is Christian again, a political life that once again is human and does not fail to encompass the human being, and an economic life that is controlled by human beings and not by horse power years. Those horse power years that human beings have at their side are an expression of the principle which governs destiny through the products of technology, through something that is outside human beings—something inhuman.

The events of recent years cannot be read as being due to human feelings and emotions. We must read the writing of the horse power years produced by technology, the terrible signs Ahriman is beginning to write into the evolution of humankind. A new understanding of the Christ must be found so that humanity may be led out of this situation.

• 68. TN. The Franco-Prussian War 1870–71.
• 69. TN. Throughout this lecture Rudolf Steiner used an invented word, Technizismen (technicisms) for ‘products of technology’.
• 70. Stuttgart 10 November 1920, ‘Die Geisteskrisis der Gegenwart und die Krafte zum Menschheitsforschritt’ (The spiritual and cultural crisis of the present time and the forces that mean progress for humanity). To be published in GA 335.
• 71. Bayle, Pierre, French philosopher. Statement has not been traced to date.
• 72. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The sorrows of Werther) 1775. Weimarer Ausgabe, 19. Bd.
• 73. Miller, Johann Martin. Siegwart, novel published in 1776 (2 y ears after Werther), very popular for a time.
• 74. Paquet, Alfons, writer. Im korrunzinistischen Ruffland In communist Russia, appeared in 1919.
• 75. See also public lecture referred to in note 69.
• 76. Clemenceau, Georges. French physician and politician.
• 77. Harnack, Adolf von. German theologian.

If you travel from here to Basel, take the electric train to Aeschenplatz and then the route to Dornach, you will find there on the neighboring hill a building that is not yet completed but already shows the intentions associated with it, even in its exterior. This building, which is called a free university for spiritual science, is intended to represent externally represent that which is striven for by this spiritual movement, which calls itself: an anthroposophically oriented spiritual-scientific movement.

Now that the building has visibly manifested the existence of such a movement, one can already hear and read many things about the foundations of this spiritual cultural movement. Of course, there are still exceptions to be found, but in general, there are accurate descriptions of these endeavors. On the whole, however, it may still be said today that what is said or written about it in public is quite the opposite of what this movement is really striving for. It is very often described as an unscientific, obscure, and, in the worst sense, mystical movement. It is very often described as if it wanted to oppose this or that, societies, creeds, and the like. In truth, this movement and this Dornach building, the Goetheanum, through which it is represented, wants to serve those longings, those goals, which today often live so unconsciously in the human soul, in the human soul of the broadest masses, which in many respects have not yet found the form to express themselves, but which are connected with all that which should lead present and future humanity out of the cultural chaos, which can be perceived by anyone who is unbiased, and from which everyone who is unbiased must extricate themselves in the present.

If one is to indicate from historical phenomena where, I would say, the main nerve of this movement lies, then perhaps to something that seems quite remote from today's man, that also seems to belong to quite abstract regions of thought and imagination, but which only needs to be developed for the most general and broadest human interests in order to lead us to the very thing that today's culture needs for its renewal, for its rebirth. I would like to point out what Goethe strove for, based on the full breadth and depth of his world view, which is still far from being sufficiently appreciated today. I would like to point out what he strove for as an insight into the living world in contrast to the dead, inanimate, inorganic world.

What Goethe strove for in terms of knowledge was closely connected with his entire spiritual striving, and he drew the best that his world view contains from the contemplation of art, but he extended what he had gained from the contemplation of art to actual scientific knowledge, as he had to view it in the sense of the breadth and scope of his world view. Goethe allowed himself to be influenced, admittedly with regard to the plant world, which was so dear to him, and his contemplation of it, everything that could be available to him in relation to the plant world from the science of his time; but it can be said that nothing that he could find in the science of his time was sufficient to explain the essence of the secrets of this plant world. And so, out of the originality of his nature, he himself turned his comprehensive gaze over the whole plant world, as far as it was accessible to him, over all its forms, and sought a unity out of the diversity, out of the variety of plants. He sought that out of the variety of the plant which he called his primal plant. When you hear the definition of what he meant by his idea, it may seem abstract, but it is not. By his original plant, Goethe meant a unified image, of which every plant, whatever external form it may take, is an image, a unified, ideal, spiritual entity with which one can traverse the plant world and which is revealed, so to speak, in every single plant.

“Such a primal plant - as Goethe wrote from Italy to his friends in Weimar - such a unitary plant, which can only be created in the mind and is nowhere to be seen in the external world, must surely exist - so he said, seemingly abstractly. How else could one know that a single is a plant?

But it matters little what his abstract opinion of these things was. What matters more is that he had the faith, the profound and coherent belief in the essence of things, which is expressed in the following words. He said and wrote about this archetypal plant: “If you have grasped it in spirit, then it must be possible not only to compare and recognize with it the plant forms that are out there in the world, but it must be possible to inwardly and spiritually devise plant forms yourself that, even if they do not exist, could exist.”

This is a weighty and momentous saying. For what does a man, a man of insight, who wishes to grasp such a spiritual idea want? He wants nothing less than to evoke in his soul a thought that can lead him, I might say, to use his own expression, to invent an external reality that can then take shape. He wants to become so inwardly related to what grows in plants, to what grows in living things in general, that he has in his own spirit, in his own thinking, in his own imagination, what is revealed outwardly in growth as power. He wants to immerse himself inwardly with his whole being in the outer world. This striving is much more significant than what Goethe achieved with it in detail. As I said, if we characterize it only in relation to the plant world, which may interest some but not others, and if we characterize it only in relation to the plant world, which Goethe wanted, it may seem abstract to some. But in this kind of spiritual endeavour there is something that can be extended to the whole extent of human knowledge, of the human view of the world.

Then one rises from the contemplation of the individual, insignificant living creature to that of the whole human being, the human being who not only contains, when one ascends to his wholeness, that which today's external natural science observes, which in many ways the materialistic sense of the time regards as the only thing about man, but which encompasses body, soul and spirit.

Goethe started from natural science. What is called anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, on the one hand, starts from Goethe, in that it seeks to develop the kind of world view that processes and allows to be revealed in the spirit that which is as intimately related to reality as Goethe's idea of the Primordial Plant is intimately related to the individual plant; on the other hand, this spiritual movement is in complete harmony with the true scientific attitude of our time, not with some obscure mysticism. And it is in complete harmony with a genuine, honest and contemporary religious endeavor of the human spirit in modern times. In past years, I have often spoken in this place of the fact that anthroposophy, the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, by no means underestimates the importance of this natural science, with its enormous influence on modern culture. Indeed, it appreciates this natural science much better than many of those who want to stand on the ground of this natural science. Anyone who has not just adopted the popular prejudices about science and believes that they are a true scientist, but who has consciously immersed themselves in what science can achieve for the overall education of the human soul and mind, must say: if science, as it has developed over the past three to four centuries, but particularly in the course of the second half of the 19th century, would fully grasp itself in its own essence, would those who pursue it fully understand their own nature, then this natural science would already proclaim today of its own accord what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to proclaim. This natural science would speak of itself as human soul and human spirit, of that which is of eternal value in the human being.

Why does not natural science do this, although it so conscientiously, with such penetrating methods, penetrates into the outer sensual reality of nature? Why does not this natural science, on the other hand, rise in the same way as Goethe did for the plant world, to such an inner processing of the idea of nature that one becomes one with creative nature itself in one's inner being?

To answer this question, one must look back a little on the historical development of humanity in modern times. In natural science itself, great and powerful progress has been made. We need only go back to the work of Copernicus and Galileo, to see how much our understanding of nature has developed up to the present day. But at the same time, we must consider how little this scientific work was actually completely free in terms of its entire rule, in terms of its entire work within the intellectual life of modern civilization. It was not, because not a unified world view emerged in the course of the more recent development of humanity, which, in addition to free, independent natural science, also tried to penetrate into the nature of the external sense world. In the external sense world there were monopolies, monopolies for the knowledge of soul and spirit. The religious world views continued to retain certain ideas about soul and spirit. And they managed to get the public to admit, more or less voluntarily, that only they had anything to say about the human soul, about the human spirit.

Natural scientists, like other people, were influenced by what I would call a monopoly on knowledge about soul and spirit. And they limited themselves, because they did not dare to ascend from the knowledge of the world to the knowledge of the soul world, to the world of the spirit; they limited themselves to saying: Yes, natural science has its limits; it must limit itself to the sense world alone. A mind such as Goethe's, which was certainly imbued with a reverent religious impulse throughout his life, sensing a divine element in all of nature and in the whole world, always felt the necessity to shape his view of the physical, the , the soul and the spiritual.

But we must consider the situation of natural science, which is to some extent under the influence of the monopoly of knowledge just mentioned. We must consider what natural science can give to man through its own efforts. Then one will understand such a unified striving for knowledge and spirit as was present in Goethe. Those who do not allow themselves to be oppressed, I would say, by the commandment, 'Thou shalt not know soul and spirit', will undergo a spiritual education precisely through the way in which the modern spirit tries to penetrate the secrets of natural science. And this education then gives the stimulus to continue the development of the human spirit to higher levels of development than those that one simply has by being born a human being.

But to understand such stages of development, one needs a certain intellectual modesty. This intellectual modesty is very necessary for the present human being. This intellectual modesty must lead the present human being to say to himself: You are not only a being that may have developed from lower organisms in the process of the evolution of the world order to its present perfection, but you are a being that can develop itself further, has developed itself further in this life; so that the forces that you received at birth can experience a higher and ever higher education.

You see, you have to be able to say the following. You have to be able to look impartially at a five-year-old child holding a volume of Goethe's lyric poems. This five-year-old child will truly not be able to do much with Goethe's volume of lyric poems, at least not what the adult human being knows how to do with Goethe's volume of lyric poems. It will perhaps tear the volume apart or do something else with it. It must first grow up, then it will treat the volume of Goethe's lyric poems in the right way. Its development must be taken into account. For although as a five-year-old child everything contained in the volume of lyric poems is before the eyes of this human being, the possibility does not yet exist for this human being to draw out of this volume of lyric poems everything that could be in it for him. Thus the human being of the present must learn to feel his way in relation to the whole expanse of nature and the world. He must be able to say to himself with intellectual modesty: You stand before nature in such a way that, owing to your present development, it cannot give you what it truly contains within itself; one must be able to assume the possibility of taking one's development into one's own hands, so that, by attaining a higher level of development attain a higher level of development than that which one simply acquires by birth, by then being able to treat what one always has before one, what one believes to recognize - like the five-year-old child who does not yet know what to do with it - in such a way that it reveals to one all the secrets it holds. The very effort that one makes when applying the scientific method today, when applying it intensively, the depth that one penetrates, can lead one to feel that, out of the effort of the spirit, a power is awakened that enables one to undergo such a development. It is truly not due to modern natural science that people are so reluctant to admit that man can undergo development! No, it is due to the pressure that I have just characterized, and which one must only look at without prejudice in order to be able to devote oneself freely to what lies in the scientific treatment of the world itself. Then one will feel that the soul is inwardly awakened precisely by looking at nature in the modern sense, that forces arise in it that were not there before. As a rule, it is precisely today's scientists who do not bring themselves to awaken these forces. But if they could bring themselves to do so, they would be in a position to proclaim what is sought in the problem of the immortality of the soul, the eternity of the human spirit. Scientific thinking and a scientific attitude can lead to an inner awakening of the human spirit. And this can then be continued and systematically developed.

How this is possible, I have often outlined from this place and described in detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in the second part of my “Occult Science”. One can continue in full self-education that which one notices developing through modern scientific knowledge. One can apply to the spirit that which is called meditation, concentration of thought-life, of feeling, of will. One can develop that inner world of ideas to such an extent, or at least the ideas that one applies by observing stars, by working in a chemical-physical laboratory, by observing plants or people or animals externally; one can further develop the inner spiritual power that you apply by devoting your thoughts to such an extent that you only want to live in these thoughts until at least the thought leads the soul to grasp inner connections. You cannot grasp them if you do not allow your soul to develop such inner self-culture. It is possible to awaken an inner soul culture. You can indeed achieve such an awakening so that your ordinary life, which you live out in ordinary science, seems like a sleep from which you awaken. And from this awakening one can observe anew what surrounds one as the world.

That is one thing that the modern human being can undergo. If he applies natural science in the right, I would say Goethean way, he will come to a religious realization, to a real spiritual realization.

But also from the life of the modern human being itself emerges that leads to such a path and, I would say, to a corresponding goal for the future.

Those who look at history superficially, as it is usually presented superficially today, do not have the real history in front of them. One must look more inwardly at the historical life of men. One must be able to compare, for example, how a person in the 9th or 10th century AD was in his entire state of mind, and how a person of the present day is, even if he is a person living in the simplest, most primitive way; for even the simplest person today differs quite significantly from the person of the 9th or 10th century AD. I do not want to go back any further. People are definitely in a state of development. Today, we have to take the word “development” not only in the limited sense in which natural science usually takes it. It must be possible to use it in a much broader sense if one wants to penetrate into the essence of human development.

It must be possible to say that a number of centuries ago, that is, in the centuries I have just mentioned, people were much closer to each other within certain associations. Before this relatively short time, a person was connected to his neighbor through blood or tribal ties. This closeness, which brought people together into associations relatively recently, no longer exists in modern times. If you are unbiased, you can see this everywhere. Modern man is much more closed in on himself; I would go so far as to say that modern man has become much more of a loner in his soul. People in older times did not pass each other by as people in newer times do. People in newer times have become more estranged from each other. But I would like to say that something else arises from a spiritual conscience than arose for people centuries ago. It arises - again one can see it if one looks into one's own soul without prejudice and has a sense for such things, again one can perceive something like an inner voice - it arises as something like an inner obligation: You should now, since you no longer feel close enough to those immediately closest to you through blood or tribal ties, be able to come close to them through your soul development. You should take up his will in a real human love within you. You should not pass him by so that you can live socially with him, but you should be able to take up his will into yours, to make his thoughts your thoughts. You should be able to think, feel and want with his inner soul state in your inner soul state. You should be able to approach him spiritually and soulfully.

Just as engaging with natural science represents a kind of awakening for the soul, a kind of waking up in the ordinary consciousness that one otherwise has in everyday life and in ordinary science, if one only looks at ordinary science correctly, then this ordinary science gives, I would say, inner social duties that awaken more and more in man. It represents something that can be described in contrast to this awakening – I will have to express it somewhat paradoxically now, but some of the truths that must be incorporated into cultural life today must still sound paradoxical – it can be described as a feeling that overcomes us when we feel inwardly: we must be close to our neighbor in spirit and soul, we must live in his will, his thoughts; it is something that feels like losing ourselves in people. This losing of self in our neighbor in his spiritual and soul life, this devotion to our neighbor, is actually the basis of the much caricatured process of social feeling in the present.

And if one says: natural science can awaken us - this feeling, I would like to say, brings about the opposite state of mind, a strange state of mind, if one can only understand it. But just as little as one becomes aware of the awakening from the natural scientific method, just as little does one become aware of this feeling of empathy for one's neighbor. But modern man will be increasingly seized by it. Then, in contrast to the awakening through science, they will feel this like falling asleep, like resting in the surroundings, like the transition of one's own soul into the soul of the other. And just as the mysterious life of a dream awakens, full of life, out of natural sleep, so can awakening come out of this devotion to what is humanly and soulfully alive, which will increasingly take hold of modern humanity more and more as a duty of conscience. It is a kind of sleep in the human environment; but out of it rises something like a dream from natural sleep. And this dream from natural sleep can be compared to what will emerge more and more from the real, not the caricatured social feeling.

This dream will give rise to that which tells the human being: See, by immersing yourself in the will that is developing alongside your will, by becoming one with the thought that develops alongside your thoughts, you know how you are inwardly connected to this person.

Just as Goethe sensed something that was given to him through his idea of the primal plant, which he had to describe as a way of living into the whole power of the plant world itself, so one lives into the living environment of the human world, precisely through the most modern feeling. And again, something awakens in you from this living into the human world, which now arises like a new realization precisely from social life. You feel connected with the being of the other person. You feel as if something in you, as if a dream, is speaking through the being of the other person, bearing witness to you: you were already connected with this person in times gone by.

From this real experience, from this genuinely modern experience, what has already grown for individual favored spirits, such as Lessing, will grow for newer humanity as a real experience, as a real experience. If you want to be pedantic, even if it is in a higher sense, you can say: Lessing, such a person was certainly great, but in his old age, when he was already half demented, he wrote his 'Education of the Human Race' and came up with the crazy idea that humanity lives in repeated lives on earth. But for those who are not pedants but who can really penetrate the development of a man like Lessing, it is quite clear that such a man was only the forerunner for all those who will come to know this peculiarity, this mighty experience, which will arise out of the rightly understood social feeling, will arise out of it, full of life, like a dream; but it will be a dream full of life, not just like dreaming, the having been connected with people whom one meets again in earthly life, the having been connected in earlier earthly lives, with looking at the fact that one will be together with them again in later earthly lives. The experience of repeated earthly lives will develop out of the right social life and feelings of modern man.

Natural science, in its research, has already come to the conclusion that it no longer wants to be purely materialistic, at least in the case of some minds. But when the ordinary natural scientist wants to prove that something lives in man that is spiritual and soul-like, that is not merely an expression of the body, then he does not turn to such phenomena that he can prove, that he can present as one presents phenomena of the laboratory, the clinic and the like, but he turns precisely to the abnormal phenomena of human life. And I would like to say that it has become fashionable to examine the world of dreams, which awakens so mysteriously from its natural sleep, in order to point out how the human being also has a spiritual and a soul element within him. But that means examining everything that arises from the phenomena of suggestion, hypnosis, somnambulism, mediumship, and so on. Here too, it is tempting to confuse anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which seeks to draw on a sound knowledge of nature and a sound experience of the human world, with that which would like to lean on such phenomena as hypnotism, somnambulism and the like for a real exploration of the human spiritual and soul nature.

We can start from the world of dreams to get a little closer to these phenomena. We can point out how this world of dreams conjures up images before people, into the human soul, in the time between falling asleep and waking up, when the human being is not fully connected to his spiritual and soul life to the resting body. But the one who can properly study this dream world will never answer the question, “What is this dream world?” “This world of dreams is something that takes people beyond their ordinary external daily lives.” – Then, for the unbiased person, it is quite clear that all sorts of things must interfere in this dream world that come only from the lower, animal-like instincts of human nature.

Consider Just consider what a person is capable of doing in a dream, how he tends towards the lower drives, how he often tends towards a life of crime in what he imagines in his dreams. Man must say to himself: he is not transported into some higher spiritual realm when he dreams, but on the contrary, he has descended into the subhuman. Truly, it is a dream itself when people today want to claim, want to claim quite willingly, that in their dreams they are transported into a higher world. No, in a dream we are brought into a lower world than the one we see through our senses. And especially when a person is subjected to the influence of some suitable fellow human being, so that he is placed in the sleep-like state of hypnosis, one can even, I might say, exert irresponsible influences on the person by acting in a kind of sleep-like state. Then he regards a potato as a pear and eats it as a pear, purely because he is being suggested, this idea is being given to him: this potato is a pear. And still completely different things can be given to him! It is only the extreme state, which also otherwise exists as, I would like to say, not a completely permissible state, where one counts on the damping down of consciousness by the other person, and wants to persuade him, I would like to say, to rape ideas. For those who work in the sense of true spiritual science, the question arises: what is the state of mind in which a person is in a dream? What is the state of mind in which a person is when he is in such a hypnotic or mediumistic - which is also similar to a hypnotic state - when he is in such a hypnotic state and can experience such influences from any fellow human being or from other surroundings?

In a hypnotic state, it is indeed possible for thought transfers to occur over long distances; they can be demonstrated and proven experimentally. But the question arises as to what regions a person, with his entire human, physical, mental and spiritual being, is brought when one descends into these regions. One then brings him into a region that is subhuman, that represents the animalistic in man.

In fact, man is being hypnotized down, profaned down into that which plays in him as animalistic. And it is precisely through this that one gets to know the animal in man, which is nevertheless something quite different from the animal in the animal series; but one enters into the region of the subhuman.

In contrast to all that is presented here, the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science referred to here would like to lead to the attainment of the soul-spiritual in man, not by dampening what is already in man in order to seemingly feel something spiritual-soul, but that one develops up what is already there in the sense world to a higher insight by educating thought, will, feeling through meditation, concentration, as it is presented in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds?” Anthroposophical spiritual science aims to lead people beyond themselves, in a healthy way, beyond what is already there in sensory perception and ordinary science.

In this way, it enters into a region that is quite new compared to the external sensory world. This is very important in order to realize that man becomes dependent when he is placed in a hypnotic, a somnambulistic, or a mediumistic state, or even when he merely surrenders himself to the dream-world of fantasy, that he becomes dependent on his outer sensory environment in a way in a way that he is no longer dependent when he surrenders to normal sensory life; when we surrender to sensory life in an awake state, then our will can avert our eyes from something that we do not want to look at, can even pay a little attention to what we hear. In short, we are more powerful through our will when we relate to our surroundings through the senses. What is placed in the freedom of our will, what brings us into a free relationship when we perceive sensually in an awake state, becomes a relationship of compulsion, as it is in animality, when we are subdued in the waking state through hypnosis. In this state we do not discover the soul in man, but that in us which is animalistic and which is otherwise veiled by our free spirituality. What is otherwise veiled comes to the surface and dominates the person. Man is organized down to the animal. Only one does not recognize - since the human being does not behave like the animal, but expresses himself more spiritually - that it is nevertheless a matter of a downward organization to animality. In contrast to this, what anthroposophical spiritual science wants is to raise the human being to a higher level of consciousness, and only through this does one recognize that which presents itself at a lower level of consciousness. For when man develops his spiritual nature as I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” then a different relationship to the world also arises. But not the world that presents itself when we are hypnotized or in a mediumistic state, or when we become somnambulant, not the world of our ordinary sensory surroundings presents itself, but a new world, a spiritual world, a world which man has not known before, but which presents itself to him as a real one, just as the outer sense world presents itself to the senses as a real world.

You see, the human being can undergo this development by ascending from the human into a superhuman, just as he descends from hypnosis, from somnambulism, into an inhuman. This development can be undergone, and in this way the human being can ascend to an immediate perception, an immediate experience of the spiritual. In this way, the spirit can enter into human consciousness.

Now one can certainly say that in a book such as this one, “How to Know Higher Worlds,” it is shown which development one must undergo in order to comprehend that the true world, which one gets to know in this way, is the real one, as I have described it. But not everyone can become a spiritual researcher themselves, not everyone can enter this spiritual world themselves so that they can make statements from this spiritual world. However, the one who reaches that development, which, where one knows about the existence of a spiritual, a supersensible world, has always been called the world beyond the threshold of ordinary consciousness, who enters this world, in which he has the spiritual around him as one has the sensual around him for ordinary consciousness, he makes his discoveries in the spiritual. He knows, for example, through these discoveries, that through that which appears today in man, by having him in a hypnotic, somnambulant state, by becoming a medium, his ordinary consciousness is subdued. What appears in man as the subhuman, that in truth represents an earlier stage of human development, and that which today develops as his sensory perception, his intellectual perception, that represents a later stage of development. And even that can be recognized - you can read about it in “Occult Science” - that today, when a person is put under hypnosis, it becomes apparent in an abnormal way how he was in his environment in an evolution of the earth world that lies far behind what geological external science presents to us as the evolution of the earth. One can even learn something about a much more spiritual state of the Earth, in which man also already existed and perceived his surroundings as he perceives his surroundings today when his consciousness is dulled. We recognize something of the past of the earth, which was not as the Kant-Laplace theory presents it, but was as a spiritual-soul being itself, in which man was embedded as a being of the senses. And on the other hand, man of the earthly future will recognize where the earth will be more spiritual again, where man, through his natural condition, will recognize as one recognizes today when one develops the soul further, as I have described it.

These knowledge, although it is a need of the newer, the modern man, will initially, I would say, only be attained by individual people. Individual people will enter into that region of life that lies beyond the threshold of ordinary consciousness. So much is necessary if one really wants to come to these higher realizations. You see, I will give you a simple higher realization. But in this simple higher realization, the one who comes to it sees, for example, what the attainment of higher realizations, the discovery of higher realizations, is actually based on. In the usual story, it is not known today that basically the development of all humanity is just as internally conditioned as the development of the individual human being. Who would not find it ridiculous today if someone were to say: a person who lives to be seven, fourteen, twenty years old and so on is always the result of what he eats and drinks; what he eats causes the child to develop further and further from childhood on, making it an adult. Everyone knows that this is not the case, that a person goes through certain stages of development that even lead to certain leaps in natural development. We have such a clear leap, for example, around the seventh year, when the teeth change. Those who have an understanding of such things know what powerful revolutions take place in the human organism, for example, when sexual maturity occurs; later on, the changes are no longer as clearly and distinctly perceptible, but they are nevertheless present. Something develops in man that springs from the depths of his being. But it is the same for all of humanity. And so it was around the middle of the 15th century of our era that humanity took a leap in its development. The state of mind of people has become quite different. What I have characterized today as the fact that man feels lonely in relation to other people, that he is closed in on himself, that he no longer feels close to people through mere blood relationship as he used to. This growing independence, this becoming personal, has developed in step with the change of teeth, the onset of sexual maturity, in the individual human being, in the individual human organization. So, out of the whole evolution of mankind, something came in the middle of the 15th century. Such knowledge can only come from the spiritual world. And only when one has gained such knowledge, as an inner fact of experience, can one also have an opinion about the realities of repeated earthly lives, about the path of the spirit in human development, about the life of the spirit in natural existence, and so on.

But everything that can be done to arrive at such knowledge can be prepared for through meditation, concentration, and the devotion of thoughts, feelings, and impulses of the will, as described in “How to Know Higher Worlds.” One can develop and then say to oneself, “You are now ready to receive higher knowledge.” But then one must wait. The nature of spiritual science does not allow one to go out and collect knowledge; one can only prepare one's own soul; then one must wait. Then one must, I might say, wait for the moment, which one feels like a gracious effect from the spiritual world; one must wait until the illumination comes. That illuminations from the spiritual world occur in one person but not in another. That is why the truths arise in some people, who must communicate them to their fellow human beings. Even when such simple realizations arise, such as the turning point in the whole development of humanity in the 15th century, one must have become acquainted with them in one's pure soul life today. One must have learned to renounce the forcible conquest of the spiritual world; one must have worked only on the development of the soul in order to prepare oneself to receive the truths. Then they come, come at the appropriate moment. One must limit oneself to accepting them as such individual truths. One must only be clear about one thing: if one wants to draw consequences from them, as some people do, then one only brings forth caricatures of the spiritual world. Let us suppose that some man has made various inner discoveries; he comes to an idea; then he builds a whole system out of it, a system of nature, a system of history, an economic or a social system, or something. Men are not satisfied with making such individual spiritual experiences, but continue to draw their conclusions, building systems upon them. The one who is experienced in the spiritual world only works on his spiritual development so that he is ready to receive what reveals itself to him. Then he again accepts such an individual experience and waits for another to arise. Just as in the external, sensory reality, one must wait for the new experience to approach, one must always be inwardly filled with resignation, through which one can wait until the individual inner realizations arise. Otherwise one often produces figments of the imagination. And because most people only have such hazy fantasies, they think that the laws that come into play only come from fantasies. But in truth, no figments of the imagination arise when a person makes an effort to move forward. Only when he does not make an effort to gain ideas about the invisible does he arrive at figments of the imagination. But only if he strives to let all thoughts and development, all work in the spirit, aim solely at the spirit becoming more and more perfect in its cognitive faculty, then he can get sufficiently far; when he has learned to wait, then the discoveries in the spiritual world present themselves to him through that which is to be communicated in the spiritual world. Man can, of course, come to discoveries himself if his fate, I might say, is favorable in this respect and he learns to wait. But above all, he can come to recognize as truth what spiritual discoverers tell him, and to acquire the judgments through such an inner development that he can also he receives from the other person as the truth.

This is the secret of life that people will live when the spirit becomes their guide in the world of the senses and in the supersensible world. This will be the peculiarity that human coexistence will become more intimate. Today we see an illusory, a misunderstood socialism, we see how people want to work socially, but actually become more and more socially distant from each other. But then, when people realize that they can develop to the point where they can acknowledge what the other person comes to through the intimacies of his inner life, through which he makes spiritual discoveries, then they will be able to enrich themselves spiritually in their lives together. Then one will realize that it is precisely when the spirit will be the guide in the sensory realm of man that the social life will be able to receive its true meaning through this spirit.

If one really wants to consciously cross the threshold, penetrating into spiritual worlds presupposes that one, in a sense, becomes fearless in the face of the experiences of the spiritual world. The ordinary world of the senses allows us, I would say, to be cradled in a certain sense of security. But the one who crosses over from this world of the senses, over the threshold of the spiritual world, into the real spiritual worlds that underlie our world of the senses, experiences the fact that, as it were, the comfortable, firm ground is no longer under him. The spiritual world does not have the same forces of gravity and the like as this world of the senses. Within the spiritual world, man feels as if he were on a surging sea, and the security that one otherwise has through a fixed point of view in the external world of the senses, through ordinary life, this security must be provided by inner strength, through which one steers through the spiritual world.

Furthermore, you must bear in mind that when you enter this spiritual world, you are not initially adapted to it. You are adapted to a world as a human being between birth and death; you are not adapted to that which reveals itself as eternal to human nature when you enter the spiritual world. You are adapted to this world, to the world here. When one enters the spiritual world after having developed in order to enter it, one feels, as long as one is still in the body and has not yet passed through the portal of death, that one is not yet adapted for the whole process of development. One often feels this as a burning pain, I might say. Many shrink from it. Only if one prepares well to experience one thing or the other, can one rise above oneself, can one venture out onto the open sea of spiritual knowledge, on which one must have the guide, the spiritual guide within oneself.

But it is already possible for every person today, if they observe such things as I have presented in “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds », to see from his own conviction, not through reasoning, that what the spirit-discoverers, the modern seers, can really reveal to the world is based on truth and taken from reality.

Human coexistence will result from the fact that we can learn to see when the other person develops the ability to fully recognize what has been discovered. A spiritual coexistence will arise that will provide the basic power for a life that humanity will need in the future, especially if some structures in the social organism are to be overcome that have emerged from old forces and which can only be overcome by new spiritual forces that develop from soul to soul.

Precisely because the spiritual will become a reality for people, precisely because of this people will come closer together. One only has to consider whether a person discovers this or that in the spiritual world; that depends on the way his life is. Isn't it true that a person's knowledge of the external world of the senses differs depending on whether he was born in Europe or America or Asia. In the same way, every person's knowledge of the spiritual world differs, depending on whether he is a spiritual explorer, a seer. The knowledge of the other person, who in turn has different knowledge, is a supplement to his own knowledge. People will know different things from the spirit. But they will be able to complement each other.

In the face of real spiritual knowledge, as it is meant and presented here today, there is truly no shame or anything degrading if one person, in a truly social existence, simply accepts what is transmitted to him from the spiritual world, while another person is able to discover it. There is no need to fear that some man who becomes a spiritual discoverer will shine through immodesty within his community of fellow human beings. On the contrary, anyone who wants to penetrate into the spiritual world must first acquire what I have called intellectual modesty in the corresponding high power, and he knows very well, especially when he begins to know something of the spiritual world, how little he actually knows. There is no danger of those who recognize spiritual things becoming particularly proud. Those who talk about the spiritual world in empty phrases, who talk about the spirit without knowing anything about it, who talk about it through mere philosophical conclusions, they may become proud. But those who penetrate into the spiritual worlds also know how small they are as human beings in the face of this spiritual world, which wants to realize itself through them, and they truly know that they should neither be arrogant nor dogmatic.

Now I would like to mention something else. On the one hand, it must be said that for the sake of the future of humanity, it is necessary today that those who have not yet discovered certain truths listen to those who have discovered them, and that this is by no means shameful, degrading to freedom, it can also be pointed out that even the one who can perhaps recognize to a high degree, who is a seer, learns tremendous things from his fellow human beings. That is the remarkable thing, that in this direction one gains a completely new relationship to one's fellow human beings precisely through seership, precisely through the development of the soul-spiritual. We must not forget that things can reveal themselves even in a simple, elementary way of life. We experience them, we have the sense to penetrate into what, as mysterious soul-spiritual depths, are also revealed, for example, through a child. This gives us cause, if only we do not interpret it symbolically, if only we do not brood over it, but give ourselves to it in love, to recognize spiritually that afterwards, when the seer has exercised such love for the simple, the blessed moment comes for him to recognize something great. And every great, real spiritual seer will be able to tell you about those moments when, not through the interpretation of what he has just seen, but through the actual experience of this power within him, he has subsequently learned something different from some human being, by choosing the spirit as his guide. You get to know a person. What they share with you from their experiences, from their experiences, perhaps as the simplest, most primitive person, leads you into the depths of the soul, if you are able to recognize correctly, to find the right context. You make the discovery that what people experience, what people learn, can lead to a revelation in every person.

Yes, over the whole wide circumference of human beings, when we choose the spirit as our guide to the world of the senses and the supersensible world, every human being can give us something of what he has gained from the world, and something can be revealed in us that is absolutely necessary for his further development. We often notice that people themselves do not apply to their lives with their inadequate powers what they believe they have in their consciousness, in their conscious soul life; they think it is something highly unimportant because people are inadequate to see through their own judgment to see the supersensible. If one looks into the depths of the human soul, if one has acquired the sense in this way, as I have described it today, then, as a spiritual researcher, one can also gain so much in modern natural science, through the way in which natural science works in clinics, in observatories, in chemical and physical laboratories. If we accept what the researchers, with their power of judgment, often understand from their own very inadequate understanding when they describe their work and their results, which they themselves do not really achieve with what they say about it, cannot reveal in its depths, if we accept what we are told about the work in the scientific workshops, then deep natural secrets are revealed to us. And precisely through what spiritual science does in this field, what medicine so often strives for today, what it cannot achieve with its own means, what is connected with what I have described, that medical science and natural science can be fertilized by spiritual science.

But social life will also be able to be fertilized when the spirit can become a guide through the sensual world and into the supersensible world. And there is no need to believe that the religious element, which should be one of the fundamental forces of every human being, will suffer from the knowledge of spiritual life, from the fact that spiritual life is taking hold among us and that the spirit is becoming a guide for people in the world of people! No, quite the opposite is the case. Precisely what the religious denominations themselves have sought, they could not attain to because of the needs that have arisen from healthy scientific life, in that they have preserved old traditions. As a result, they could only achieve what they wanted to create as a belief in the soul and spirit through dogmatic commandments, while in truth, when people come to make the spirit their guide in the world of the senses, they will be at one with their soul life in the spiritual. But people who recognize the spirit, people who live with their ideas, with their perceptions in the spirit, they will also be able to worship the spirit, they will be able to find the way to truly religious worship. Those people who know nothing of the spirit will not be religious people even if they belong to a “word religion.” Those who have the spirit as their guide do not fear that Christianity could be damaged by the spirit being imbued with modern spiritual science. Oh no, those who say that spiritual knowledge should not come because it will undermine religious sentiment and Christianity show themselves to be small. He who truly recognizes the spirit cannot think so little of the power of the Christ impulse, which has been working in the world since the Mystery of Golgotha. He must think much higher. He must think in such a way that he says to himself: Whatever insights may come, the more one penetrates into the spirit, the better one will learn to worship that which can only be elevated in its significance for people by being recognized ever better and better recognized.

Not spiritual science will hinder the real religious development of mankind, but the desire to remain stuck beyond real knowledge and spiritual progress will have a hindering effect on religious development. And it could be that in the not too distant future, many people will realize where the obstacles to religious development actually come from. They will come from the fact that the denominations no longer want to live with what is present in the innermost human being as a need.

You see, I just wanted to show how the spirit can become man's guide through the world of the senses and into the supersensible world. I can only do this in a sketchy way in such a lecture as I was allowed to give here.

Man comes to know that within him which is eternal and immortal, which passes through birth and the gates of death, precisely by developing the spirit within him to which he belongs. He comes to recognize that through his soul and his spirit he belongs to the spiritual world, just as he belongs to this world through his body.

Today, however, the fact that I have characterized is fully alive in the depths of the subconscious. But the one who sees through things today knows that there are many people who long for such a spiritual fellowship; but in people's consciousness this is often not the case. In the broadest circles, I might say, there is still an aversion, an antipathy to such spiritual leadership. But anyone who is inside such a spiritual movement looks at the way in which spiritual movements or even external cultural movements have been met with in the course of the historical development of humanity! And if today one is wholeheartedly attached to the idea that something like the Dornach building, the School of Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum, as an external representative – it is not yet finished, it is only just being built, but hopefully it will be finished in the not too distant future – that something like this should stand as a visible sign of the spiritual movement that I have characterized in today's lecture, then one has to remember history in the face of various disparaging judgments.

Imagine what today's world would look like if, at the time when Columbus wanted to equip a few ships to steer westward into regions of which he truly knew nothing, and which the others knew nothing about either, if the opinion had triumphed. You can read about it in history that this opinion was very much present – that it regarded Columbus's intention as folly, as madness! But in the end, he won. Imagine what would have happened in modern times if it had not been the cleverness of those who refused Columbus's ships that had won, but the “madness” of Columbus that had won. For many people, this madness of Columbus is what anthroposophical spiritual science wants. Even today, for many people it is madness. But this madness does not just include that which is only a spiritual realization; no, this madness includes such a development of the spirit through which one also becomes a truly practical person, through which one becomes such a person that one can practically attack a voyage of discovery into real life. A real voyage of discovery into life is to be inaugurated through that for which this Dornach building is to be the external representative.

Therefore, many people may see madness in what is to be undertaken with it. Those who, through inner insight, have connected their hearts and minds with what is to be a symbol of the beginning of the spirit's guidance in the development of humanity through the sensual world and into the supersensible world, know that out of this “madness” must develop that which many people, and ultimately all people of the civilized world, must seek, so that we may emerge from some of what is sensed by the unprejudiced as chaotic, as cultural confusion, in order to arrive at that which numerous people and numerous souls long for after all, long for more than the contemporaries of Columbus longed for India in his time, long for the light that is to dawn for humanity, so that it can truly strive towards higher cultural goals in humanity.

Our present considerations will impress us with their deeper and real meaning only if we do not take them in a merely theoretical way, since they are in the highest sense truths of life. Rather, we must draw from them certain consequences for our feelings and sentiments that may enable us to look upon life differently than is often done by those who have not been prepared to do so by an anthroposophical view. Our minds must be broadened through spiritual science to grasp the truth of life. This means that we must learn to compare the nature of truth as it meets us in life with the one-sided thinking about the truth that so easily befalls people. It is all too easy to get into the habit of forming opinions about this or that, not merely about everyday matters but also about the most important facts of life, and then fortifying our point of view with this opinion, paying no attention to the fact that the world may be viewed from the most varied standpoints. Thus, we can attain to the truth only when we feel and realize how everything, every single fact, can be viewed from many standpoints. I will relate the course of a certain life in order that I may give you an example, a kind of illustration of what I mean. We are now dealing with what we call karma, the passage of the human being through repeated earthly lives, the destiny of man, which is expressed in the course a human life takes. We can learn much through the examples of individual lives if we view them correctly in the light of repeated earthly lives.

In this example, we have to do with a person who was born in the sixteenth century. In order to consider the hereditary influences that people today like to emphasize, let us first look at his father. The father of this man who was born in the sixteenth century was a rather versatile person but also an extraordinarily obstinate one; this was characterized by a certain harshness in the expression of his life. He was well-acquainted with music, played the lute and other string instruments, was also familiar with geometry and mathematics, and his profession was that of a merchant. His harshness may be more readily understandable from the following. He had a certain music teacher who, at that time in the sixteenth century, was a highly respected man. As a pupil of this man, he wrote a book on music, but this did not please his teacher and he took issue with it in a book of his own. The pupil then became really quite angry and wrote another volume in which he included all possible contempt he could muster against the “ancient and rusty views” of his music teacher. Then he dedicated the book to him, saying expressly in the dedication, “Since you deigned to turn against me in such an obtrusive manner, I want to give you an opportunity to experience this pleasure more often. You obviously enjoy this sort of thing and that is why I dedicate this book to you.”

The son of this man is the person whose course of life I wish to tell you about in a slightly disguised way. As was the custom in those days, he at first pursued the study of Greek and Latin with a famous teacher in Italy because his father attached great importance to having him well-instructed. He studied the humanities with a monk, learned mathematics from his father and, in addition, learned drawing, perspective, and the like with other teachers. Possessing an extraordinary capacity for mathematics and mechanics, he continued to excel in these fields and became quite a versatile young man. Even as a boy he had made all sorts of models of machines that were useful at that time. Today, you know, boys make only airplanes, but then other ships were made. At eighteen, the young man went to the university, studying medicine at first—excuse this just after we have heard that passage from Faust.¹⁰⁶ But he had a somewhat different experience than the student who has just been presented to you in that scene of “Mephisto and the Student.” He did not pass through his medical studies as if he were in a dream, nor did he say, “They're not so bad.” No, he really disliked studying medicine since he found that this discipline proceeded in an unsystematic way, one fact simply following after another with no true connection. Then he turned to philosophy. In those days it was the custom of some individuals to attack Aristotle, the Greek philosopher who had hitherto been so greatly honored. Having one of these critics as his teacher, our young man fell into the same habit of criticizing and hating Aristotle. Although his father was an extraordinarily competent man, he was not well-liked because of his various characteristics. So, after his son had studied for a few years, he did not have much money and tried to secure a scholarship for him. He did not succeed, however, and was compelled to provide further instruction for him with the money he earned with sweat and blood.

After the son had struggled through his medical and philosophical studies, he had reason to feel most fortunate. He became a professor at one of the most famous universities of his country, teaching mathematics and also practicing medicine, of which he had a good deal of knowledge from his student days. On the whole, he was a quite popular teacher. But at this university things got a little hot for him. This came about through a book that was published containing a description of a public project, a mechanical project. It was written by an eminent gentleman who was not too intelligent, but who was the son of an actual princely personality of that particular state. Our professor, although still relatively young, had little difficulty in proving it would be impossible to carry out this project. Much hostility was then aroused against him and, although he had already succeeded in attracting attention to himself through his accomplishments, he no longer felt entirely comfortable in that particular city and university. The opportunity arose to go to another university in a republican state. At this university also, he soon became well-known, had many students and, what was then a mere matter of course, gave many private lessons so that he had an excellent income. He needed a good deal of money because his father had died and he had to support his mother and sisters. In order that we may see a little more clearly into the karma of this person let me mention the following authenticated fact; it was related by a contemporary to whom it was told by the man himself. Moreover, no matter with what philological finesse the endeavor is made to get at the fact, it is demonstrably true. This man with whom we are dealing, now teaching in a republican university, once had a dream in which he saw himself walking over burning coals and ashes and knew that they must have come from the burning of the cathedral in the city where he had previously been a professor. He related this dream and also wrote of it in many letters. It was later revealed that the very same night he had this dream, the cathedral had actually burned down.

Now, he was most successful; indeed, he made significant scientific discoveries, for which others claimed part of the credit as was then the custom and is still so to some extent even now, without thanking him. He became fairly prosperous but not sufficiently so in his own mind, especially since he had to drive himself so hard. He had to give many private lessons, earning a little thereby, to be sure, but it required a good deal of work. Now, his Italian contemporaries and later others tell in an interesting way how he was a man so much occupied with his brain that—I simply repeat what was related—he had little time to pay attention to the impulses of his heart. He was, therefore, quite clever but somewhat less lovable. Thus, he never officially married but lived, as his contemporaries say, in a common-law marriage with a certain Marina Gamba by whom he had two daughters, whom he sent into a convent, and a son, whom he later legitimized. Although he became the instructor of many famous people—for example, he taught Gustav Adolf, who later became the king of Sweden—things were not entirely as he wished them. So he applied to the Grand Duke of his native land where he had previously been a professor. This was in 1610. The fact was that he was striving to gain more free time to devote to inventions and discoveries. It is interesting, therefore, to observe the man somewhat more carefully since he was really a sort of child of his age. For this reason I should like to read to you, in a pretty good translation, a letter that he wrote to obtain a more fitting position at the court of the Grand Duke. He writes to a friend about his correspondence with the Grand Duke:

Your grace's letter was heartily welcome, first, because it lets me know that his most serene Highness, the Grand Duke, my Lord, remembers me, and then because it assures me of the continued goodwill of the right honorable Signor Aeneas Piccolomini, infinitely highly treasured by me, as also of the love of your Grace, which causes you to perceive my interest and induces you to write me in such friendly fashion about circumstances of great importance. For this service I remain always under obligation both to the right honorable Signor Aeneas and also to your Grace, render you endless thanks, and consider it my duty, as evidence of the value I attach to such goodness, to speak with these gentlemen concerning thoughts and those life relationships in which it would be my desire to pass the years that still remain to me. I hope that an opportunity might present itself when the right honorable Aeneas, with his keenness and versatility, might give a more definite answer to our august Lord, toward whose Highness, in addition to that reverent relationship and most obedient subjection that is due him from every one of his loyal servants, I feel myself, moreover, inclined with such special devotion and, as I may be permitted to say, so much love. Even God does not require any other feeling of us than that we should love Him, but I would set aside every other interest, and there is no position whatever for which I would not exchange my own state if I should learn that this would please His Highness. This answer might then suffice to realize any decision it might please His Highness to form in regard to my person. But if, as we may assume, His Highness, full of humanity and goodness, which renders him worthy of fame among all others and will ever render him more and more worthy, will unite together with my service to him every other satisfaction for me, I will then not refrain from speaking my mind. For twenty years now, and indeed throughout the best part of my life, I have labored even to minute detail, as it is said, upon the demand of anybody and everybody, to share any small talent that had come into my possession from God or through my own endeavors in my vocation. But now I would really wish to attain sufficient leisure and peace to be able to bring to completion before my life ends three great works I have on my hands so that I may publish these. I would hope to do this perhaps to the honor of myself and also of everyone who might support me in such undertakings, through the fact that I would perhaps bring to those studying in this special field greater, more general, and more lasting service than I could otherwise do for the rest of my life. I do not believe that I could have greater leisure elsewhere than I have here as long as I am compelled to obtain the support of my family out of my official duties as a teacher and from private lessons. Moreover, I would not willingly do such work in another city than in this one, for various reasons that it would be too cumbersome to enumerate. Yet, the freedom I have here is not sufficient, since I must sacrifice, upon the demand of one person and another, many hours of the day and often the best. No matter how brilliant and generous a republic, to retain a remuneration from it without rendering service to its general community is not customary. As long as I am able to give lectures and to render service, no one in a republic can release me from this obligation without ending my income; in short, I cannot hope to receive such a favor from anyone else than an absolute prince. Yet I should not wish, after what I have said, to appear to make unjustified claims upon your Grace, as if I were seeking for support without a corresponding service and obligation. That is not my purpose; on the contrary. As concerns a corresponding service, I have various inventions of which even a single one would suffice to provide a support for my life, if I should meet a great prince who should take pleasure in it. Experience shows me that things that are, perhaps, of far less significant value have a great advantage for their discoverer, and it had always been my thought to place these things before my Prince and natural master rather than before others. He in turn could do with these things and with the inventor as he might see it, and to receive from them, if it should please him, not only the ore, but also the metal. I find new things of this kind every day and would find many more if I had the leisure and more favorable opportunities to secure skillful persons whose help I could utilize in various investigations. So far as concerns further the daily rendering of service—that is, public and private lectures—I have only a distaste against that venal servitude in which I must offer my work in exchange for whatever remuneration pleases any purchaser; but to render service to a Prince or a great Lord, and to anyone dependent upon him, would never cause me any feeling of repugnance. On the contrary, I would earnestly desire this and strive for it, and since your Grace wanted to know from me something about my income here, I will tell you that the compensation for my service amounts to 520 gold gulden, which will be changed to an equal number of scudi within a few months when I receive my new position, of which I am just as good as certain. This money I can in great part save, since I obtain a large supplementary assistance for the support of my household through having private students and through my earnings from private lessons, although I rather discourage than seek to give many such lessons. I have a far greater longing for more free time than for money, since I know that it would be much more difficult for me to acquire a sufficient sum of money to give me any distinction than a certain amount of fame through my scientific work.

This man was then really summoned to this court. The only requirement was that he deliver lectures on the occasions when there were unusual events, brilliant occasions, festival affairs at which the Grand Duke had to appear and where it was necessary to make a good impression on foreign visitors. As for the rest, he was simply to receive his support salary and devote himself entirely to his studies. For a time things went well, indeed. Even poets, noblemen, and princes honored him and held all kinds of festivities because they considered him a great man. He himself—it was on February 3, 1613—composed the text for a masquerade in which he represented himself as Jupiter enthroned on the clouds. He could easily be recognized in his disguise and since the four moons of Jupiter had just been discovered by Galileo¹⁰⁷ and had been given the names of the four princes of the house, even these four princes appeared in the entourage. It was an altogether unusual, festive pageantry.

The kindness of the Prince, however, gradually subsided and after a certain time he actually betrayed this man of learning. The clergy found that his views did not agree with theirs. Moreover, he was impoverished at the close of his life and died in genuine disillusionment. He had thoroughly tasted the ingratitude and fickleness of fate. He had learned fully how some princes behave in the long run, and he had experienced the hatred of the clergy.

I have now given you a factual account of the life of a human being. But now I would like to relate this life story in a different way, from another perspective, as it were.

On February 18, 1564, the great Galileo was born. His father, Vincenzo Galileo, was extraordinarily well-acquainted with music, played the lute and other string instruments well, was occupied with geometry, and at first taught his son music himself. The boy pursued his studies in Latin and Greek with distinguished teachers; he learned the humanities with a monk and then went to the University of Pisa where he studied medicine without much satisfaction, then turned to philosophy, became an anti-Aristotelian under the influence of the contemporary anti-Aristotelian tendency. At that time he was already such a genius that one day as he sat in the Cathedral of Pisa watching the church lamp swing, he discovered the principle of the pendulum's isochronism, a most important discovery that has had significance ever since. This event was told by Galileo's contemporaries. I am constantly being told that this story is a myth, but I will continue to relate it because it is true.

In spite of the importance of Galileo's thoughts upon observing this swinging church lamp, his father could not obtain a stipend for him. Then, after he had pursued his geometrical studies, he became a professor at the University of Pisa. There he lectured on mathematics for sixty scudi a year and also practiced medicine. We know that he actually did practice medicine from a letter he wrote to his father in which he asked that the writings of the ancient physician Galen be sent him as a guide. He sharply criticized the writing of the highly placed but imprudent Cosimo I¹⁰⁸ that was published at that time. Then things became too hot for him in Pisa and since the Venetian Republic invited him to teach there, appreciating him more than his native state, he went to Padua in 1592. Galileo Galilei became a professor at the University of Padua and lectured with great distinction on mathematics and related subjects; he also constructed sun dials according to special principles and perfected the knowledge of mechanics. It was there that Giambattista Doni in his letters on dreams wrote that Galileo had the dream of which I have told you; this was the dream where he was walking over glowing coals and ashes. The Cathedral of Pisa burned at the time Galileo had his dream, and he wrote of this in letters to many contemporaries. About this time he invented the proportional circles and machines for raising water, made important discoveries in connection with the telescope and the thermoscope, and made observations regarding the barometer and other things, credit for which was claimed by other people, whereas in most cases it is to be attributed to him. I have already told you the story of his common-law marriage; it happened as I related it so I need not repeat it. Likewise, his letter was written in the way I have told you. Thus, he was actually transferred from Padua back to his native state and things happened to him there as I have said. It was Galileo who produced that masquerade in which he represented himself as Jupiter enthroned on the clouds, and it was he who gave the names of the Medici to the four satellites of Jupiter, which led to their representing them at this festival. The fact that he was not well-treated by the clergy, and that, in relation to it, he was betrayed by his prince, is known from history. Although all sorts of things in the story of his recantation are true, the assertion made by everybody that he said, “And yet it does move,” is certainly false. I have frequently pointed this out.

So this is the matter when it is reenacted from another point of view. You will observe that even though I did not relate false things the first time, your feelings for the man were probably not the same as when I related the story the second time. And you will also agree that your feelings the second time were definitely those that almost every person has when he or she thinks about Galileo, the astronomer. You will see from this that much knowledge is lacking in what many think. They certainly do not know much about Galileo but think and feel about him, not because of what they know, but because the name Galileo Galilei has a certain significance in history.

We must take into consideration, however, that what a man produces through his genius has meaning for the physical world. The fact that there are satellites around Jupiter was a discovery of immense importance for the evolution of the earth, but it has no significance for the concerns of the spiritual world, that is, for the beings of the higher hierarchies. So it is with the other discoveries of Galileo. They are such that they have a great significance for the earth. What, then, was the substance of what I first related? It was his personal fate. Apart from the fact that Galileo was an important man because of his earthly discoveries, it was his personal fate, the misery he experienced in his vocation, his—well, what shall I say—perhaps his loyalty toward the Prince, and so forth. In other words, I first told you what his daily affairs were, but because it concerns him personally it is also what has significance when he bears it through the portal of death and has to develop it between death and a new birth. We must go into such studies as this to educate ourselves regarding the question of human destiny, which cuts so deeply into life. It is precisely with significant, distinguished human lives that we must do this.

There is much talk about heredity nowadays and many questions are considered solely in connection with it. I first told you the story of the life of Galileo in such a way that you could observe it without any preconception. I related his life to that of his father, so that we perhaps might again have an example of right thinking about the question of heredity. It is certainly impossible to think correctly of it without taking into consideration the teaching of repeated earthly lives. In such a thought process, heredity does not prove to be without meaning, but is, on the contrary, most meaningful. There also appears, however, the connection between the inherited characteristics and what the human being brings down from the spiritual world through his own individuality as a result of his previous earthly life. When we wish to decide what is really inherited, we simply have to look at the facts of life.

On a previous occasion I called your attention to the fact that the period of puberty is not taken into consideration at all by science today, whereas it should be when heredity is discussed. Up to this period a person must carry with him all the impulses of heredity. What comes later must be referred to another point of time. I mentioned this a week ago. But what, then, really is inherited? The unprejudiced observation of the following facts is testimony for the arbitrary manner in which scientists interpret things in this field, but they are utterly incapable of understanding them. Since it is known to anybody who can observe life, it must be known to every psychiatrist that there may be two sons in a family who have the same inherited potentialities. Let us define the two sets of hereditary potentialities that may be similar. First, there is a certain tendency to think out concepts and connections and to apply them to external life; second, there is a certain—what shall we call it?—peppy or fashionable bearing such as a businessman must have. Once there were two sons who both had these traits; that is, a certain self-consciousness and from it a certain boldness in bringing to realization what occurred to them. These were simply inherited characteristics, and it is thus that they must, in general, be conceived. But the question now is: What did each of them become? What course did their karmas take? One of them became a poet whose achievements were pretty respectable. The other became a swindler. The inherited characteristics were applicable to both activities; in one individual, they could be applied to the art of poetry, and in the other, to all kinds of swindles. Whatever comes from physical life was similar in these brothers. These things must really be studied conscientiously and earnestly and not in the way contemporary science often studies them. Indeed, we often find that the people themselves register the facts quite correctly nowadays, but they cannot make anything of them because they do not possess the ability to connect them with the great law of repeated earthly lives.

Influenced by the currents of our time, people in a few regions have begun to think of how it may be possible to assist nature according to the physical line of heredity, the stream of heredity, as the materialist says—they do not say Divine Providence. The brilliant minds of many individuals are especially impelled to reflect on how offspring may be produced in our sad time. But in the minds of most people, this question is identical with that of how families may be assisted to have as many children as possible; that is, how the conditions conducive to producing the greatest number of descendants may be established scientifically. One who can see through things can readily foresee what will come about. Those who are displaying their scientific theories about the best possible conditions for producing future progeny will be completely fooled simply because they refuse to learn anything. All they would have to do would be to observe the results in instances where excellent conditions existed for the production of children. For example, there is the case of the well-known Johann Sebastian Bach,¹⁰⁹ who was cantor in the Thomas School in Leipzig some two hundred years ago, and who played a great deal of music with his ten musical sons. No one can say that this family with ten sons was unfruitful. But you can go all the way back to the great grandfather of Johann Sebastian Bach. He also had sons. There were so many sons throughout the generations that almost the entire family was as prolific as Johann Sebastian himself. That is to say that what constitutes favorable conditions for having descendants was present in this family in the most eminent sense. Nevertheless, by 1850, a hundred years after the death of Johann Sebastian Bach, the entire family had died out; not a single descendant was left. There you have what needs to be studied. Thus, when people with their new method will have come up with their so-called favorable conditions, they will not be able to prevent the possible generation of ten-member families, but after fifty years such families may no longer exist.

We shall speak again tomorrow of how conditions arise under which humanity evolves and how these are quite different from those at which our natural philosophic world conception labors with its utter lack of all wisdom. But this scientific world conception is simply one of the outcroppings of materialism. I have already told you that those who are familiar with the fundamental laws of the occult conception of the world knew that in the middle of the nineteenth century we reached the lowest point—or, as the materialists might designate it, the highest point—of materialistic thinking, feeling, and willing. We have already learned to know much that is connected with this materialistic thinking, and we shall still have to learn much more. But what strikes us time and again is the fact that even well-meaning persons are by no means inclined to become acquainted with the materialistic impulses dominating the depths and heights regarding human perception and will. Here people are really astonishingly little inclined to submit to what has so often been discussed, that is, to seeing the world with open eyes. What will become of the world if the views that have spread over the entire earth in the second half of the nineteenth century continue to develop further? In the course of these lectures we shall have to speak about the deep inner reasons for these things in our time.

We must, however, confront our souls with the question of how far things have really gone in some fields. Indeed, the nineteenth century was the period in which the view was presented that a real scientist could not possibly accept the childish and absurd conceptions of the ancient religions. What has been preserved in them—and we shall later discuss how it has been preserved—was considered mere childishness. It was considered the mark of an enlightened person to have risen above the assumption of a spiritual-psychic organism in the human being and that he is to be especially distinguished from animals. Not only was the endeavor made to establish a physical connection between human beings and animals, but the endeavor was also made to prove that they are nothing but animals, that is, simply a little different from other animals just as other animals differ from one another. That is the very point these people wanted to make, and it was from this point of view that not only natural histories were written, but also psychological texts. Pick up at random what the dominant people of the nineteenth century have written, and you will find at what conceptions man has actually arrived.

I have a book here before me; it is, in a certain sense, a book representing profoundly decisive views of the nineteenth century for it deals with the human soul. Every possible effort is made in this book to prove that this soul is something simply talked about by stupid people of earlier and present times. It was written in 1865, but these views were disseminated, and though some people say today that we have passed beyond that, we have not, but are still deep within it in the life of feeling and of general culture. The book deals with the human soul, but a special effort is made to demonstrate that the animal soul is the same as that of humans. In particular, you will find in it a neat definition of women and men. The author says that women represent in their peculiar characteristics a greater tendency to spirituality, whereas men represent more the tendency to materialism. In other words, according to this statement, spirituality is a weakness of women! The author then finds that certain crazy psychologists still speak about an ego that distinguishes man from animal. But he says in a delicate way that the cat, for example, shows that it also says “I;” that it has the same kind of consciousness of the ego, so the author expresses it, as our vague and super-sensible psychologists because the ego consciousness of the cat is not in the least different from that of the human being. Then comes a passage that is quoted from another book with which, however, the author is in full agreement. I shall read this passage, and I beg you to excuse the fact that the language is a bit off-color, but this is not my fault. It is the fault of the philosophy that has developed under such influences and that proposes to project living impulses into the future, asserting that it is the only philosophy today worthy of the human being. The passage reads:

The theologians and metaphysicians of our age pretend that man is the only religious animal. This is utterly false and the error is entirely in keeping with that made by some travelers who conclude, from the absence of organized cults, that religion is absent among certain savage peoples. Among a great proportion of the entire succession of animals, including even the molluscs, indications are to be found of fetishism and star worship. [ So we find among the molluscs and other animals indications of fetishism and worship of the stars.] Those that most nearly approach the human being live in veritable polytheistic anthropolatry. Our domestic dog barks at the moon and howls in a particular way when it is at the seashore; it may also be seen on certain occasions making use of whatever lustral water is available and carrying out more or less obscure rites. Who would be able to prove that there have never been high priests among dogs? What could have degraded the poor animal to the point of causing him to lick the hand that strikes him if this was not done by religious and superstitious ideas? How is one to explain, except on the basis of a profound anthropolatry, the voluntary submission to man of so many animals stronger and more active than he? To be sure, it will be said that the animal frequently devours his god, but primus in orbo deos fecit timor (fear, first of all things on earth, created gods). ... Besides, the sectarians of most of the religions also eat theirs!

The book in which this view is approved is entitled Materialism and Spiritualism and was written by Leblais¹¹⁰ with a preface by Littré,¹¹¹ a man who produced a whole series of writings. In 1871 he was elected to the National Assembly and in the same year was made a member of the Academy. This same Littré, a man known throughout the entire world, wrote the preface to this book. It deals with the human soul and simply expresses in an emphatic way what in essence is pulsing through many souls today. It is only because people are so little inclined to observe life that they fail to see the important bearing it has upon the course of human evolution, to the sorrow and pain of anyone who sees into these things.

Thus, I wanted to present to you a by no means isolated example of the presence of materialistic views in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Now let us ask whether such views are without significance for external life. Do they not gradually penetrate into this external life? Do they not mold and form this external life? Just yesterday I was sent a book by a member, the young Swiss Albert Steffen,¹¹² in which he could observe various currents of our time, because he is, in a certain sense, permeated by those impulses that are at play in spiritual science. Young Steffen describes a little of what can be experienced by a man who permits the influences of materialism on the molding of the social world to work upon him.

In his novel, which is called The True Lover of Destiny (Der rechte Liebhaber des Schicksals), there is a character named Arthur who records a fragment of his life for a certain purpose. It is, to be sure, a section taken from a novel, but it describes much of what pulses today in life. So this Arthur describes a fragment from that part of his life when materialism takes hold of humanity and forms the social order. Arthur says:

At twenty-one, I went to a metropolis for the first time—not the city in which I now live—in order to begin my studies.

One the day of my arrival I took a look at the streets. It was raining. Everything was murky and dirty.The people all showed the same indifferent but hurried pace, one just like another. I felt myself overcome immediately by an inner barrenness. I stopped in front of a billboard to see where I might spend the evening. I read one poster that called for a meeting in favor of prohibition. A man came with a pastepot and brush and pasted a beer bottle poster over it.

The very mark of our age—a poster in favor of anti-alcoholism with a beer bottle poster pasted over it!

Then suddenly I understood the significance of the mood that had taken possession of me since I arrived in this city: it was foolish to wish to improve human beings.

Disabled people stood to the right and left on the streets, yet no one had time to consider their misfortune. Women passed by and offered themselves and nobody showed pity or indignation. Suddenly it seemed to me almost astonishing that the shopkeepers did not come out of their shops to smash everything to pieces and shout, “What does it matter?” But then I perceived that the only reason that people did not despair was because they were already too commonplace, too cunning, too thievish. They were entirely too much at home in these alleys.

And did I then despair? I must confess that I greedily sucked up the mood of this alley. With a shuddering lust for death I took in the certainty that everything was on the way to destruction. The people who met me bore the unmistakable signs of degeneration. The houses reeked of corruption. Even the gray sky seemed to drop something heavy and inevitable from its clouds.

This feeling grew stronger in me. In this state of soul I sought out almost unconsciously darker and darker alleys. I went into courtyards full of refuse. I stared into windows and witnessed dreadful crimes. I read the notices that swindlers and procuresses thrust into my hands. Finally, I climbed aboard one of the buses that roared with terrific power through the streets. I closed my eyes. The thundering noise rumbled through me like a hymn of death.

Suddenly the vehicle stopped. I stooped over and heard a few indifferent words. A child had run across the street, had been caught under a wheel and was carried away dead. We continued our way.

From this moment on something within me was paralyzed. I could now see the horrible thing that this city was, and it no longer horrified, angered, or disgusted me. It seemed to me quite natural.

More: I had to laugh at anybody who wanted to change it.

Could a person move otherwise in this fever of hunger, thirst, and passions?

My father came from a family of pastors. He studied natural science and absorbed its results with great enthusiasm. It made him clear in thought, thorough, broad-minded and, in the truest sense of the word, human. He applied all his powers to the investigation of the sensory world. The super-sensible did not interest him. At least, I learned nothing of it from him.

In my childhood I adopted his view of the world without investigating whether its theories might be one-sided, just as an admiring child receives the truth from his father. But I did not yet possess his steadfastness of character that is acquired in the course of life, nor the religiousness he inherited from his ancestors, which he denied, but which was nonetheless in his nature. I did not have such a stock to live on. No pious practices were taught me in my youth that would have enriched and deepened my soul and could have worked on further in me.

Now bear in mind how often I have said—I have brought this to your attention for years—that the first generation will still be able to live with materialism because it lives under the spiritual influence received from its forefathers, but that the succeeding generation would degenerate under materialism and would go to ruin. It is gratifying—if such a thing can be gratifying—that this truth passes over now even into literature. Steffen's narrator continues:

Perhaps this is why the effect of scientific knowledge on me was different from what it was on my father. That inner inheritance prevented him from carrying over into life what he had attained as knowledge. In my case it was quite different; this single day had the effect of reversing, so to speak, the direction of my will.

My father confessed to an intellectual satisfaction when he reflected that the human being is dissipated after death and no longer exists. The certainty of this, and it seemed certain to me, evoked in me a sort of ecstatic impulse to self-destruction and, as a result, heartlessness and lust for crime.

I recently pointed out to you that modern humanity is cruel even in its use of concepts. Now we read here:

That evening I had become empty, void of feeling, and cruel, and I did not say No to these characteristics. In the succeeding time I lived entirely without scruple. And just because my action arose not from an impulse that I was unable to master, but from a certain logic and strength of will, the effect on me was twice as disastrous. I knew this. I was absolutely wicked.

He now relates how he fell into bad company, led another into bad company, and so forth. This you can read yourselves. But there is another brief passage to which I should like to call attention because it is symptomatic. A number of Arthur's acquaintances are together, all of them persons “worthy of honor,” who intended the best within their group. But Arthur has to slip away on one occasion, and he then sits alone at an empty table. Steffan narrates the incident as follows:

After a while a gentleman sat down opposite him whose face struck him because it bore an astonishing likeness to his own. It was pale, lean, smoothly shaven, but with somewhat more witch-like lines.

A peddlar came, put his glasses on his nose, untied a bundle of picture postcards and, with a sleight-of-hand rapidity, put them first before Arthur, then before the stranger all the while looking into the face of the one under whose nose he held them as if he might see his chances there. Arthur turned away in disgust. The stranger went through them carefully and selected about ten, which he put together and tore to pieces. “These persons should not be given the opportunity to earn anything,” he said to Arthur. “Of course, he will order a double supply of those I purchased. They were the most dreadful of all. But I saw so many decent working class couples here that I was afraid he would show these cards to them.”

“How can anyone look at such pictures?” asked Arthur.

“Surrender yourself for a moment, without resistance, to the fumes in here, and you will see that figures take form in your soul whose movements are just as ugly as is depicted on the postcards. What are our places of entertainment today other than hells? You need only test your feelings after you have left them—smoke, fumes, prostitutes. You do not take anything noble away with you.”

“Why are you, then, in this dangerous place?” asked Arthur.

“Because I consider it necessary that someone should be here who is disgusted. The thought of the necessity for disgust in our time came to me a few days ago at an exhibit of Greek vases. The Greeks did not need to be disgusted in order to attain to beauty. They lived in it from the beginning. But we need this disgust if we wish to stand completely in life, in order to value the world correctly, in order to come to the spirit within us, in order to protect the God within us. It was different with the Greeks. When they surrendered themselves to life, they fulfilled also the laws of the spirit. They did not need to constantly defend and arm themselves. The work of man everywhere made the human being beautiful—the buildings, the art, the customs, the utensils, even to the smallest thing. But we become ugly through everything that surrounds us—streets, posters, movies, popular music—everything makes us barren, everything destroys us ...”

Here is a question we must study: what lives at first in the thought world, and in the world of feeling, how does it flow into the social world? It is not good simply to sleep through life, not knowing what has been working at the bottom of it before it has come to its ultimate consequence. After all, the reason such a man, who has taken into himself something from spiritual science, describes this life well is because he has an eye for it.

• 106. Prior to this lecture, a scene from Faust, Part I, had been performed: Mephisto and the freshman student.
• 107. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). The letter is quoted from Angelo de Gubernatis, “Galileo Galilei,“ Deutsche Revue (March/April, 1909).
• 108. Cosimo I de'Medici (1519–74), Duke of Florence (1537–69) and Grand Duke of Tuscany (1569–74).
• 109. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750).
• 110. Alphonse Leblais, Matérialisme et Spiritualisme (Paris, 1865).
• 111. Maximilian Lime (1801–81) was a philosopher, linguist, and follower of the positivist Auguste Comte (1798–1857).
• 112. Albert Steffen (1884–1963), Swiss poet and writer, became president of the Anthroposophical Society after the death of Rudolf Steiner.

An unbroken thread has run through all the discussions held here over many years: It is vitally important that those who are moved by the impulses of spiritual science should develop a sense, a feeling for the extent to which this spiritual science enters into everything that mankind has brought to the surface during the course of human evolution—I mean to the surface of spiritual life or, indeed, all life, for it is absurd to maintain that spiritual life can exist in isolation. In fact, everything that seemingly belongs to materialistic life is nothing other than an effect of spiritual life.

To begin with, the connections between material life and spiritual life are little understood because spiritual life is frequently seen today as nothing more than the sum of abstract philosophical, abstract scientific, and abstract religious ideas. From what has been said on other occasions you will have grasped that religious ideas are today often most strongly afflicted by abstraction, by ideas and feelings which can quite well be developed without any direct, real spiritual life. An abstract culture of this kind cannot enter into material life; only a truly spiritual culture can do this, a culture whose source lies in the life of the spirit. If man's future evolution is to avoid being swept into total degeneracy, a true spiritual culture will have to enter ever more strongly into external life. Very few people realize this today because very few have any feeling for what spiritual life really is. I have stressed frequently that just now it is extremely difficult to speak about the position spiritual science holds in the many painful events of our time.

A number of years ago we chose as our motto these words by Goethe: ‘Wisdom lies solely in truth’. Our choice was not dictated by the superficial whims that often govern such decisions these days. We chose this motto bearing in mind that the human being needs to be prepared in his entire soul, in his whole nature, if he intends to absorb spiritual science into his soul in the right way, making it the real driving force of his life. The wide preparation he needs if he wants to penetrate in the proper way into spiritual science today is encapsulated in this motto: ‘Wisdom lies solely in truth’. Of course the word ‘truth’ must be seen as something serious and dignified in every connection. Even superficially we find that the level of culture we have reached today—highly praised though it is—both in Europe and the world at large, shows how little souls are moved by what is expressed in this motto.

Please do not assume that I mean our anthroposophical circles in particular! This would be a total misunderstanding. Spiritual science, certainly to begin with, must, in an ideal sense, recognize its relationship to modern culture as a whole. Inevitably I have to mention many things belonging to today's culture which make it well-nigh impossible to relate in a proper way to spiritual science. But in this I refer least of all to our anthroposophical circle which seeks to penetrate consciously into the spiritual needs of our time, and endeavours to find whatever might bring healing to it without disparaging anything that it has brought into being.

There are, of course, fundamental inner necessities which were not unforeseen. But leaving these aside, we have outwardly entered upon a time in which, within that spiritual life which rises to the surface to the extent that anyone can see it in his soul, people are not in the least inclined to take truth in its truest sense, in its most fundamental meaning. In no way, not even for the sake of the inmost impulses of their soul, not even in those joyful moments of inner sensitivity, do people illuminate with the full light of truth what interests them most of all. Instead they illuminate it—especially at the present time—with the light that derives from their membership of a particular national or other community. Consciously and unconsciously people today form judgements in accordance with this type of viewpoint. The quicker the judgement, that is, the fewer the true insights that go to make up this judgement, the more comfortable it is for the souls of today. That is why there are so many utterly impossible judgements today pertaining both to the wider issues and to individual events. These judgements are not based on any kind of intimate knowledge; indeed there is no wish to base them on any such knowledge. People strive to distract attention from what is really at issue and look instead at some other matter which is not at all the point.

In this vein people speak today about the differences between nations; judgements are made about nations. Amongst ourselves this obviously ought not to take place, but in order to gain a proper yardstick we sometimes have to be clear about what is going on around us. So, judgements are made about nations, and yet there is no understanding for someone who does not make such judgements but, instead, judges what is real. Those judgements about nations never touch on what is real. Yet when someone judges those things that are realities and in the course of doing so has to say one thing or another about some government or other, or about a particular person, or about something that has taken place in politics,—whether about everyday happenings or more far-reaching matters—then he himself is judged as though his intentions were quite other than is in fact the case. How easy it is for someone to pass a judgement about some statesman who is involved in what is going on today. If this comes to the ears of a person who belongs to the same nation as the statesman in question, then this person immediately feels himself affronted. This is because he takes something that is said about a reality and relates it, not to this reality but to something that is quite indefinable if it is not viewed in the light of spiritual-scientific reality; he relates it to his nation, as he says, or to some other nation.

Thus the oddest judgements buzz about in the world today. People belonging to a particular nation form judgements about other nations without realizing that such judgements carry no content whatever; they consist of no more than the words that express them and contain nothing that has been in any way experienced. Just consider what is entailed in forming a judgement about a whole nation—and are not judgements about whole nations scattered around in all directions these days! And not only that. People are fervently committed to their judgements without having the slightest inkling of even the most scanty evidence on which such a judgement should be based. Of course you cannot expect everybody to be in possession of such evidence. But you can expect of every single individual that he pronounce his judgements with a certain modicum of reserve, refraining from placing them in the world as absolute statements. Even if we do not go as far as this, we must be quite clear about the difference between a judgement that carries content, a sentence that carries content, and a sentence that is empty of all content. We could say: The great sin of our culture today lies in the fact that it lives in sentences that bear no content, without realizing how empty these sentences are. More than at any other time we can experience today: ‘Then words come in to save the situation. They'll fight your battles well if you enlist'em, or furnish you a universal system.’

Indeed, we are experiencing even more; we are experiencing how history is being made and politics carried on with words that have no content. What is depressing is that there is so little inclination to realize this very thing. Only rarely have I met a genuine sense for what is really going on in this field. But in the last few days I did come across some passages which do show a sense for this great deficiency in our time:

‘With astonishment we hear from the prophets of our time that the old words, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity were no more than “tradesmen's ideals” due to be replaced by something new. Professor Kjellén said this ...’

I must point out—this is necessary nowadays—that the professor is not a German but a Swede; he belongs to a neutral country.

‘in his paper on “The Ideas of 1914” in which he compared the old slogan of 1789 with the new one of 1914: Order, Duty, Justice! Looking more closely we find that these so-called new words are in fact quite old and pretty threadbare. Comparison between the two reveals the ancient conflict that characterizes human spiritual life, the conflict between an inner world of free personal activity and an outer world of rigid laws, coercive measures. Even as long ago as the time of Christ, justice as the fulfilment of the law was balanced by mercy, duty by love, and the legal order by voluntary imitation of Christ.

To give him his due, Professor Kjellén does not advocate the unconditional abolition of the words Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, even though they have become superfluous upon the demise of the "ancien regime". He suggests a synthesis beween them and those new ones of 1914: Order, Duty, Justice. But there is nothing new in this synthesis either. It was enough of a reality in the England of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to allow for the imperfection of every human institution.

The fact that this synthesis has now become ineffecive only goes to prove that all values and counter-values, together with whatever temporary synthesis may be current, become empty phrases as soon as the divine spark that gave them life is extinguished. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity signify one formula that gains its power from a social conscience. Order, Duty and Justice, on the other hand, must presuppose the suggestive power of a higher authority if they are to become effective. Herein, and not in the predominance of one or another formula, is revealed the deficiency that is so decisive for the destiny of modern mankind: The force of a social conscience is lacking in too great a majority for the liberating values to dominate, and the force of authority is too much lacking for those values that bind from outside to dominate. Values which are not deeply rooted in evolution can rapidly turn to empty phrases and fall prey to misuse ...’ and so on.

Thus, occasionally a chord is struck that reveals a genuine sense of what is going on. I need not be surprised at these words which stand out for me like an oasis in today's desert of empty phrases. They were written, after all, by my old friend Rosa Mayreder. They are to be found in the November 1916 issue of the Internationale Rundschau and they point to much about which we spoke together many years ago. So I need not have been surprised to find these words standing out for me; but in many ways I was delighted to hear how the thoughts of such a personality have developed over the years. Though she cannot bring herself to rise to a view of the world based on spiritual science and has ever taken a standpoint of unfruitful criticism, yet she has to say:

‘All the problems found in the external structure of the world can be traced back to one single source-the power problem.’

If only we could take heed of this, we should be far less inclined to live our lives in empty phrases!

‘At the centre of all the quarrels and disturbances that dominate the human condition stands the battle of groups and individuals for power. This battle for power between whole groups of nations or states is, beyond all empty phrases, the true cause of every war. War cannot be separated from power-seeking; those who desire to combat war must first devalue the principle of power—just as, quite logically, the early Christians did. The guise in which the power principle now appears is worse than any it may have donned in the past; for now it threatens the human soul in all its most beautiful and noble traits. It could be called the mechanization of life through the technical and economic mastery of nature. It is the tragic destiny of man forever to become the slave of his own creations because he is incapable of calculating their consequences in advance. Thus it has happened that even where he has used his ingenuity and inventiveness to coerce the elemental forces into his service, he has once again become the slave of the unforeseeable effects they assume through their combination with the power principle. Modern technology, which makes human life so much easier in so many ways, and modern economics, which so infinitely increases man's material wealth, having now become the tools of modern imperialism, turn against the essential being of the individual. Massed together in a soulless multitude, human beings are ground up by the machinery of party interests that drives today's civilization. The individual becomes a spare part, a cog; he can hold his own only to the extent to which he has the strength. But the values of soul quality established by past cultures perish in the process ... At present such cultural values survive only in countries which lie outside the realm of imperialistic competitiveness, or in rural areas and small towns where there is still a degree of leisure and repose, where the demands made on the individual do not exceed his capacity to fulfil them. These are the indispensable preconditions for a harmonious art of living; but they are sucked under by the murderous maelstrom of excesses prevailing at the centres of modern civilization ...’

Voices such as this prove that there are some—not very many—who understand what is lacking today. Yet these people recoil from grasping the living impulse of spiritual science. The very thing most able to grasp reality is kept at arm's length. The main reason for this is that there is a fundamental impulse lacking in their striving, and that is the fundamental impulse for truth. There is an urge to seek for the truth in empty phrases. But however enthusiastically they fill their being with these phrases, this urge will never lead them to the truth. To find the truth it is necessary to have a sense for the facts, regardless of whether these are to be found on the physical plane or in the spiritual world.

Let us look at life as it is today: Has the urge for truth kept pace with the sagacity and with the immensely admirable progress that are embodied in external culture? No. We can even say that in a certain sense people have lost the good will to look properly and see whether what is there in reality is rooted in any way in the truth. But it is essential to develop this feeling for truth in daily life, for otherwise it will be impossible to raise it up to an understanding of the spiritual worlds.

To show you what I mean, let me give you an example, not only of the lie of the empty phrase but also of how actual lies surge and billow on the waves of present-day civilization, influencing real life. There are many events we can now look back on which have shaken Europe to its foundations. It is necessary to go back many decades and to recognize over these decades the essential characteristics of these events if we want to form a judgement about what is today causing the whole world to quake; but we must have an eye for the realities.

I have told you before that in certain secret brotherhoods in the West—I have proof of this—there was talk in the 1890s about the present war. The pupils of these brotherhoods were given instruction by means of maps which showed how Europe was to be changed by this world war. The English brotherhoods in particular discussed a war that was to take place—indeed, that was to be guided into being and properly prepared. I am speaking of facts, but there are certain reasons why I have to refrain from drawing maps for you, though I could quite easily draw for you the maps which figured in the teachings of those western secret brotherhoods.

These secret brotherhoods, together with everything affiliated to them, were counting on tremendous revolutions which were to take place between the Danube and the Aegean Sea and between the Black Sea and the Adriatic in connection with the great European war they were discussing—every sentence I say here is quite deliberate. One of the sentences which figured in their discussions, and which I shall quote more or less literally, went: As soon as the dreams of Pan-Slavism have developed just a little further, a good deal will take place in the Balkans which is in accord with the developments in Europe. They meant in accord with the secret brotherhoods.

This is one great network that I want to bring to your awareness. The dreams of Pan-Slavism were discussed over and over again by these secret brotherhoods. They spoke of political dreams, of political revolutions, not of cultural dreams which would have been fully justified; have not we in our spiritual-scientific movement discussed more thoroughly than anyone else what lives in the soul of the East! Having seen what kind of role the dreams of Pan-Slavism played, let us now turn for a while to the realities of the physical plane. I will give one example. For many decades there existed, under the protection of the Russian government, a ‘Slav Welfare Committee’. What could be nicer than a ‘Slav Welfare Committee’ under the protection of a mighty government? I will now read you a short letter that has to do with this Committee, dated 5 December 1887. It says the following:

‘The President of the Petersburg Committee of the Slav Welfare Society has approached the Foreign Minister with a request for weapons and ammunition for the Nabokov expedition.’

The request was not for warm underwear for little children, it was for ammunition for a certain expedition connected with stirring the revolution in the different Balkan countries! You may perhaps see from this how something that is a lie, a conscious lie, can float about in public life. A ‘welfare committee’,—how innocuous, indeed worthy!—carries on the business of the various revolutionary committees connected with the Russian government who have the task of stirring up the Balkan states.

I could easily quote you ten, even twenty, such little notes. Let me add one more: In the fateful year of 1914 a certain Mr Pasic occupied a high position in the government of a certain Balkan country. No doubt you remember the name. While the Obrenovich dynasty were still the rulers of Serbia, this Mr Pasic was exiled to another Balkan country. You might ask what he was doing there. I do not want to criticize this gentleman but I would like to read you another short letter. It starts: ‘Secret communication from the President of the Committee of the Slav Welfare Committee in Petersburg to the Consular Administrator in Rustshuk, dated 3 December 1885, Nr. 4875.’ I quote the file number so that you don't think I am making this up or merely recounting an anecdote:

‘On the instruction of the Director of the Asiatic Department I have pleasure in sending to Your Honour herewith 6000 roubles with the humble request that this sum be paid to the Serbian emigrant Nicola Pasic through the kind offices of the widow Natalya Karavelov who resides at Rustshuk. Please be so good as to confirm receipt and further disposal of this sum.’

You see how even those who worked for the innocuous ‘Slav Welfare Society’ played a certain part in the fateful events in Europe. Would it not be a good thing to develop an instinct for truth by not being so careless as to take things at their face value according to a name or a phrase and, instead, cultivating the will to examine them a little? Unless this is done, conclusions are reached entirely thoughtlessly, and thoughtlessness in forming judgements is what takes us further and further away from the truth. The fact that thoughtlessness in judgement takes us away from the truth can never be countered by the excuse that we did not know this or that. The judgements we carry in our soul are facts that work in the world; we should never forget that what we carry in our soul works in the world, though on the whole it is subject to what is at work governing the whole wide range of life.

To digress for a moment, the strangest judgements about the relationships between the various states can be heard these days. The words for this—an empty phrase in the place of the truth—are ‘international relations’. Judgements are reached by people who make not the slightest effort to consult the evidence, even though this would sometimes be quite easy to find. I do not refer, of course, to those who are united with us here in the Anthroposophical Society. Nevertheless, we do stand in the world and it does influence us via at least one fatal indirect route, for we always allow ourselves to be influenced by what some people have called a major power: the Press! The effect of the Press really is most disastrous, for it falsifies and blurs virtually everything. How little would be written if those who write were really called upon to write properly! Who does not write today about the relationship of Romania to Russia, or Romania to any of the other states? It does not even occur to them that a fundamental prerequisite for saying anything about these relationships is to read the memoirs of the late King Carol of Romania. Those who write without having done this only write things which are not worth reading, even by the simplest people.

Times are grave; therefore only grave and earnest views of the world and of life can serve in these times. So it is important to sense something of a feeling that I have often described as essential: above all not to judge rashly but, instead, to look at things side by side and wait for them to speak. In the course of time they will say a good many things to us. To acquaint oneself with as many aspects as possible is the best preparation for penetrating thoroughly into the difficult and complicated conditions of life today.

Without wishing to express any judgement I should like to tell you something which will demonstrate the proper way to place the kind of thing I have to tell side by side with other things that happen. The important part played by the Romanian army in the Russo-Turkish war is well known. After the Russians had demanded permission to march through Romania, and after they had been refused, a moment arrived in this war when Grand Duke Nikolai, who was already playing an important part at that time, wrote to Romania as follows: ‘Come to our assistance, cross over the Danube however you wish and under whatever conditions you wish. But come quickly, for the Turks are about to finish us off.’ As a result, as we know, the intervention of the Romanian army led to a favourable outcome for Russia.

After this, King Carol of Romania wanted to take part in the peace negotiations. He was not admitted. So he took up quite a vehement position vis-á-vis the Russian government, in consequence of which he underwent rather a peculiar experience. There were Russian troops stationed in Bucharest and it was quite easy to be convinced that the intention was to remove the King; the situation being as I have just hinted, you can easily understand that such intentions might indeed exist. So King Carol demanded the withdrawal of the Russian troops, whereapon he received an exceedingly brusque, indeed quite atrocious reply from Gorchakov, the then Foreign Minister. He thought for a while—such people do think from time to time—and comforted himself with the notion that at least Tsar Alexander would not agree and that it was only Gorchakov who was taking such liberties. So he wrote to the Tsar and received a reply from which I quote verbatim the main sentences:

‘The embarrassing situation brought about by your ministers has not in any way altered the cordial interest I feel for you; I regret having had to hint at the possible measures which the attitude of your government would force me to take.’

I am telling you these things only as an example of how to place the events of recent decades side by side, so that out of these events one judgement or another may present itself. Only the events themselves can help us to form judgements with real content. And the events of recent decades are such that they cannot be judged summarily because far too many threads lead to each one. Furthermore, it is necessary with every judgement to bear in mind the proper motivation, the proper perspective. In this connection the most painful experiences can be had. I must admit that in the face of the great accumulation of unkindness I am now meeting in just this connection I cannot but reach the painful conclusion that there is very little inclination in the world to give judgements their proper perspective and also very little will to understand someone who tries to judge things in this way, thus finding the right perspective for his judgements.

Without stating my own opinion one way or the other, I must admit that outside Germany I have hardly met a single judgement about Germany that is really understanding and friendly. Judgements have been pronounced with immense confidence, yes, but not with genuine understanding. On the other hand, there are innumerable extraordinarily benevolent judgements about everything in the periphery. Nobody need believe that this surprises me. It certainly does not. I am not in the least surprised, but I do try to understand why it is so. The reason is that there is absolutely no will to gain a proper perspective. People do not even suspect that a judgement about what lives today in Central Europe has to be made from a perspective that differs utterly from that needed to judge what lives in the periphery. They have no idea what it means that with everything contained in Central Europe each single individual is vulnerable and threatened, and therefore that the scale of affairs is at a human level, whereas in the periphery the scale is that of state and political affairs which require to be judged from an entirely different perspective. Each is judged on the same basis, but this is meaningless in this case.

As I have already said, I am not stating an opinion but speaking about the form in which judgement is passed. Nowhere in the world is account taken of the fact that something that is not meant to relate to a particular nation is, nevertheless, inappropriately seen in relation to that nation. Nobody takes into account that the British Empire covers one quarter of the earth's land surface, Russia one seventh, France and her colonies one thirteenth. Together this amounts to about half of the total land surface of the earth! I can well understand that the benevolence directed towards this side can be quite easily accounted for, simply mathematically. Obviously one is dependent on what dominates one half of the earth! I quite understand. But the terrible thought to be considered is that this is not admitted and, instead, all kinds of moral statements and empty phrases are used. If only people would say: We cannot help but go along with one half of the earth! At that moment everything would be almost alright. But people will do anything to avoid saying this. By the way, I might as well just mention that Germany, with all the colonies she has ever possessed, covers one thirty-third of the earth's land surface.

These things must definitely be taken into account, and I ask you: Is it not essential to include such things in one's judgement? What was meant by ‘imperialism’ in the essay quoted earlier was, of course, the spread of domination over the territories of the world. The British Empire is obviously the largest. This is indisputable. I am not speaking of opinions but of facts. Please do not think that my remarks are aimed at any particular person belonging to any particular nation.

Bearing in mind what has just been said, it is not surprising to learn that the British Empire had, and still has, the highest export figures. We have to know this and take it into account. However, a remarkable circumstance arose: Germany's exports started to catch up with the British. Not very many years ago a comparison showed that Germany's export figures were very low and those of Britain very high. Now let me write on the blackboard the figures for January to June 1914. For this period Germany's export figure was £1,045,000,000 and that of Britain £1,075,000,000. If another year had passed without the coming of the World War, it is possible that the German export figure might have been larger than the British. This was not to be allowed to happen!

These things can be seen without any need to let feelings come into play in one direction or another. What individual people, who strive for objecivity, think about the events of the present day is far more important than any subjective sympathies or antipathies and, above all, far more important than what throbs through the daily press in such a disastrous way. I shall go into these things more deeply from a spiritual point of view quite soon. But I would be failing in my duty if I were to throw spiritual light on these matters without pointing to the realities of the physical plane. I cannot make everything comfortable for you and avoid hurting anyone's feelings by lifting the forming of judgements up into cloud-cuckoo-land. It is essential that I let the light of what can be said about the spiritual situation shine also on what one can and ought to know about the physical plane. So let me draw your attention to something which may interest you and which will not cause too much offence now, since I believe that all our friends here present are obviously entirely free of any prejudice. I have to carry out my duty conscientiously and this involves creating a proper basis.

There are some people today who strive to look at things clearly and see them for what they really are. Though it might seem that everyone is biased there are, in fact, varying degrees of prejudice and we should not lose sight of this. Without recommending or praising it in any way, I want to mention an article which, interestingly enough, has been published here in Switzerland: On the History of the Outbreak of the War Based on the Official Records of His Majesty's British Government by Dr Jakob Ruchti. This article diverges considerably from what is heard everywhere across half the world these days about the so-called guilt of the Central Powers. The style of the article is formally scientific, even rather pedantic, after the manner of historical seminars. And the records quoted are chiefly those of the British Government. Out of consideration for people's feelings I shall not repeat the conclusion reached, since it diverges greatly from the judgement usually heard in the periphery about Central Europe. At the end of the article we read:

‘But history cannot be permanently falsified; the myth cannot stand up to the scrutiny of scientific research; the sinister web will be brought into the light and torn to pieces, however artfully it has been spun.’

This article, the fruit of a historical seminar at a Swiss university, was even awarded a prize by the University of Berne. So there exists today an article that has been awarded a prize by a Swiss university, an article which endeavours to reveal the facts in a light that differs from that found at the periphery very frequently nowadays. This is worth taking into consideration, for no one would dare to accuse the historical faculty of the University of Berne of having perhaps been bribed.

There is yet another fact I want to mention. For some time a discussion has been going on between Clemenceau, Mr. Archer and Georg Brandes. Georg Brandes is a Dane, a Danish writer. Most of you will know of him, since he is one of the most celebrated European writers. Do not think that I am mentioning him today because I have any particular liking for him; indeed he is a writer I particularly dislike, for whom I have very little sympathy.

Without any further introduction, let me now read to you the article Brandes wrote recently, following an argument with Grey, Mr. Archer and Clemenceau. I must repeat, though, that I am counting on my earlier statement about our present circle proving true: namely, that discrimination will be exercised and that no one will believe that it is my purpose to pick holes in any particular nation. I am not giving my opinion, I am merely reading to you an article by Georg Brandes. He writes:

‘Since I have met with personal insinuations both in foreign newspapers and in those anonymous letters through which the flower of the Danish gutter airs its perfumes, I must say the following once and for all: I have the honour of being a member of three distinguished London clubs, and was president of one, vice-president of another; I am an honorary member of three learned societies and an honorary doctor of a Scottish university. Thus, strong links attach me to Great Britain. I owe England's literary and artistic world a debt of deep gratitude and I have ever been strongly attracted to British life and letters. The German Reich and Austria-Hungary, in contrast, have never awarded me the slightest honour of any kind, not even the tiniest Little Red Bird Fourth Class; I have never been a member of any German club or learned society and have never received even the smallest award from a German university.’

I, too, have never heard of any inclination on the part of a German society to award any honour to Georg Brandes, but they do heartily abuse him!

‘Because of my remarks about Northern Schleswig I have been regularly and violently slandered in the German press for the last twenty years. It cannot, therefore, truly be claimed that I have been bribed to take up cudgels for Germany.’

Very true! This, dear friends, by way of a brief introduction. I might add that Brandes was a most intimate friend of Clemenceau. I myself have seen in Austria on the estate of friends of theirs, a bench on which—so I was told—Clemenceau and Brandes once sat in the most beautiful and affectionate concord and on which the names ‘Clemenceau and Brandes’ had been carved. Since then this bench in that beautiful Silesian hermitage has been known as the Clemenceau-Brandes Seat. Lecturing in Budapest, Georg Brandes once said:

‘Since I cannot speak Hungarian I shall not be able to speak to you in Hungarian, and since I dislike the German language every bit as much as you do, I shall not speak to you in German either. I shall give this lecture in French.’

As you see, there is not the slightest reason why any German should have a particular affection for Georg Brandes. His article continues:

‘It cannot, therefore, truly be claimed that I have been bribed to take up cudgels for Germany. If I have spoken without taking sides about what I see to be the truth, I have done so for reasons other than those so stupidly hinted at by Mr Clemenceau when he suggested that I was currying favour with the Kaiser.’

I do not know whether one or the other name has been eradicated from that seat since the appearance of these words! Brandes continues:

‘Mr Archer bases his argument on the premise that the Central Powers alone (namely, certain persons) are to blame for the war and made preparations for it. This same premise turns up repeatedly among the Allies: the assumption that incomplete preparation for the war proves one side to be the lamb and the other wolf.

In my opinion the unpreparedness for war of a certain country on the Continent in the summer of 1914 proves nothing more than a certain carelessness, negligence, sloppiness and lack of foresight among the appropriate authorities. A certain nation might therefore very well have hoped, by means of war, to regain possession of some confiscated provinces. It is quite easy to imagine that public opinion has all along considered such a war to be a holy duty but that, even so, negligence meant that the military forces were unprepared.

And what applies to a land force applies just as much to a sea force.

I.

On 27 November 1911 a question was asked in the English Parliament as to whether the April 1904 Anglo-French agreement about Morocco could be interpreted, either by the French or the English Government, to include military support by land or sea, and under what circumstances. The answer amounted to a statement that diplomatic support did not commit to either military or maritime support. On the same day Sir Edward Grey said: “Let me try to put an end to some of the suspicions with regard to secrecy ... We have laid before the House the secret Articles of the Agreement with France of 1904. There are no other secret engagements ... For ourselves we have not made a single secret article of any kind since we came into office.” On 3 August 1914 Sir Edward Grey read out in Parliament, among other things, the following passage from a document that he had sent to the French ambassador in London on 22 November 1912: “You have pointed out that if either Government had grave reason to expect an unprovoked attack by a third Power, it might become essential to know whether it could in that event depend upon the armed assistance of the other. I agree that, if either Government had grave reason to expect an unprovoked attack by a third Power, or something that threatened the general peace, (an exceedingly vague expression) it should immediately discuss with the other whether both Governments should act together to prevent aggression and to preserve peace, and, if so, what measures they would be prepared to take in common.” In the same speech, Grey says: “We are not parties to the Franco-Russian Alliance. We do not even know the terms of that Alliance.” ’

Brandes adds, in brackets: ‘A really extraordinary statement.’

‘On 10 March 1913 Lord Hugh Cecil said in the Debate on the Address: “There is a very general belief that this country is under an obligation, not a treaty obligation, but an obligation arising out of an assurance given by the Ministry in the course of diplomatic negotiations, to send a very large armed force out of this country to operate in Europe ...” Here Mr Asquith interrupted the speaker with the words: “I ought to say that this is not true.”

On 24 March 1913 the Prime Minister was asked again whether under certain circumstances British troops could be mustered in order to land them on the continent. He replied: “As has been repeatedly stated, this country is not under any obligation not public and known to Parliament which compels it to take part in any war.” Does this reply conform to the truth? When rumours surfaced again in the following year, Sir Edward Grey answered on 28 April 1914: “The position now remains the same as stated by the Prime Minister in answer to a question in this House on 24 March 1913.” To yet another question on 11 June 1914 Sir Edward Grey replied: “There are no unpublished agreements which would restrict or hamper the freedom of the Government or of Parliament to decide whether or not Great Britain should participate in a war.” Without any exaggeration this can be called sophistry.
After all, there existed the letter of 22 November 1912 to Monsieur Cambon which, in the dreadful bureaucratic style of diplomatic language, unequivocally committed England to participation in any military recklessness into which Russia might lure France.’

The style is indeed excruciating.

‘Even more extraordinary was the conclusion of the speech by the Foreign Minister: “But if any agreement were to be concluded that made it necessary to withdraw or modify the Prime Minister's statement of last year, it ought, in my opinion, to be, and I suppose that it would be, laid before parliament.”

The whole world knows that this did not happen.

II.

These passages from parliamentary speeches prove that Great Britain was not unprepared for a war with Germany. Mr Archer regards it as quite definite that Germany passionately longed for a war with Great Britain.

It has been proved that England's declaration of war was so unexpected by the German government that it caused consternation. It is possible to call the German government naive in this connection, but there is absolutely no doubt that they were painfully surprised. As C. H. Norman conclusively proves, Kaiser Wilhelm had good reason to hope for England's neutrality. In the years 1900-1901 he had prevented a European coalition that would have forced England to grant favourable peace terms to the South African republics. He had shown his friendship for England by refusing to receive in Berlin a deputation of Boers who were being fêted throughout Europe. In the well-known interview in the Daily Telegraph he expressly publicized the fact that he had refused the invitation of Russia and France to join them in taking steps to force England to bring the Boer War to an end. Neither France nor Russia have ever dared to deny this.’

I could add a good deal out of that letter in the Daily Telegraph which would speak far more clearly than Georg Brandes is doing; but I don't want to add anything myself!

‘So the Kaiser was not all that keen on a war with England at that time. And it will not be easy to convince any thoughtful person that six years after the publication of that interview he was all of a sudden eagerly planning to go to war with the whole globe. It is obvious, of course, that his Government made a false calculation. But they did not want war with England in 1914, and the uncontrollable hate of the German people against the English which burst out so repulsively was obviously the result of the surprise of discovering in Great Britain an unexpected and uncommonly powerful enemy.

To the last minute, Germany sought through her diplomats to win England's neutrality. They worked cautiously. The German Chancellor proposed to Sir Edward Goschen (the British Ambassador in Berlin) that he would stand for the inviolability of French territory if Germany should happen to conquer France and Russia. But Sir Edward Grey's attitude was negative because Germany would not extend this guarantee to include the French colonies.

Now Prince Lichnowsky, the German Ambassador in London, asked whether England would agree to remain neutral if Germany refrained from violating Belgium's neutrality. Sir Edward Grey refused. He wanted to retain a free hand. (“I did not think we could give a promise of neutrality on that condition alone.”) Would he agree if Germany were to guarantee the integrity of both France and her colonies? No. (“The Ambassador pressed me as to whether I could formulate conditions on which we would remain neutral. He even suggested that the integrity of France and her Colonies might be guaranteed. I said that I felt obliged to refuse definitely any promise to remain neutral on similar terms, and I could only say that we must keep our hands free.”)

Sir Edward Grey afterwards maintained that Prince Lichnowsky had certainly over-stepped his authority in making these offers. Surely he could only say such a thing because he was, and still is, convinced that Germany had an invincible urge to do battle simultaneously with Russia, France, England and Belgium.’

Please forgive me for adding something here. From what I have just read to you we may see that a single sentence from Grey would have sufficed to prevent the violation of Belgium's neutrality. However, I do not blame Grey in any way, for he is the puppet of quite other forces about which I shall speak later. On the contrary, I regard him as a perfectly honest but exceptionally stupid individual; but I do not know how far it is permitted today to express such judgements! Anyway, one sentence from Grey would have sufficed to prevent the violation of Belgian neutrality, and it is possible to add: A single sentence and the war in the West would not have taken place. Some day the world will hear about these things.

I think that these things weigh quite heavily, for they are facts. Brandes continues:

‘As I said earlier, and this is obvious to common sense, Germany was prepared for a German-Russian war, should this arise from the invasion of Serbia by Austria. But Germany did not want to molest France (or Belgium) if she remained neutral. France, however, was determined to go to the aid of Russia. The wisdom of this policy will be judged by future generations, but meanwhile its consequence is that ten million people are spending seven days every week miserably murdering one another. Without the knowledge of Parliament, the English Foreign Ministry had committed Great Britain to assisting France in the event of a European war. Given the new and strong sympathy for France, public opinion in England might even have approved of this commitment had it been public knowledge. But if all the details had been known it would certainly not have approved of the constraint under which England was placed, for England was to be forced to go to war because of France's relationship with Russia, the only power with nothing to lose in the case of a war. Russia's population is so enormous that the loss of life occasioned by a war would hardly be worth considering, and if national passions were aroused and if the war were to lead to a victory, then this could only serve to strengthen the position of the conservative Government.

If the political position had been fully known, public opinion in Great Britain would have recognized that the consequences of a conflict could contain nothing good for the freedom or the well being of mankind. If the Allies were to win, this would only lead to an immense increase in the might of Russia, the victory of a governmental system opposed to that of Great Britain. For the Russian people, who as a people have won the heart of Europe, such a victory would bring no progress.

III.

I do not believe that my esteemed opponent, Mr Archer, can detest Prussian militarism more than I do. It is caused by the two long and threatened borders, that between Germany and Russia on the one side and that between Germany and France on the other.’

Note that this is said by a person who has never been awarded even the tiniest Little Red Bird, not even fourth class!

‘It is excusable vis-á-vis France by the fact that the French have occupied Berlin twenty times or so, whereas the Germans have only taken Paris twice. It is obnoxious because of its caste system and its arrogance. But it can hardly be said to be worse than the militarism of other countries.’

Says Georg Brandes, who does not possess even the tiniest Little Red Bird, not even fourth class!

‘Europe, including England, was worried to note during the Dreyfus Affair what forms French militarism was capable of taking.’

Of course I agree whole-heartedly with Georg Brandes!

‘As for Russian militarism, in the year 1900 our idyllic and amiable Russians, about whom my esteemed friend Wells is so enthusiastic, and who have captured the hearts of the rest of us too, cold-bloodedly slaughtered the total Chinese population of Blagoveshchensk and surroundings. The Cossacks tied the Chinese together by their pigtails and launched them on the river in boats which sank. When the women threw their children on the beach and begged that they at least might be spared they slaughtered them with their bayonets. “Even the Turks have never been guilty of anything worse than this mass murder in Blagoveshchensk,” wrote Mr F E Smith, the former English press censor, in 1907, the very year of the Anglo-Russian agreement which guaranteed and at the same time undermined the independence of Persia.

The same English writer confirmed the description of Japanese militarism by the correspondent of The Times. On 21 November 1894 the Japanese army stormed Port Arthur and for four days a rabble of soldiers slaughtered the civilian population, men, women and children, with the utmost barbarity: “From dawn till far into the night the days passed with murder, plunder and mutilation, with every imaginable kind of nameless cruelty, until the place presented such a picture of horror that any survivor will shudder at the memory to the day he dies.” ’

These things which Georg Brandes says, even though he does not possess even the tiniest Little Red Bird fourth class, were of course well known to someone who wrote: ‘War brings with it the horrors of war and it is not surprising if the most modern methods are used in war.’ Yet I heard the other day that particularly this sentence in my pamphlet has been taken amiss. It can only be taken amiss by people who know nothing about history and have no idea of the cause of such a thing. Georg Brandes continues:

‘So we see that militarism, whatever its nationality, is much the same everywhere. I wish Mr Archer would read a lecture which Dr Vöhringer gave about German Africa on 30 January 1915 in Hamburg. He would learn from this what the German inhabitants of the Cameroons, about fifty men and women, suffered when, surprised by the declaration of war, they were locked up by English officers and handed over to black guards who mistreated them. They suffered hunger and thirst. If they begged for water they were given slop buckets, and a British officer said, “It doesn't matter whether the German swine have anything to drink or not.” On the journey from Lagos to England they were not even given water for washing.’

I did not bore anyone reading my pamphlet by telling things like this; yet it has been taken amiss that I do not join in the tune that is being sung everywhere. It is not what the pamphlet says that has been criticized but the fact that it does not say what is being said everywhere. It has been taken amiss because it does not scold in the way everyone else is scolding. Georg Brandes continues:

‘This is what English militarism looks like. Is it any better than Prussian militarism when English nationalism, as with any other nation, is stoked up to the point of madness?

IV.

Let Mr Archer and other eminent gentlemen in and outside Great Britain bring to an end the eternal discussion, into which I too have been dragged, about who is guilty of having started the war and about who ought to bear the consequences of its outcome! Let them turn instead to the only important and crucial question, namely how to find the way out of this hell of which we can in truth say, as in Macbeth:

Oh horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart
Cannot conceive nor name thee ...

The appetite of those who wage war is insatiable. Has it not been decided in Paris to carry on the trade war even after the cessation of hostilities? Is there never to be an end to this madness?

In any case the war will have to end with an agreement; and since the war is of an economic nature, the agreement will have to be an economic one. As a free trade power, England has shown the way to the whole world. Tariff agreements will be unavoidable; governments will be forced to make mutual concessions and it will be necessary to strive for greater freedom of trade so that finally world free trade can be achieved.

A citizen of the country which has suffered the most from the war right from the start, a Belgian manufacturer from Charleroi, Monsieur Henri Lambert, has spoken the redeeming word that can smooth the way for peace: The only intelligent and farseeing policy, in this case tariff policy, is a just policy which does not begrudge life to the other party. He has pointed out that a permanent improvement of the European situation can only be reached if the country seeking peace is obliged to abolish or at least reduce tariffs, of course only under an arrangement that is totally just to both sides. The abolition of tariffs seems to be the only sensible and effective means of preventing the economic tactic known by the English as “dumping”, of which they so passionately accuse the Germans.

Tariff agreements will also be unavoidable in the unlikely event that the war is fought to the point of a crushing victory for one side or the other. If this were to happen, millions and more millions of human beings would be sacrificed on the battlefields or would perish at home of wounds, sickness and deprivation. Supposing the victors were to decide (in accordance with the economic conference in Paris) to discriminate against the conquered to such an extent by means of tariffs that they were brought down to a lower economic level, this would be a relapse for mankind as a whole to the system of national slavery.

The underdog would, as a matter of course, make every effort to rise up again; he would utilize any dissension among the conquerors and be free again within half a century. Alliances never last as long as fifty years.

So, a peaceful future for Europe depends on free trade. As Cobden says, free trade is the best peacemaker. Indeed, it seems to be even more: it is the only peacemaker. In olden times, horses whose task it was to go round and round on a treadmill had their eyes put out. Similarly, blind to the reality around them, the unfortunate nations of Europe are going round and round on the treadmill of war, voluntarily and yet under compulsion.’

This is the judgement of a neutral citizen, but one who does not base his judgement on empty phrases; he includes a number of facts in his judgement, showing how it is possible to measure these facts against one another in the right way. My endeavour has been not to express an opinion but to indicate something that is needed in our time if we are to seek the truth. Why should it not be possible to suspend judgement, at least in one's own soul, if one has neither the time nor the will to bother about the facts in a suitable way? Spiritual science can show us that judgements made today, and so frequently clothed in such words as: ‘We are fighting for the freedom and the rights of the small nations’, are indeed the most irresponsible empty phrases. Someone who knows even the least part of the truth must realize that such talk is comparable to that of the shark negotiating for a peace treaty with the little fishes who are going to be his prey. It will naturally not be understood immediately, perhaps not until some meditation has taken place, that much of today's talk resembles the suggestion: Why don't the sharks enter into an inter-fish agreement (international is a word much used today) with the little fishes they want to eat?

People who today speak about the coming of peace say that the murder will not cease until there is a prospect of eternal peace. It is virtually impossible to imagine anything more crazy than the notion that murder must continue until, through murder, a situation has been created in which there will be no more war. It is hardly necessary to have knowledge of spiritual matters today in order to know that once this war in Europe has come to an end only a few years will pass before a far more furious, far more devastating war will shake the earth outside Europe. But who bothers today about things that are a part of reality? People prefer to listen to statesmen who declame that this or that must be achieved in the interest of freedom and the rights of small nations. People even listen when lawyers, quite competent lawyers, who have become presidents appear in the toga of a Moslem prince to conduct cases in Romania ... only this is not noticed because in this instance we speak of a ‘republic’. What more is there to be said if people are still willing to go to lectures given by such people about artistic and literary matters, about the relationships between the myths and sagas and literary materials of West and Central Europe, quite apart from other facts such as the one I mentioned to you the other day: that Maeterlinck was applauded loudly for calling Goethe, Schiller, Lessing and others ‘mediocre intellects’. But I do not wish to influence your judgement in any way; I merely draw your attention to the fact that for the forming of judgements perspectives have to be sought, as well as quite other things, if the judgement is to become truth.

We must realize that the population crowded together in Central Europe has to be judged from an entirely different viewpoint because, here, human values are under threat. For the peripheral countries, on the other hand, the viewpoint can be that of state and political values, at least for some time to come, until certain other conditions are brought about by the prolongation of the war for many years. In Central Europe we have to do with the treasure of the spirit, with the development of the soul and with everything that has been created over the centuries. It would be utter nonsense to believe that we have to be similarly concerned about the periphery; it would be thoughtless to express any such thing. Of course there is much everywhere with which fault can be found. But it is one thing—comparing greater with lesser matters—to find fault with things that take place inside a closed fortress and another to find fault with what occurs among the besieging army. I have as yet heard no judgement from the periphery that takes any kind of account of these things.

In order not to be onesided, I shall now, in conclusion, turn to something else. In order to be just, it is always thought to be a good thing to judge both sides by saying: Here it is like this and there it is like that, and so on. But the question is never asked: Is it really so? A Swiss newspaper recently published articles which, in order to be just to both sides, pointed out in quite an abstract way that lies were told in both camps. But supposing what is said there is not true? The article was about untruthfulness in the world war, but the article is, in itself, because of the way it is written, totally untruthful. Now I want to read to you—in fear and trembling, I might add—something out of a German magazine, selected at random, in order to show you the difference. What is written all around Germany is well enough known, and it is also well known that it is surely not written out of any benevolence towards the nations of Central Europe. Even in articles expressing judgements that are a little less vitriolic there are still plenty of very unkind statements against the nation who, after all, brought forth Goethe, Schiller, Lessing and others.

I came by chance across this article on human dignity by Alexander von Gleichen-Russwurm. The article is motivated by the fact that the Germans have been called barbarians, and are indeed still called barbarians in the periphery. Gleichen-Russwurm—he is Schiller's grandson—is not particularly offended that the word ‘barbarian’ is used. On the contrary, he shows rather nicely what the ancient Greeks and Romans meant by ‘barbarian’, which was certainly nothing dreadful. I shall not go into this aspect. He then goes on to discuss the various nations. The article is like many others we may find today written by people in Central Europe who are equivalent, say, to Maeterlinck. Pardon me! Gleichen-Russwurm distinguishes between nations and governments and in some cases he does so in words—I am only passing them on to you, they are not my words—that may seem terrible if a reader or listener feels offended because he is a member of that nation. I am confident there is no one among us here who will feel thus; we are all anthroposophists and can understand such things. It is not because of the words used to describe governments that I want to read you this article, but to show you how Gleichen-Russwurm—not a very famous man but one who is roughly on a par with Maeterlinck as far as intelligence goes—in no way recoils from saying to his own people within the fortress what a courageous, thoughtful and honest man has to say if he does not intend to throw sand in their eyes. Obviously, though, what is said inside the fortress ought not to impinge on the periphery because basically it has nothing to do with that. Think tactfully and you will understand what I mean. Gleichen-Russwurm says:

‘The Russian people are good natured and gentle, whatever the Cossacks, who are not related to them, might do. The criminal Tsarist Government has brought about the war, yet the greatest poet of the nation, Tolstoi, who will ever retain our respect, has preached abhorrence of war in most moving words.

The atrocities committed by the French mob, the stupidity of their ministers and the uncultured remarks of Paris journalists and writers, cannot undo the fact that France is the country of that saint of charitable love, Vincent de Paul, who still has many followers, nor that the majority of French people are hardworking and peaceful by nature.

England remains the birthplace of Shakespeare and has given the world gentle poets, selfless philanthropists and philosophers of the highest worth. Yet the country is ruled by liars and tricksters and the English people, who are proudest of their own culture, have brought into being the worst kind of modern barbarism through their manner of conducting the war.

Italy's characterless bandit Government is despicable. Everything connected with Italy recently has been disagreeable and repulsive even to her friends. Yet since Goethe we have received such rich treasures of culture, artistic sense and natural beauty from her that we shall keep her in our hearts, unforgotten and still fruitful.

The hate our enemies bear towards us has perhaps preserved what is most valuable in our nature. The bitterness shown us nowadays, our recognition of the unprecedented antipathy facing us on all sides, is like the warning whispered by the slave to the victor: “Memento mori!”

Even if spoken by vile mouths it ensures that noble-mindedness does not become overbearing, that triumphal jubilation does not degenerate into arrogance or hubris—the presumptuousness the Greek poets warned their heroes to guard against.

Schiller, concerned for the dignity of man, considered that noble human beings pay not only by what they do but also by what they are.’

You see, it is possible to form very derogatory opinions about those who are participating in current events, without falling into the trap of scorning whole nations. Judgements of this kind may be found by the hundred and if, one day, statistics are drawn up from 1914 onwards showing the way other nations are judged by Central Europe and by the periphery, the result will be a revelation of a remarkable cultural and spiritual nature! But nothing is further from anybody's mind meanwhile. At present Mr Leadbeater is compiling statistics comparing the criminal records of Germany and England, and recently announced in large print in the Theosophical Review how many more criminals Germany has than England. Then, in the next issue someone else pointed out that a certain figure had been inserted under the wrong heading and that a rectification would show the situation to be quite different. I seem to remember that he put down twenty-nine thousand criminals for England, forgetting a hundred and forty-six thousand; for Germany he included them all. But whereas the table showing Germany as the country with the greatest number of criminals is printed in large letters in the Theosophical Review, the refutation appears in minute print right at the end of the next issue.

Statistics like this will one day be superseded by others and then something of what is said in that article ‘On the History of the Outbreak of the War’, which was awarded a prize by the University of Berne, will be found to be true:

‘But history cannot be permanently falsified; the myth cannot stand up to the scrutiny of scientific research; the sinister web will be brought into the light and torn to pieces, however artfully it has been spun.’

It has been necessary to say these things in preparation for speaking next time on matters which a number of people are greatly looking forward to hearing about but which, I must repeat, may not be made as comfortable as some might imagine. I myself have no need to express one opinion or another. As a spiritual scientist I am used to looking at facts purely as they really are, without any falsification, and to speaking about them as such. I know very well what objections some people—though of course nobody from this circle—are likely to make with regard to certain atrocities and other things which are told and stirred up over and over again without any proper perspective. I know these objections, but I also know how shortsighted it is to make them and how small a notion someone who makes them can have about how matters really stand and how the blame is really distributed.

When we had our dispute—if I can call it that—with Mrs Besant, she managed to load all the blame on to us. According to someone who until that time had been her devotee but who then withdrew his esteem, she acted according to the principle: If a person attacks another person, and if the one who is being attacked cries for help, then the attacker can tell the one who is crying for help that he is wrong not to let himself be slaughtered. Many judgements made today are of a similar nature. The strangest situations can be met in this respect. Kind-hearted, well-meaning people who would never form such a judgement in everyday life, nevertheless do so with regard to political matters about which they know nothing. These people lack clarity in their judgements. But clarity is the fundamental prerequisite for the formation of any judgement, though it is not a justification for the delivery of this or that judgement in one or another direction.

The art of education (about which we will say a great deal during this course of lectures) is based entirely on knowledge of the human being. If such knowledge is to have a deep foundation, however, it must be based on knowledge of the entire universe, because human beings, with all their inherent abilities and powers, are rooted in the universe. Therefore true knowledge of the human being can spring only from knowing the world in its entirety. On the other hand, one can say that the educational attitudes and ideas of any age reflect the general worldview of that age. Consequently, to correctly assess current views on education, we must examine them within the context of the general worldview of our time. In this sense, it will help to look at the ideas expressed by a typical representative of today’s worldview as it developed gradually during the last few centuries. There is no doubt that, since that time, humankind has been looking with great pride at the achievements accomplished through intellectuality, and this is still largely true today.

Basically, educated people today have become very intellectualized, even if they do not admit to it. Everything in the world is judged through the instrument of the intellect. When we think of names associated with the awakening of modern thinking, we are led to the founders of modern philosophy and of today’s attitudes toward life. Such individuals based all their work on a firm belief in human intellectual powers. Names such as Galileo, Copernicus, and Giordano Bruno come to mind, and we easily believe that their mode of thinking relates only to scientific matters; but this is not the case.

If one observes without prejudice the outlook on life among the vast majority of people today, one finds a bit of natural scientific thinking hidden almost everywhere, and intellectuality inhabits this mode of thinking. We may be under the impression that, in our moral concepts or impulses and in our religious ideas and experiences, we are free from scientific thinking. But we soon discover that, by being exposed to all that flows through newspapers and popular magazines into the masses, we are easily influenced in our thinking by an undertone of natural science.

People simply fail to see life as it really is if they are unaware that today’s citizens sit down to breakfast already filled with scientific concepts—that at night they take these notions to bed and to sleep, use them in their daily work, and raise their children with them. Such people live under the illusion that they are free from scientific thinking. We even take our scientific concepts to church and, although we may hear traditional views expressed from the pulpit, we hear them with ears attuned to natural scientific thinking. And natural science is fed by this intellectuality.

Science quite correctly stresses that its results are all based on external observation, experimentation, and interpretation. Nevertheless, the instrument of the soul used for experiments in chemistry or physics represents the most intellectual part of the human entity. Thus the picture of the world that people make for themselves is still the result of the intellect.

Educated people of the West have become quite enraptured by all the progress achieved through intellectuality, especially in our time. This has led to the opinion that, in earlier times, humankind more or less lacked intelligence. The ancients supposedly lived with naive and childish ideas about the world, whereas today we believe we have reached an intelligent comprehension of the world. It is generally felt that the modern worldview is the only one based on firm ground. People have become fearful of losing themselves in the world of fantasy if they relinquish the domain of the intellect. Anyone whose thinking follows modern lines, which have been gradually developing during the last few centuries, is bound to conclude that a realistic concept of life depends on the intellect.

Now something very remarkable can be seen; on the one hand, what people consider the most valuable asset, the most important feature of our modern civilization—intellectuality—has, on the other hand, become doubtful in relation to raising and educating children. This is especially true among those who are seriously concerned with education. Although one can see that humanity has made tremendous strides through the development of intellectuality, when we look at contemporary education, we also find that, if children are being educated only in an intellectual way, their inborn capacities and human potential become seriously impaired and wither away. For some, this realization has led to a longing to replace intellectuality with something else. One has appealed to children’s feelings and instincts. To steer clear of the intellect, we have appealed to their moral and religious impulses. But how can we find the right approach? Surely, only through a thorough knowledge of the human being, which, in turn, must be the result of a thorough knowledge of the world as a whole. As mentioned, looking at a representative thinker of our time, we find the present worldview reflected in educational trends. And if one considers all relevant features, Herbert Spencer could be chosen as one such representative thinker.

I do not quote Spencer because I consider his educational ideas to be especially valuable for today’s education. I am well aware of how open these are to all kinds of arguments and how, because of certain amateurish features, they would have to be greatly elaborated. On the other hand, Spencer, in all his concepts and ideas, is firmly grounded in the kind of thinking and culture developed during the last few centuries. Emerson wrote about those he considered representative of the development of humankind—people such as Swedenborg, Goethe, and Dante. For modern thinking and feeling, however, it is Herbert Spencer above all who represents our time. Although such thinking may be tinged with national traits according to whether the person is French, Italian, or Russian, Spencer transcends such national influences. It is not the conclusions in his many books on various aspects of life that are important, but the way he reaches those conclusions, for his mode of thinking is highly representative of the thinking of all educated people—those who are influenced by a scientific view and endeavor to live in accordance with it.

Intellectualistic natural science is the very matrix of all he has to say. And what did he conclude? Herbert Spencer, who naturally never loses sight of the theory that humankind evolved gradually from lower life forms, and who then compares the human being with animals, asks this question: Are we educating our youth according to our scientific ways of thinking? And he answers this question in the negative.

In his essay on education, he deals with some of the most important questions of the modern science of education, such as, Which kind of knowledge is most valuable? He critically surveys intellectual, moral, and physical education. But the core of all considerations is something that could have been postulated only by a modern thinker, that we educate our children so they can put their physical faculties to full use in later life. We educate them to fit into professional lives. We educate them to become good citizens. According to our concepts, we may educate them to be moral or religious. But there is one thing for which we do not educate them at all: to become educators themselves. This, according to Spencer, is absent in all our educational endeavors. He maintains that, fundamentally, people are not educated to become educators or parents. Now, as a genuine natural scientific thinker, he goes on to say that the development of a living creature is complete only when it has acquired the capacity of procreating its own species, and this is how it should be in a perfect education; educated people should be able to educate and guide growing children. Such a postulate aptly illustrates the way a modern person thinks.

Looking at education today, what are Spencer’s conclusions? Metaphorically, he makes a somewhat drastic but, in my opinion, very appropriate comparison. First he characterizes the tremendous claims of education today, including those made by Pestalozzi. Then, instead of qualifying these principles as being good or acceptable, he asks how they are implemented in practice and what life is actually like in schools. In this context, he uses a somewhat drastic picture, suggesting we imagine some five to six centuries from now, when archeologists dig up some archives and find a description of our present educational system. Studying these documents, they would find it difficult to believe that they represent the general practice of our time. They would discover that children were taught grammar in order to find their way into their language. Yet we know well that the grammar children are taught hardly teaches them to express themselves in a living way later in life. Our imaginary archeologists would also discover that a large portion of students were being taught Latin and Greek, which, in our time, are dead languages. Here, they would conclude that the people of those documents had no literature of their own or, if they did, little benefit would be gained by studying it.

Spencer tries to demonstrate how inadequately our present curricula prepare students for later life, despite all the claims to the contrary. Finally, he lets these archeologists conclude that, since the document could not be indicative of the general educational practice of their time, they must have discovered a syllabus used in some monastic order. He continues (and of course this represents his opinion) by saying that adults who have gone through such educational practice are not entirely alienated from society, behaving like monks, because of the pressures and the cruel demands of life. Nevertheless, according to our imaginary archeologists, when having to face life’s challenges, those ancient students responded clumsily, because they were educated as monks and trying to live within an entirely different milieu. These views—expressed by a man of the world and not by someone engaged in practical teaching—are in their own way characteristic of contemporary education.

Now we might ask, What value do people place on their lives after immersion in a natural scientific and intellectualistic attitude toward the world?

With the aid of natural laws, we can comprehend lifeless matter. This leads us to conclude that, following the same methods, we can also understand living organisms. This is not the time to go into the details of such a problem, but one can say that, at our present state of civilization, we tend to use thoughts that allow us to grasp only what is dead and, consequently, lies beyond the human sphere. Through research in physics and chemistry, we construct a whole system of concepts that we then apply to the entire universe, albeit only hypothetically. It is true that today there are already quite a few who question the validity of applying laboratory results or the information gained through a telescope or microscope to build a general picture of the world. Nevertheless, a natural scientific explanation of the world was bound to come and, with it, the ways it affects human feelings and emotions. And if one uses concepts from laboratory or observatory research to explain the origin and the future of the earth, what happens then? One is forced to imagine the primeval nebulae of the Kant-Laplace theory, or, since views have changed since their time, something similar. But this notion of primeval nebulae makes sense only when we apply to it the laws of aeromechanics. Such laws, however, contain nothing of a soul or spiritual character. People who long for such a soul and spiritual element, therefore, must imagine that all sorts of divine powers exist along side the aeromechanical view of the universe, and then these spirit beings must be somehow blended skillfully into the image of the nebulae. The human being, in terms of soul and spirit, is not part of this picture, but has been excluded from that worldview. Those who have gotten used to the idea that only an intellectually based natural science can provide concrete and satisfactory answers find themselves in a quandary when looking for some sort of divine participation at the beginning of existence.

Education Based on Knowledge of the Human Being 21 A hypothetical concept of the end of the cosmos is bound to follow the laws of physics. In this context, we encounter the socalled second fundamental law of thermodynamics. According to this theory, all living forces are mutually transformable. However, if they are transformed into heat, or if heat is transformed into living forces, the outcome is always an excess of heat. The final result for all earthly processes would therefore be a complete transformation of all living forces into heat. This destruction through heat would produce a desert world, containing no forces but differences of temperature. Such a theory conjures up a picture of a huge graveyard in which all human achievements lie buried—all intellectual, moral, and religious ideals and impulses. If we place human beings between a cosmic beginning from which we have been excluded and a cosmic end in which again we have no place, all human ideals and achievements become nothing but vague illusions. Thus, an intellectual, natural scientific philosophy reduces the reality of human existence to a mere illusion. Such an interpretation may be dismissed simply as a hypothesis, yet even if people today do not recognize the way science affects their attitudes toward life, the negative consequences are nevertheless real. But the majority are not prepared to face reality. Nor do such theories remain the prerogative of an educated minority, because they reach the masses through magazines and popular literature, often in very subtle ways.

And, against the background of this negative disposition of soul, we try to educate our children, True, we also give them religious meaning, but here we are faced above all with division. For if we introduce religious ideas alongside scientific ideas of life, which is bound to affect our soul attitude, we enter the realm of untruth. And untruth extracts a toll beyond what the intellect can perceive, because it is active through its own inner power. Untruth, even when it remains concealed in the realm of the unconscious, assumes a destructive power over life. We enter the realm of untruth when we refuse to search for clarity in our attitudes toward life. This clarity will show us that, given the prevailing ideas today, we gain knowledge of a world where there is no room for the human being.

Let us examine a scientific discovery that fills us with pride, as it should. We follow the chain of evolution in the animal world, from the simplest and most imperfect forms via the more fully developed animals, right up to the arrival of the human being, whom we consider the most highly developed. Does not this way of looking at evolution imply that we consider the human being the most perfect animal? In this way, however, we are not concerned with true human nature at all. Such a question, even if it remains unconscious, diminishes and sets aside any feeling we might have for our essential humanity.

Again I wish to quote Herbert Spencer, because his views on contemporary education are so characteristic, especially with the latest attempts to reform education and bring it into line with current scientific thinking. In general, such reforms are based on concepts that are alien to the human spirit. Again, Spencer represents what we encounter in practical life almost everywhere. He maintains that we should do away with the usual influences adults—parents or teachers—have on children. According to him, we have inherited the bad habit of becoming angry when a child has done something wrong. We punish children and make them aware of our displeasure. In other words, our reaction is not linked directly to what the child has done. The child may have left things strewn all over the room and we, as educators, may become angry when seeing it. To put it drastically, we might even hit the child. Now, what is the causal link (and the scientific researcher always looks for causal links) between hitting the child and the untidy child? There is none.

Spencer therefore suggests that, to educate properly, we should become “missionaries of causal processes.” For example, if we see a boy playing with fire by burning little pieces of paper in a flame, we should be able to understand that he does this because of his natural curiosity. We should not worry that he might burn himself or even set fire to the house; rather, we should recognize that he is acting out of an instinct of curiosity and allow him—with due caution, of course—to burn himself a little, because then, and only then, will he experience the causal connection. Following methods like this, we establish causal links and become missionaries of causal processes.

When you meet educational reformers, you hear the opinion that this principle of causality is the only one possible. Any open-minded person will reply that, as long as we consider the intellectualistic natural scientific approach the only right one, this principle of causality is also the only correct approach. As long as we adhere to accepted scientific thinking, there is no alternative in education. But, if we are absolutely truthful, where does all this lead when we follow these methods to their logical extremes? We completely fetter human beings, with all their powers of thinking and feeling, to natural processes. Thoughts and feelings become mere processes of nature, bereft of their own identity, mere products of unconscious, compulsory participation. If we are considered nothing more than a link in the chain of natural necessity, we cannot free ourselves in any way from nature’s bonds.

We have been opposed by people who, in all good faith, are convinced that the ordinary scientific explanation of evolution can be the only correct one. They equate the origin of everything with the primeval nebulae, comprehensible only through the laws of aeromechanics. They equate the end of everything with complete destruction by heat, resulting in a final universal grave. Into this framework they place human beings, who materialize from somewhere beyond the human sphere, destined to find that all moral aspirations, religious impulses, and ideals are no more than illusions. This may seem to be the very opposite of what I said a few minutes ago, when I said that, when seen as the last link in evolution, human beings loses their separate identity and are therefore cast out of the world order. But because human identity remains unknown, we are seen only as a part of nature. Instead of being elevated from the complexities of nature, humankind is merely added to them. We become beings that embody the causal nexus. Such an interpretation casts out the human being, and education thus places the human being into a sphere devoid of humanity; it completely loses sight of the human being as such. People fail to see this clearly, because they lack the courage. Nevertheless, we have reached a turning point in evolution, and we must summon the courage to face basic facts, because in the end our concepts will determine our life paths.

A mood of tragedy pervades such people. They have to live consciously with something that, for the majority of people, sleeps in the subconscious. This underlying mood has become the burden of today’s civilization. However, we cannot educate out of such a mood, because it eliminates the sort of knowledge from which knowledge of the human being can spring. It cannot sustain a knowledge of the human being in which we find our real value and true being—the kind of knowledge we need if we are to experience ourselves as real in the world. We can educate to satisfy the necessities of external life, but that sort of education hinders people from becoming free individuals. If we nevertheless see children grow up as free individuals, it happens despite of our education, not because of it.

Today it is not enough just to think about the world; we must think about the world so that our thinking gradually becomes a general feeling for the world, because out of such Education Based on Knowledge of the Human Being 25 feelings impulses for reform and progress grow. It is the aim of anthroposophy to present a way of knowing the world that does not remain abstract but enlivens the entire human being and becomes the proper basis for educational principles and methods.

Today we can already see the consequences of the materialistic worldview as a historical fact. Through a materialistic interpretation of the world, humankind was cast out. And the echo of what has thus lived in the thoughts of educated people for a long time can now be heard in the slogans of millions upon millions of the proletariat. The civilized world, however, shuts its eyes to the direct connection between its own worldview and the echo from the working classes. This mood of tragedy is experienced by discerning people who have decided that moral ideas and religious impulses are an illusion and that humanity exists only between the reality’s nebulous beginning and its ultimate destruction by heat. And we meet this same mood again in the views of millions of workers, for the only reality in their philosophy is economic processes and problems.

According to the proletarian view of life, nothing is more important than economics—economic solutions of the past, labor and production management, the organization of buying and selling, and how the process of production satisfies the physical needs of people. On the other hand, any moral aspirations, religious ideas, or political ideals are viewed as an illusory ideologies and considered to be an unrealistic superstructure imposed on the reality of life—the processes of material production. Consequently, something that was theoretical and, at best, a semi-religious conviction among certain educated social circles has, among the proletariat, become the determining factor for all human activity. This is the situation that humankind faces today. Under these conditions, people are trying to educate. To do this task justice, however, people must free themselves of all bias and observe and understand the present situation.

It is characteristic of intellectuality and its naturalistic worldview that it alienates people from the realities of life. From this perspective, you only need to look at earlier concepts of life. There you find ways of thinking that could very well be linked to life—thoughts that people of the past would never have seen as mere ideologies. They were rooted in life, and because of this they never treated their thinking as though it were some sort of vapor rising from the earth. Today, this attitude has invaded the practical areas of most of the educated world. People are groaning under the results of what has happened. Nevertheless, humankind is not prepared to recognize that the events in Russia today, which will spread into many other countries, are the natural result of the sort of teaching given at schools and universities. There one educates and while the people in one part of the earth lack the courage to recognize the dire consequences of their teaching, in the other part, these consequences ruthlessly push through to their extremes. We will not be able to stop this wheel from running away unless we understand clearly, especially in this domain, and place the laws of causality in their proper context. Then we shall realize that the human being is placed into a reality tht will leave him no room for maneuvering as long as he tries to comprehend the world by means of the intellect only. We will see that intellectuality, as an instrument, does not have the power of understanding realities.

I once knew a poet who, decades ago, tried to imagine how human beings would end up if they were to develop more and more in a onesided, intellectualistic way. In the district where he lived, there was a somewhat drastic idea of intellectual people; they were called “big heads” (grosskopfet). Metaphorically, they carried large heads on their shoulders. This poet took up the local expression, arguing that human development was becoming increasingly centered in the intellect and that, as a result, the human head would grow larger and larger, while the rest of the body would gradually degenerate into some sort of rudimentary organs. He predicted only rudimentary arms, ending in tiny hands, and rudimentary legs with tiny feet dangling from a disproportionately large head—until the moment when human beings would move by rolling along like balls. It would eventually come about that one would have to deal with large spheres from which arms and legs were hanging, like rudimentary appendages. A very melancholic mood came over him when he tried to foresee the consequences of one-sided intellectual development.

Looking objectively at the phenomenon of intellectuality, we can see that it alienates people from themselves and removes them from reality. Consequently, an intellectual will accept only the sort of reality that is recognized by the proletariat—the kind that cannot be denied, because one runs into it and suffers multiple bruises. In keeping with current educational systems (even those that are completely reformed), such people believe that one can draw conclusions only within the causal complex. On the other hand, if they must suffer from deprivation, again they limit their grasp of the situation to the laws of causality. Those who are deprived of the necessities of life can feel, see, and experience what is real only too well; but they are no longer able to penetrate the true causes. While distancing themselves from reality in this way, people become less and less differentiated. Metaphorically, they are, in fact, turning into the poet’s rolling sphere. We will need to gain insight into the ways our universities, colleges, and schools are cultivating the very things we abhor when we encounter them in real life, which, today, is mostly the way it is. People find fault with what they see, but little do they realize that they themselves have sown the seeds of what they criticize. The people of the West see Russia and are appalled by events there, but they do not realize that their western teachers have sown the seeds of those events.

As mentioned before, intellectuality is not an instrument with which we can reach reality, and therefore we cannot educate by its means. If this is true, however, it is important to ask whether we can use the intellect in any positive way in education, and this poignant question challenges us right at the beginning of our lecture course.

We must employ means other than those offered by intellectuality, and the best way to approach this is to look at a certain problem so that we can see it as part of a whole. What are the activities that modern society excels in, and what has become a favorite pastime? Well, public meetings. Instead of quietly familiarizing ourselves with the true nature of a problem, we prefer to attend conferences or meetings and thrash it out there, because intellectuality feels at home in such an environment. Often, it is not the real nature of a problem that is discussed, because it seems this has already been dealt with; rather, discussion continues for its own sake. Such a phenomenon is a typical by-product of intellectuality, which leads us away from the realities of a situation. And so we cannot help feeling that, fundamentally, such meetings or conferences are pervaded by an atmosphere of illusion hovering above the realities of life. While all sorts of things are happening down below at ground level, clever discourses are held about them in multifarious public conferences. I am not trying to criticize or to put down people’s efforts at such meetings; on the contrary, I find that brilliant arguments are often presented on such occasions. Usually the arguments are so convincingly built up that one cannot help but agree with two or even three speakers who, in fact, represent completely opposite viewpoints. From a certain perspective, one can agree with everything that is said. Why? Because it is all permeated by intellectuality, which is incapable of providing realistic solutions. Therefore, life might as well be allowed to assume its own course without the numerous meetings called to deal with problems. Life could well do without all these conferences and debates, even though one can enjoy and admire the ingenuity on display there.

During the past fifty or sixty years, it has been possible to follow very impressive theoretical arguments in the most varied areas of life. At the same time, if life was observed quietly and without prejudice, one could also notice that daily affairs moved in a direction opposite to that indicated by these often brilliant discussions. For example, some time ago, there were discussions in various countries regarding the gold standard, and brilliant speeches were made recommending it. One can certainly say (and I do not feel at all cynical about this but am sincere) that in various parliaments, chambers of commerce, and so on, there were erudite speeches about the benefits of the gold standard. Discriminating and intelligent experts—and those of real practical experience—proved that, if we accepted the gold standard, we would also have free trade, that the latter was the consequence of the former. But look at what really happened; in most countries that adopted the gold standard, unbearable import tariffs were introduced, which means that instead of allowing trade to flow freely it was restricted. Life presented just the opposite of what had been predicted by our clever intellectuals. One must be clear that intellectuality is alien to reality; it makes the human being into a big head. Hence it can never become the basis of a science of education, because it leads away from an understanding of the human being. Because teaching involves a relationship between human beings—between teacher and student—it must be based on human nature. This can be done only by truly knowing human nature. It is the aim of anthroposophy to offer such knowledge.

When at the present time a Madonna, when a goddess addresses us from the stage one can hardly believe one’s ears. Not the faintest attempt is made to set the language apart from the ephemera of common life, and not the slightest effort to attain with the aid of speech to a higher sphere. The spirit is barred every way from admittance to the stage, and not an opening, not even the least pretentious of openings into its alien, inaccessible worlds can be found. Absolutely no one undertakes to allow any light to infiltrate from that hinterland of speech whence celestial forms may shine through. The reality of spirit is a concept cast by the wayside. A washerwoman at her sink is quite up to any one of these Madonnas perched on a pedestal in some miracle-play – and quite devoid of anything divine and spiritual in her language. The speaking is so uncultivated, so rough, so painfully prosaic. It is positively offensive. I do not mean this as a snub to washerwomen and the way they speak, which in their case is quite justifiable. Hard work makes the voice hard and rugged, and her struggling with material tasks must have a coarsening effect unless there happens to be religion or anthroposophy to restore the balance. But a Madonna is hardly likely to be subjected to such physical labours in the heavenly heights: A certain aura should always hedge her about – even on the pedestal. There should be a certain translucence, a luminosity, a spirituality that sounds in her voice. The speaker should be able to produce the effect of a voice sounding from afar, free and floating. The figure thus presented is an image of something that reaches for the heavens and brings us down her gifts, catching us in the effulgence of her beams and the music of the spheres.

And what about the heavenly hosts: Have you ever heard them speak, either on stage or behind the scenes? What about Goethe’s archangels, for instance, or the Lord in the same scene? They sound like a real lot of stay-at-homes, or a chorus of sales executives: dry, dun, getting-down-to-business, quite down-to-earth. As for the spiritual background, the circling tread of the dance, the course of the aeons – all absent.

The sun makes music as of old

Amid the rival spheres of heaven

Of the poetry there is hardly a trace.

Yet this is what we ought to pursue, to capture, today.

We have to feel our way towards it, step by step, listening, responding, continually wrestling, never relenting, until we burst out of our intellectual constraints, the barriers directed by material life across our path; until we transcend our restrictions and emerge into the open on the other side, liberated, saved. Anyone who is “happy discovering earthworms” will never succeed in getting beyond himself, will not make the discovery that he is also a being of air who can master the physical man, and make use of him without being chained to him. For him there will be no encounter with the word’s healing power, its life-giving power, or the power of illumination which enables him to grasp the core of his being and carries him over into the realm from whence he came. Borne on the wings of the word, he can endeavour to seek out his way along these paths. He has a presentiment of them whenever he gives himself over to the primordial powers of the word. The “I” – the vital breath – the divine centre: along such a path may the word lead one back to the beginning.

And let us explore the realms of that less expansive spirituality that opens up for us in poetry. Let us take the elemental world. Does modern art, like a child of the gods, hand us the key to unlock these kingdoms? Not at all! Cleverness, and a dash of temperament, are enough to be going on – absolutely rattling along, with no feeling at all for a wise disposition of aesthetic resources, such as comes from knowledge of our human organization. No knowledge of the laws that are manifestations of divine-creative forces in art, of which for us both man and the world are representations. Should not our ultimate aim be to trace the routes that the gods have taken in creating works of art after their own image, and into which they have breathed the breath of life? Let us embark with our tentative consciousness on those paths, beginning quietly and reverentially by experiencing the breath of life that furnishes the ground of our existence – here, in speech, as there, in creation. It is when we immerse ourselves in the word, when we fathom its being, that we enter upon those paths. What more marvellous prospect could there be?

Only we must begin by learning to spell. We must concern ourselves with the fundamentals, the speech-sounds themselves, and not with projecting our own one-sided personality.

I once saw in Germany a large-scale production of Shakespeare’s Tempest. But of the elemental world and its spiritual nature, there was nothing to be perceived. There was certainly a lot of noise, temperamental outbursts and screaming. The Caliban scenes were exorbitantly overdone, and protracted in the realist manner far beyond anything Shakespeare apportioned them. And Ariel? There was nothing in him of aerial lightness and strength: a heavy, booming voice, hard as bone; the figure thick-set. There was much bouncing up and down and shrieking. But the bouncing did nothing to dispel the heaviness of that little, earth-bound, dumpy figure with its anti-halo of tousled, dishevelled hair. An Ariel! Is not the word itself pure lightness and radiance – a soaring, sounding, hovering delight in the air? Shortly afterwards, I saw the same actress as Salome in Hebbel’s Herodes and Mariamne. It struck me then that she was talented. Her constitution lent support to her in that role: the dark, heavy voice, the hard, watchful, furtive glance; rooted to the earth and stocky in stature, she was the most interesting figure in Hebbel’s darkly-coloured piece, brooding on disaster as Salome-Herodias. Mariamne, on the other hand, seemed too cool and self-conscious, too keenly intelligent and concerned with women’s rights. A Maccabee? – no, a north-German down to the ground.

When will the actors find the escape route from this one-sidedness of the intellect, and reach the sources that will open up for them the culture-epochs, the races, the elements and the spirit-world? Desiccation is the only alternative to finding this way. In extremity, nerves fray. The breathless, consumptive approach soon loses its fascination – and is anyway not productive. If once the practice spreads, it becomes frankly objectionable. It is increasingly being rumoured that the theatre will be ousted by the film.

I once saw an Iphigeneia performance that acquired for me the status of an event. It was something of a turning-point, for things just could not continue like this. They had already been taken to breaking-point. And perhaps it was exactly here, where lay the driving powers behind such excesses as these, that the counter-forces could be evoked. I refrain from saying much about Iphigeneia herself. She was terribly tedious and common-place, expressing the boring and blasé inanities of a salon-lady – the kind who has nothing to do but parade up and down in her park and be pestered by her (solitary) insufferable admirer. Nor will I dwell upon the prize-fighter’s figure of King Thoas, the admirer in this case – though, with a neck like a bull and swinging his bare, muscular arms, he seemed to be saying: Just take my measurements, you won’t find anyone who can size up to me! I do not recall that anything else was conveyed in what he did say; certainly nothing faintly regal.

But then Orestes – Orestes: He was obviously sustained by one idea alone: that of being different from any Orestes that ever was. He was out to excel in triviality. Now if one is supposed to be a tramp, one must have the proper attributes: a skin as red as copper, an unkempt, tangled head of hair (of an indeterminate mousy colour), and a voice that is hoarse and flat, with a tinny ring. Orestes is supposed to be possessed. And so the intellect is set in motion to work out what a possessed person should look like: his thoughts will be incoherent, his nerves sensitive, making him nervous and wary of being touched; he finds everything repellent. Inwardly, such a concocted product of the head’s “realism” possesses about as much truth as a billiard ball that is made to speak. And outwardly it looks like a sort of uncared-for vagabond one might encounter on the highways of Russia ... but wait, that might actually be an inspiration: Tauris – the Crimea – Russia – a possessed vagabond it yields analogies: Modern interpretations are scarcely drawn from farther afield than this. As for Orestes, the accursed descendent of Tantalus, the Greek hero, on the other hand – such ideas are long out of date, far too hackneyed. And the same goes for iambics, for the metres and noble harmony of speech: we got beyond such things years ago.

It is said that Maximilian Harden’s journalistic career began in the following way. The editor of the Monday edition of the Berliner Tagblatt instructed a number of his young employees to “do nothing for the whole week except sit in coffee-houses, read all the papers you can lay hands on, and for next Monday write me an article that is different from everything else you have read on the subject.” Maximilian Harden is said to have done the best job.

If the motive-power behind the player of Orestes was something on the same lines, this might explain his grotesque whim and bad taste – otherwise quite inexplicable. His novelty consisted, in effect, only in pushing the tendencies of intellectualism and naturalism to an extreme, obsessively debasing this culminating achievement of the German spirit by his nervous brand of realism. The noblest, flawless, perfect product of German poetry, the Roman version of Goethe’s Iphigeneia, was quite ruthlessly and brutally trampled upon, and anyone who felt in sympathy with the play felt himself trampled upon too. We came away from the performance with a burden of responsibility: to rescue the most exalted values of the spirit.

It was about this time, as well, that our Shaper of Destinies was taken from us, he who had done so much for art, too, and pointed out the path of recuperation. He spanned the “shimmering arch” which bridges over the spirit-abandoned abyss of modern times to the other side. He was the builder, he did the moulding, he kindled and scattered the sparks, bequeathing us in his work myriads of precious stones. It is with a profound sense of responsibility that we now put together these precious stones from his spiritual wealth.

They will ennoble human beings, and fill them with bliss for thousands of years to come; and they will serve today as a magic key to open closed doors, to revive what is dead and heal what is sick, to atone for what is evil. We must only have good will. All these far-flung gems can become a magic key – even though, as in the case of these transcripts, they lie before our eyes in fragments. The notes of these three splendid lectures are very inadequate, and for all of seven years they lay hidden from the public at large because these deficiencies seemed too obvious. But so much of their richness remains that, on the foundation they lay, a rebirth of the theatre can come about.

Every word that was uttered must indeed be given its full value, and taken in all its interconnections. A foundation must be furnished for an understanding based on the will to an all-round knowledge of man and the world in their cosmic dimensions. Rudolf Steiner refers to what is adumbrated here as being “guiding principles”. With them he has opened new worlds for us.

These lectures can be our signposts to those more subtle reaches of art to which access has presently been lost, barred by materialism. The intimacies of the soul-life, the mysteries of man’s organization in conjunction with the mysteries of the cosmos form the basis of our considerations. They are intended only as points of departure for further advances, which will be achieved through steady work and inner experience. Limitations of time meant that they could be carried out only cursorily; but they may serve as prompters and awakeners to rouse the artist’s powers to independent life. They were given as part of a whole complex of lectures, which were aimed in a single direction: away from the nihilistic forces at work in our age, towards new light and recuperation. This was the deed which Rudolf Steiner performed. And if, to some hostile powers, his life’s work seems to have been checked or even annulled through the crippling of his public activities, the burning of the Goetheanum, his physical death – they are mistaken. The seeds, sheltering the future within them, are there. They are sprouting everywhere, even though external forms may be disrupted.

The task of preparation and re-edification for the future demanded unflagging effort, superhuman strength; and their affirmation could only be achieved through sacrifice. In a lifetime of indefatigable labour, one of the high points of Rudolf Steiner’s work was the opening of the Goetheanum as a Spiritual Scientific University (Hochschule). It was a time of subversive acts, of social dissension and economic collapse. Even though the art work was not entirely finished, the building could be committed to its proper function, the work for which it was intended. For three years the building served this purpose: the spiritual renewal of mankind. Then, on Sylvester Night, it was destroyed by fire. The solemnity of the festival gave way to the act of destruction; the vast framework of the completed year passed over into history. And thus, when it was rent away from earthly effectiveness, the building was impressed like a seal into the cosmos and the course of the ages.

The lectures formed part of the course for this university, and were not to be omitted from their context in the whole opening ceremony, of which they formed an integral part. For Rudolf Steiner the word stood at the foundation of everything that took place. The word was his point of departure, the central and directing force behind every development that unfolded and every seal that was opened. It was not Rudolf Steiner’s way to shroud great words in the secrecy of the occult: he paved the way for them through genuine understanding and inner apprehension. What he laid open to us became a matter of perception, something consciously grasped, an activity consciously undertaken. We were able, under his guidance, to scale the first rungs of the ladder. Then he gave us our freedom. In us his word was to become a courageous venture and accomplishment.

Art was never lacking in any of the projects inaugurated by Rudolf Steiner. We were to approach art with understanding, and practise it with reverence, being mindful of its origin. In the celebration of the cosmic rite, art played a vital role. It sprang from the threefold Logos; it officiated and performed the sacrifice at the altars of truth, beauty and power. In the course of the age of rationalism, it has for the longest time preserved its links with the divine. In the age of triviality, this heaven-born child was sunk in physical nature: the triumph of mechanics tore her away from her spiritual origins and fettered her to the machine. She must be redeemed again!

The House of Speech (as Rudolf Steiner called the Goetheanum) was intended to lead art, science and religion, which had grown apart from their original unity into threefold isolation, back together. Rudolf Steiner saw in a spiritual deepening of art, science and religion and in their mutual fructification an effective remedy for the social ills of mankind. Barbarity might be avoided and, in place of the twilight of European culture that has already been confirmed by science, there might rise out of affliction, misery and delusion the light of a new dawn.

He expressed the object of his strivings in profoundly penetrating words, which allow us to realize the significance he attributed to a spiritualized form of art in the rebuilding of a higher culture for humanity.

The house which served this end, freely and openly bidding welcome to every guest, is no longer standing. But in its place there rises a building made, like a stronghold, in the hard material of our time – concrete. Life from its departed creator was still breathed into it, ennobling it and giving it its special significance. It is there that the Mystery Plays are to be performed. These dramatic creations of Rudolf Steiner, which put man in connection again with the spiritual cosmos and make him once more a “citizen of the universe”, explaining his present personality in terms of his earlier lives an earth – these productions will enable mankind to attain to self-knowledge, self-realization and self-renewal. And there above all, eurythmy must be cultivated: Rudolf Steiner added this new art, where speech-movement takes an externally visible form, to the series of already existing arts; and this leads to the compelling, the imperative demand for a renewal of the art of speech – the word artistically spoken. Concerted interaction between spoken word and eurythmic gesture was what Rudolf Steiner called for and this had to be attained in practice. When the performance corresponded with his demands, he gave us a conscious insight into our actions and shed light on the mysteries of the art of speech and poetry, thereby redeeming us from the insufferable state into which they had degenerated.

We are under no illusion that the world will bring any but a meagre understanding to bear on our endeavours. We shall be understanding, even if some honest student at first casts this book impatiently and despairingly aside. A metamorphosis of consciousness is necessary to pass this way, and art has been held back from any permeation by consciousness. A perceiving, a hearing, a willing consciousness: today these alone can bring us genuine aesthetic experience and wrest the language of poetry away from the abstractive intelligence and mechanization to which it has now fallen prey.

We have grown accustomed to what the modern stage puts before us and thus have little notion of the suffering that can be inflicted when the noblest works of poetic drama are brought before the soul mutilated, maltreated and desecrated, as is only too often the case today.

It is as if the gods have turned away in anger from what we have made of their gifts. They gave us everything, held nothing back. Works of unbelievable stature, purity and perfection of form have come into being. The German language has been moulded into an instrument of subtlest strength and pliancy, to grasp the breadth and profundity of existence, to unfold the inner essences of things. It is still capable of transformation, of pliancy; it still has the ability to grow beyond itself, bearing mankind onward and upward in its progress. But whoever leads it on to its destination resolutely and imperturbably will be stoned – while those who make it banal, who reduce it to the level of the feuilleton will be venerated.

The German language’s potentialities for concrete delineation and for the transcending of conceptual formulations are also to be found in another way: in the plasticity and translucence of its speech-sounds. It is not in the usual sense musical – not superficially. One has to have an ear for it. But it does have so many lights and shades, such capacities for veiling the sound or for brightening, flashing, that with its help we can break through the bounds of the senses. The world beyond sounds through in its modified vowels and its diphthongs, whispers through its clusters of consonants and rings out in the freely-suspended vaulting of its syntax. We do not realise what an artistic experience language can be until we have learnt to listen inwardly, until psychic-spiritual sound has been transposed into tone-formation and soaring movement.

The world of today is sheer intellect rendered actual. It does not go beyond the mechanical and mathematical; it cannot find the way into imagination and the creating of myths. We are unable to produce images any more, because we have grown abstract and hollow. It is much easier to be clever in one’s thinking than it is to form imagery, since the intellectual stems from our personality, while aesthetic creation makes much greater demands an our selflessness. It immerses itself in the object rather than reflecting upon it, lets itself be drawn along rather than seizing hold of it. Through living in intellectualism we lose our real connection with the world. We deprive human beings of their immortal part. The forming of images affects not only the intellect, but the whole man, entering into much deeper strata of the soul-life than does conceptual thinking. In attempting to speak in imagery, we bind the atoms sundered in the course of study, and divided amongst the conventional categories of learning, into a new synthesis. It must all be raised into the sphere of Imagination, where the plasticity of the language is released into movement and its musicality becomes ensouled. In this it draws near to the eternal in the soul which stands behind everything intellectual. Through imaginative, ensouled speech we can lead man to the substantial content of the word, to the super-sensible, to the creative word that flows from the super-sensible. The immortal life of the soul is roused to awakening when we speak artistically, out of the image; immortal life is smothered when we work out of intellectualism.

When the spiritual scientific movement began its activity some thirty years ago, its aim was not to satisfy curiosity about the spiritual worlds, but to make spiritual knowledge available to a wider public, and provide insight that will help to solve not only spiritual but also everyday practical problems. One such problem is the subject of today's lecture. It belongs to everyday life and must be of interest to everyone. Knowledge of human nature and problems of education are intimately connected. No aspect of social life can benefit more from spiritual research than education, because it is possible to provide practical guidelines in this realm through supersensible knowledge.

In order to deal with this subject we must look once more at the nature of human beings. That aspect of their being that is grasped by the intellect is for spiritual science only part of their nature. The physical, bodily aspect that we can see and touch a person has in common with the rest of the natural world. The spiritual investigator's research is not based on speculation, but on what is discovered through the higher sense of clairvoyant sight. This reveals the ether body as the second member of a person's being. It is a spiritual organism that is considerably more delicate and refined than the physical body. It has nothing to do with physical ether, and is best described as a sum of forces or currents of energy rather than as substance.

The ether body is the architect of the physical body. The latter has crystallized out of the ether body much as ice crystallizes out of water. We must therefore regard everything that constitutes the physical aspect of a person's being as having evolved out of the ether body. Human being's have this member in common with all beings endowed with life, that is, with the vegetable and animal kingdoms. In shape and size the ether body coincides with the physical body except for the lower part, which differs in shape from the physical. In animals the ether body extends far beyond the physical. For someone who has developed the spiritual faculties that slumber in every human being, there is nothing fantastic about this description of the ether body, just as it is not fantastic for a person who can see to describe colors to a blind person as blue or red.

The third member of a person's being, the astral body, is the bearer of all kinds of passions, lower as well as higher, and also of joys and sorrows, pleasure and pain, cravings and desires. Our ordinary thoughts and will-impulses are also contained in the astral body. Like the ether body, it becomes visible when the higher senses are developed. The astral body permeates the physical and ether bodies and surrounds humans like a kind of cloud. We have it in common with the animal kingdom; it is in continuous movement, mirroring every shade of feeling. But why the name “astral?”

The physical substances of which the physical body is composed connect it with the whole earth; in like manner is the astral body connected with the world of stars. The forces that permeate it and condition a person's destiny and character were given the name “astral” by those who were able to look deeply into their mysterious connection with the astral world that surrounds the earth.

The fourth member of a person's being, the power that enables him or her to say “I,” makes the human being the crown of creation. This name can only be applied to himself; it expresses the fact that what speaks is the soul's primordial divine spark. The designations of everything else we share with others; they can reach a person's ear from outside, but not the name that refers to what is god-like in each individual human soul. That is why in Hebrew esoteric schools it was called the “inexpressible name of God—Jahve,” the “I am the I am.” Even the priest could utter it only with a shudder. This “I am the I am” the soul ascribes to itself.

The human physical body is related to the mineral kingdom, the ether body to the vegetable kingdom and the astral body to the animal kingdom. The “I” humans have in common with no other earthly being; the “I” makes a person the crown of creation. This fourfold entity has always been known in esoteric schools as the “quaternity of man's nature.”

These four bodies develop in each individual in a particular way from childhood till old age. That is why, if we are to understand a person, we must always consider each human being individually. A person's characteristics are indicated already in the embryo. However, humans are not isolated beings; they develop within a certain environment, and can thrive only when surrounded by all the beings of the universe. During embryonic life they must be enveloped by the maternal organism, from which they become independent only when a certain stage of maturity is reached. During further development, the child goes through more events of a similar nature. Just as the physical body while still at the embryonic stage must be enveloped by the maternal organism, so is it surrounded after birth by spiritual sheaths related to spiritual realms. The child is enveloped by an etheric and an astral sheath; the child reposes in them as he did in the womb before birth.

At the time of the change of teeth an etheric covering loosens itself from the ether body, as did the physical covering at physical birth. That means that the ether body is born and becomes free in all directions. Up to then an entity of like nature to itself was attached to it, from which spiritual currents flowed through it as physical currents flowed from the maternal covering through the child before birth. Thus, the child is born for a second time when the ether body is born. Meanwhile the astral body is still surrounded by its protective sheath, a covering that strengthens and invigorates it up to the time of puberty. Then that too withdraws; the birth of the astral body takes place; and the child is born for the third time.

The fact that a threefold birth takes place indicates that the three entities must be considered separately. While it is impossible for external light to reach and harm the eyes of the unborn child, it is not impossible, but certainly highly damaging to the soul, if influences foreign to it are brought to bear on the ether body before it has become completely independent. The same applies to the astral body before puberty. We should, according to spiritual science, avoid all education and training before the change of teeth, except such that have a bearing on the child's physical body; we should in fact influence the ether body as little as we influence the child's physical body before it is born. However, just as the mother must be cared for, because her health influences the development of the embryo, so one should now respect the inviolability of the ether body for the sake of the child's healthy development. This is so important because before the change of teeth only the physical body is ready to be influenced by the external world; all training should therefore be restricted to what concerns the physical body. Any external influence of the ether body during this period is a violation of laws according to which human beings develop.

The human ether body is different from that of the plant world because in a person it becomes the bearer of his enduring traits such as habit, character, conscience and memory, and also temperament. The astral body is the seat of the life of feelings already mentioned, and also of the ability to discern, to judge.

These facts indicate when it becomes right to exert influence on the natural tendencies. In the period up to the seventh year, the child's bodily faculties develop; they become independent and self-contained. The same applies between the seventh and the fourteenth years to habits, memory, temperament and so on; between the fourteenth and the twentieth or twenty-second years is the time when the faculty of the critical intellect develops, and an independent relation to the surrounding world is attained. All these things indicate that different principles of education are required in the various life periods. Special care must be taken up to the seventh year with everything that affects the physical body. This encompasses a great many things. It is a time when all the essential physical organs are gradually developing and the effect on the child's senses is of immense importance. It matters greatly what it sees and hears and generally absorbs. The faculty most prominent at this time is imitation. The Greek philosopher Aristotle¹ remarked that human beings are the most imitative of all animals. This is especially true of the child before the change of teeth. Everything is imitated during this time, and as whatever enters the child through its senses as light and sound works formatively on the organs, it is of utmost importance that what surrounds the child should act beneficially.

At this age nothing is achieved by admonition; commands and prohibitions have no effect whatever. But of the greatest significance is the example. What the child sees, what happens around him, he feels must be imitated. For instance: the parents of a well-behaved child were astonished to discover that he had taken money from a cashbox; greatly disturbed, they thought the child had inclinations to steal. Questioning brought to light that the child had simply imitated what he had seen his parents do every day.

It is important that the examples the child sees and imitates are of a kind that awaken its inner forces. Exhortations have no effect, but the way a person behaves in the child's presence matters greatly. It is far more important to refrain from doing what the child is not permitted to do than to forbid the child to imitate it.

Thus, it is vital that during these years the educator is an exemplary example, that he or she only does what is worthy of imitation. Education should consist of example and imitation. The truth of this is recognized when insight is attained into the nature of human beings and confirmed by the results of education based upon it. Thus, because the ability to understand what things mean is a faculty of the ether body, the child should not learn the significance of the letters of the alphabet before the change of teeth; before then, he or she should do no more than trace their form with paint.

Spiritual research makes all these subtleties understandable and throws light even on details of what should be done. Everything the child perceives, also in a moral sense, acts on the formation of its physical organs. It makes a difference whether the child is surrounded by pain and sorrow or happiness and joy. Happiness and joy build sound organs, and lay the foundation for future health. The opposite can create a disposition towards illness. Everything that surrounds the child should breathe an atmosphere of happiness and joy, even down to objects and colors of clothing and wallpaper. The educator must ensure that it does so, while also taking into account the child's particular disposition.

If a child is inclined to be too earnest and too quiet, it will benefit from having in its surroundings rather sombre, bluish, greenish colors, while the lively, too active child should have yellow, reddish colors. This may seem like a contradiction, but the fact is that through its inherent nature the sense of sight calls up the opposite colors. The bluish shades have an invigorating effect, while in the lively child the yellow-reddish shades call up the opposite colors.

Thus, you see that spiritual investigation throws light even on practical details. The developing organs must be treated in ways that promote their health and inner forces. The child should not be given toys that are too finished and perfect, such as building blocks or perfect dolls. A doll made out of an old table napkin on which eyes, nose and mouth are indicated is far better. Every child will see such a homemade doll as a lady attired in beautiful finery. Why? Because it stirs its imagination, and that induces movement in the inner organs and produces in the child a feeling of well-being. Notice in what a lively and interested manner such a child plays, throwing itself body and soul into what the imagination conjures up, while the child with the perfect doll just sits, unexcited and unamused. It has no possibility to add anything through imagination, so its inner organs are condemned to remain inactive. The child has an extraordinarily sound instinct for what is good for it, as long as only the physical body has become free to interact with the external world, and as long as it is in the process of development. The child will indicate what is beneficial for himself. However, if from early on this instinct is disregarded, it will disappear. Education should be based on happiness, on joy and the child's natural cravings. To practice asceticism at this age would be synonymous with undermining its healthy development.

When the child approaches the seventh year and the milk teeth are gradually being replaced, the covering of the ether body loosens and it becomes free, as did the physical body at physical birth. Now the educator must bring to bear everything that will further the development of the ether body. However, the teacher must guard against placing too much emphasis on developing the child's reason and intellect. Between the seventh and twelfth years, it is mainly a question of authority, confidence, trust and reverence. Character and habit are special qualities of the ether body and must be fostered; but it is harmful to exert any influence on the reasoning faculty before puberty.

The development of the ether body occurs in the period from the seventh to the sixteenth year (in girls to the fourteenth). It is important for the rest of a person's life that during this period feelings of respect and veneration are fostered. Such feelings can be awakened in the following way: by means of information and narration, the lives of significant people are depicted to the child, not only from history, but from the child's own circle, perhaps that of a revered relative. Awe and reverence are awakened in the child, which forbid him to harbor any critical thoughts or opposition against the venerated person. The child lives in solemn expectation of the moment he will be permitted to meet this person. At last the day arrives and the child stands before the door filled with awe and veneration; he turns the handle, enters the room that for him, is a holy place. Such moments of veneration become forces of strength in later life. It is immensely important that the educator, the teacher, is at this time a respected authority for the child. A child's faith and confidence must be awakened, not in axioms, but in human beings.

People around the child with whom he has contact must be his ideals; the child must also choose such ideals from history and literature: "Everyone must choose the hero whose path to Olympus he will follow," is a true saying. The materialistic view that opposes authority and undervalues respect and reverence is utterly wrong. It regards the child as being already self-reliant, but its healthy development is impaired if demands are made upon the reasoning faculty before the astral body is born. What is important at this time is that memory is developed. This is best done in purely mechanical fashion. However, calculators should not be used; tables of multiplication, poems and so on should be committed to memory in quite a parrot fashion. It is simply materialistic prejudice that maintains that at this age such things should be inwardly felt and understood.

In the old days educators knew better. At the ages between one and seven all kinds of songs were sung to the children, like the good old nursery rhymes and children's songs. What mattered was not sense and meaning but sound; the children were made aware of harmony and consonance; we often find words inserted purely for the sake of their sound. Often the rhymes were meaningless. For example: “Fly beetle fly, your father is away; your mother is in Pommerland, Pommerland, fly beetle fly.” Incidentally, in the idiom of children “Pommerland” meant motherland. The expression stemmed from a time when it was still believed that human beings were spiritual beings and had come down to earth from a spiritual world. Pommerland was the Land of spiritual origin. Yet it was not the meaning in such rhymes that was important, but the sound; hence, the many children's songs had no particular sense.

This is the age when memory, habit and character must be established, and this is achieved through authority. If the foundation of these traits is not laid during this period, it will result in behavioral shortcomings later. Just because axioms and rules of conduct have no place in education until the astral body is born, it is important that the pre-puberty child, if he is to be properly educated, can Look up to authority. The child is able to sense a person's innermost being, and that is what it reveres in those with authority. Whatever flows from the educator to the child forms and develops conscience, character and even the temperament—its lasting disposition. During these years allegories and symbols act formatively on the ether body of the child because they make manifest the world-spirit. Fairy tales, legends and descriptions of heroes are a true blessing.

During this period, the ether body must receive as much care as the physical body. During the earlier period it was happiness and joy that influenced the forming of the Organs; from seven to fourteen (in this case boys to sixteen), the emphasis must be on everything that promotes feelings of health and vigor. Hence, the value of gymnastics. However, the desired effect will not be attained if the instructor aims at movements that solely benefit the physical body. It is important that the teacher be able to intuitively enter into how the child inwardly senses himself, and in this way to know which movements will promote inner sensations of health, strength, well-being, and pleasure in the bodily constitution. Only when gymnastic exercises induce feelings of growing strength are they of real value. Not only the external aspect of the bodily nature benefits from correct gymnastic exercises, but also the way a person inwardly experiences the self.

Everything artistic has a strong influence on the ether, as well as the astral body. Music of excellence, both vocal and instrumental, is particularly important, especially for the ether body. And there should be many objects of true artistic beauty in the child's environment.

Most important of all is religious instruction. Images of things supersensible are deeply imprinted in the ether body. What is important here is not the pupil's ability to have an opinion about religious faith, but that he receives descriptions of the supersensible, of what extends beyond the temporal. All religious subjects must be presented pictorially.

Great care must be taken that what is taught is brought to life. Much is spoiled in the child if it is burdened with too much that is dull and lifeless. What is taught in a lively interesting manner benefits the child's ether body. There should be much activity and doing; this has a quickening effect on the spirit. That is true also when it comes to play. The old kind of picture books have a stimulating effect because they contain figures that can be pulled by strings and suggest movement and inner life. Nothing has a more deadening effect on the child's spirit than putting together and fixing some structure, using finished geometrical shapes. That is why building blocks should not be used; the child should create everything from the beginning and learn to bring to life what he forms out of the lifeless. Our materialistic age extinguishes life through mass-produced lifeless objects. Much dies in the young developing brain when the child has to do meaningless things like, for example, braiding. Talents are stifled and much that is unhealthy in our modern society can be traced back to the nursery. Inartistic lifeless toys do not foster trust in spiritual life. A fundamental connection exists between today's lack of religious belief and the way young children are taught.

Once puberty is reached, the astral covering falls away; the astral body becomes independent. With the awakening feelings for the opposite sex, the ability to judge, to form personal opinion, also awakens. Only now should appeal be made to the reasoning faculty, to the approval or disapproval of the critical intellect. That is not to say that the moment the human being has reached this age he is capable of forming independent judgment, let alone do so earlier. It is absurd for such young people to judge issues or to have a say in cultural life. A young person under the age of twenty has an as yet undeveloped astral body, and can no more make sound judgments than a baby still in the womb can hear or see. Each life period requires a corresponding influence. In the first, it is a model to imitate; in the second an authority to emulate; the third requires rules of conduct, principles, and axioms. What is of utmost significance for the young person at this time is the teacher, the personality that will guide the student's eagerness for learning and his desire for independence in the right directions.

Thus, the spiritual scientific world conception provides an abundance of basic principles that help the teacher's task of developing and educating the young generations. We have shown that spiritual science is applicable to everyday life and capable of practical intervention in important issues. We must understand all the members of the human being, and the way they are interrelated in order to know when to influence which member in a truly beneficial way. The embryo will be affected if the expectant mother is not properly nourished; for its sake the mother must be cared for. Similarly, what later still surrounds and protects the child must also be cared for, as that in turn will benefit the child. This holds good on both physical and spiritual levels. Thus, as long as the child still slumbers as if within an etheric womb and is still rooted in the astral covering, it matters greatly what happens in the environment. The child is affected by every thought, every feeling, every sentiment motivating those around him, even if not expressed. Here a person cannot maintain that one's thoughts and feelings do not matter as long as nothing is said.

Even in the innermost recesses of their hearts, those around the child cannot permit themselves ignoble thoughts or feelings. Words affect only the external senses, whereas thoughts and feelings reach the protecting sheaths of the ether and astral bodies and pass over to the child. Therefore, as long as these protective coverings envelop the child, they must be cared for. Impure thoughts and passions harm them just as unsuitable substances harm the mother's body.

Thus, even subtle aspects are illumined by spiritual science. Through knowledge of the human being the educator gains the insight needed. Spiritual science does not aim to persuade; it is not a theory, it is practical knowledge applicable to life. Its effect is beneficial, for it makes human beings healthier both physically and spiritually. It provides effective truth that must flow into every aspect of life. There is no better way for spiritual science to serve humanity than fostering social impulses in the young during the formative years. What takes place in human beings during the time they grow up and mature is one of life's greatest riddles; those who find practical solutions will prove true educators.

• 1. Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) was a Greek philosopher and one of the most influential thinkers of his time.

BEFORE the lecture, Dr Steiner makes some announcements regarding arrangements:

My dear friends!

Before opening today's meeting I must ask your forgiveness for yesterday's unpleasantness about access to the hall and having to wait outside. I do beg your forgiveness for this most annoying incident which, however, was truly the consequence of a whole sequence of misunderstandings. From now on we shall make sure that our friends will find the doors open here half an hour before any meeting. I am also doing my best to have two more radiators put in tonight so that it will no longer be quite so cold in the outer room. It is really difficult in this primitive accommodation to create conditions which are satisfactory for everybody. Please believe me when I say that the conditions are the least satisfactory of all for the Vorstand and myself. Let us hope that we can avoid too much trouble in the coming days.

Now may I ask Herr Stuten to speak. He is going to give us the pleasure of a lecture about the element of music in spiritual life.

Herr Stuten gives his lecture on music and the spiritual world.

After a fifteen-minute break the debate on the Statutes continues. Dr Steiner opens with the following words:

My dear friends! Today once again I shall speak the words which are to give us the foundation for our present work as well as for our continued work outside:

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the limbs
Which bear thee through the world of space
In the spirit's ocean-being.
Practise spirit-recalling
In depths of soul,
Where in the wielding will
Of world-creating
Thine own I
Comes to being
Within God's I.
And thou wilt truly live
In the World-Being of Man.

For the Father-Spirit of the heights holds sway
In depths of worlds begetting being.

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the beat of heart and lung
Which leads thee through the rhythm of time
Into the realm of thine own soul's feeling.
Practise spirit-awareness
In balance of the soul,
Where the surging deeds
Of the world's becoming
Thine own I
Unite
With the World-I.
And thou wilt truly feel
In the Soul-Weaving of Man.

For the Christ-Will in the encircling round holds sway
In the rhythms of the worlds, bestowing grace on the soul.

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the resting head
Which from the grounds of eternity
Opens to thee the world-thoughts.
Practise spirit-beholding
In stillness of thought,
Where the eternal aims of Gods
World-Being's
Light
On thine own I
Bestow
For thy free willing.
And thou wilt truly think
In the Spirit-Foundations of Man.

For the world-thoughts of the Spirit hold sway
In the being of worlds, craving for light.

Now, dear friends, let us once more inscribe the inner rhythm into our souls, the rhythm that can show us closely how these very words resound out of the rhythm of the universe.

The first verse:

Practise spirit-recalling

This is the activity that can be accomplished within one's own soul. It corresponds to what out there in the great universe is expressed in the words:

For the Father-Spirit of the heights holds sway
In depths of worlds begetting being.

The second is:

Practise spirit-awareness

That is the process within, which is answered out there in the universe by:

For the Christ-Will in the encircling round holds sway
In the rhythms of the worlds, bestowing grace on the soul.

The third is:

Practise spirit-beholding

From out there comes the answer:

For the world-thoughts of the Spirit hold sway
In the being of worlds, craving for light.

DR STEINER: We shall now continue our meeting with a discussion of Paragraph 4 of the Statutes. Would Dr Wachsmuth please read Paragraph 4.

Paragraph 4 is read by Dr Wachsmuth:

‘4. The Anthroposophical Society is in no sense a secret society, but is entirely public. Anyone can become a member, without regard to nationality, social standing, religion, scientific or artistic conviction, who considers as justified the existence of an institution such as the Goetheanum in Dornach, in its capacity as a School of Spiritual Science. The Anthroposophical Society rejects any kind of sectarian activity. Party politics it considers not to be within its task.’

DR STEINER: Mr Collison has applied to speak first.

MR COLLISON: Please pardon me, as a very old member, for saying a few words about the Statutes. We have now come to point 4. I believe that it cannot be our intention to improve on these Statutes. Dr Steiner has put so much effort into them and they are truly all-embracing. It seems to me that any debate on the various points should serve the purpose solely of asking any questions there might be about the meaning or the extent of any of them.

(Lengthy applause.)

DR STEINER: Who would like to speak about Paragraph 4?

The suggestion is made that the Statutes should be adopted by acclamation.

DR STEINER: Yes, but I still have to ask whether anybody would like to speak to Paragraph 4. This Paragraph is in the main concerned with the fact that quite soon we shall be presenting the Anthroposophical Society to the world as an entirely public society. And everything that can contain the esoteric element, despite this public character, will be ensured by Paragraph 5 and subsequent Paragraphs.

May I ask once more who would like to speak to Paragraph 4 of the Statutes? There seems to be nobody. So will those friends who are in favour of adopting Paragraph 4 please raise their hands. (They do.) Who is in favour of rejecting Paragraph 4? (No hands are raised.) Paragraph 4 is adopted at the second reading.

Would Herr Wachsmuth please read Paragraph 5 of the Statutes.

Paragraph 5 is read out:

‘5. The Anthroposophical Society sees the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach as a centre for its activity. The School will be composed of three Classes. Members of the Society will be admitted to the School on their own application after a period of membership to be determined by the leadership at the Goetheanum. They enter in this way the First Class of the School of Spiritual Science. Admission to the Second or Third Class takes place when the person requesting this is deemed eligible by the leadership at the Goetheanum.’

DR STEINER: Now, my dear friends, the purpose of this Paragraph is to enable the soul which naturally belongs to the Anthroposophical Society and which can be given to it in the Goetheanum at Dornach, to be given to it indeed in the near future. This Paragraph of the Statutes is intended to make members, or those who still want to become members, conscious of the fact that in the Goetheanum we are given the soul of the Anthroposophical Movement. This will make it possible for the esoteric impulses that ought to be given to the Anthroposophical Society to actually be given to it. We shall make progress if you endeavour to penetrate to the spirit of this fifth Paragraph.

I would only like to say a few things about how I see the constitution of the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, at the Goetheanum, in the future. Those who have sojourned and worked within the Anthroposophical Society for some time have had the opportunity of realizing quite well that in the matter of advancing in the schooling by stages it will more and more be a question not merely of intellectual capacities, least of all the type of intellectual and empirical schooling customary in the outside world except where absolutely necessary in respect of specialist knowledge. An important role will have to be played by the capacities that lie in the feelings and in those of direct perception of the esoteric and the occult, and by moral qualities and so on. The fundamental feature of what will be at work with regard to the three Classes, which are built on the foundation of the Anthroposophical Society, which in its turn is entirely public—this fundamental feature in the working of the three Classes will be, of course, the spiritual-scientific content. But for this very reason it will be necessary for us to present the working of the School of Spiritual Science before the world in a way that shows how it can inspire the various realms of civilization, of knowledge, of art and so on. Here, too, from the start, we must not allow ourselves to think along any given lines. What is meant by thinking along a given line? To think along a given line would be to say: The School of Spiritual Science must be divided up in accordance with a concept or an idea such as a logical division into the first Section, the second Section, the third, the fourth, the fifth Section and so on. This can be nicely thought out.

What is usually the consequence of such a way of thinking? It is a structure that lies in the realm of Cloud-cuckoo-land. And on top of that, this structure has to be administered! So then you start hunting for suitable people, you look around all over the place for people who have to fit into the first, the second, the third Section, and finally they are somehow juggled in by means of some sort of election or something. Usually what then becomes apparent is that they settle as though into a chrysalis in their particular department in the scheme; they creep into their chrysalis, but no butterfly emerges. So let us not proceed in an abstract way. Let us start by taking the activities that are already going on and put together the Sections out of the existing facts. Let us take what is already there. You see, dear friends, the management of what has to be administered, including what has to be administered in the highest spiritual sense in the different realms, cannot be carried out by just anybody who might be called and who might not even live here permanently. Is it not so that if more is to be done than merely talking about work, if the work itself is actually to be done with full responsibility, then firstly each one doing the work must be constantly available for all the others, and secondly the leadership as a whole must be accessible at any time to those who are responsible. That is why simply out of spiritual empiricism I thought that the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach should be led by me with regard to all esoteric matters and that I should be supported in this leadership by those people who have shared spiritually in the work of bringing about the building of the Anthroposophical Movement.

What I am now going to say therefore arises naturally out of the situation in Dornach at the moment. First of all it will fall to me to maintain an overall view and to administer the School as a whole, while also taking on the leadership of the general anthroposophical and pedagogical aspects.

I would carry out the leadership of the other aspects by placing at the head of the different Sections those persons who are in a position, from what has gone before, to run a particular branch of the work of the Anthroposophical Movement.

Out of this there would arise: Firstly—I have mentioned it already—what in France is called ‘belles-lettres.’ I don't know whether the expression is still used. No? What a pity! In Germany they spoke of ‘schöne Wissenschaften’ up to the nineteenth century, and then the term lapsed. The ‘beautiful sciences’, sciences which brought beauty into human knowledge, aesthetics, art. How typical that even in France the expression ‘belles-lettres’ is no longer used!

SOMEONE CALLS OUT: ‘Académie des lettres!’

Yes, but the ‘belles’ has been left out! And it is just this aspect with which I am concerned. We have plenty of sciences, but where are the ‘beautiful sciences’? I don't know what those of you gathered here, especially the younger members, intent on science, think about the matter, but here in Dornach we link up not only with more recent times but also with most ancient past times. Therefore we may, and indeed must, create a Section for the field that in France used to be called ‘belles-lettres’ and in Germany is called ‘schöne Wissenschaften.’ Perhaps we shall have to give it a less unaccustomed name for the world at large, but so far I haven't found one. And once again I have to say that it is perfectly obvious that there is a person here who could not be more suitable as the leader of this Section, and that is our dear friend Albert Steffen who will most certainly do nothing in this realm which is not most eminently suited to the spiritual-scientific Movement as it is intended to take its start here from Dornach. (Lively applause.)

Then there is the realm of the spoken arts together with music and eurythmy. Once again there is a person on whom the choice falls quite naturally, so there is no need for me to say a great deal. My leadership of this realm will be through Frau Dr Steiner as the Section Leader. (Lively applause.)

Another department to be created here is a Section for the natural sciences themselves. You know that our attitude to the natural sciences is such that we seek in them something extremely profound and that it is most urgent for us to metamorphose the way they are treated nowadays into something quite different. You will see from a work of literature which is almost ready at the printer that our dear friend, Dr Guenther Wachsmuth, has devoted himself enthusiastically to this metamorphosis of natural science. Therefore we shall most fruitfully be able to entrust the department for the natural sciences to Dr Guenther Wachsmuth. (Applause.)

In connection with this will be a department which must be cultivated especially carefully because always in times when true spiritual knowledge has been striven for its field has been not so much a chapter of spiritual science as rather something quite organically linked with spiritual science. It is impossible to imagine that in olden times the spiritual vision, the spiritual knowledge given to mankind could have been separated in any way from the medical element. It will be seen in the work which Frau Dr Wegman has been doing with me here, which is soon to be made public, how not only a synthesis but an organic development can arise for a true anthroposophical view of the world. Once more, therefore, it is as a matter of course that the administration of the medical department, the Medical Section, should be conducted through me with the help of the Section Leader Frau Dr Wegman. (Applause.)

Now my dear friends, if you call to mind the old Goetheanum, and if you call to mind the beautiful words spoken about it today by our friend Herr Stuten in his excellent lecture, then you will see that the sculptural or plastic arts, too, have played a great role here. They will have to go on playing this role in future, so we shall certainly need a Section for the Sculptural Arts. You know that for years Miss Maryon has been at my side in carrying out the sculptural arts for the Goetheanum. Most unfortunately she is unable to take part in this gathering as she is suffering from a long illness which has prevented her even from stepping over here to take part. But I hope that after a while, when she is well again, she will be able to devote herself to the work of which I am now speaking. I shall carry out all that needs to be done here by way of sculpture and in the realm of the sculptural arts through the leader of this Section, Miss Maryon. (Applause.)

And there is another person who has marked out her territory in the world so clearly that whenever advice or help is needed in the realm of mathematics and astronomy it comes from her. You, and especially those resident in Dornach, can see from the content of my most recent lectures, including those given here before the last cycle, how necessary it is, especially in the field of astronomy, to go back to the more ancient conceptions. If you consider a small note in my memoires which are now appearing in Das Goetheanum—just at the beginning of the article coming out this evening⁵²—you will see how very profound are the reasons for the motto over Plato's Academy: ‘God geometrizes’. And indeed it is only possible to penetrate Platonic instruction—I am speaking of Platonic instruction and not spiritual-scientific instruction—by means of mathematics. Everything which needs to be put straight in this field must be put straight. And I believe that you will be as enthusiastic as you were in the other cases when I tell you that in the future I shall let this area be tended through Fräulein Dr Vreede as the Section Leader. (Applause.)

My dear friends! If I had divided up these Sections according to ideas, no doubt there would have been others too, but the people would have been lacking here in Dornach who could have seen to what was necessary in accordance with all the fundamental conditions. You may believe me that whereas the Statutes are the fruit of four weeks' consideration, the announcements I have just made are based on the experience of years. So this is how things will have to stand.

Later on, when we come to include the Vorstand in the Statutes, I shall speak on this final point of the Statutes and tell you how I see the relationship between the Collegium of Section Leaders, who administer the School, and the Vorstand, which bears the initiative for the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society.

Now would anyone wishing to speak to Paragraph 5 of the Statutes please do so. (Nobody does.) Mr Collison's words appear to be having a remarkably muting effect!

HERR INGERÖ: Respected friends! Just a brief question: In Paragraph 5 does the statement ‘a period of membership determined by the leadership at the Goetheanum’ refer to an individual period or will it be general?

DR STEINER: It will be entirely individual. You must consider how it will arise. Of your own free will you become a member of the Anthroposophical Society, or you are one already and have been for some time. For most of you sitting here the conditions are already fulfilled. But it also says here ‘on their own application’. This means that you express your will to become a member of the School. And then the leadership of the Goetheanum decides whether this is possible at the present moment or not until some future moment. This is how this matter will be dealt with in practice.

Would anyone else like to speak to Paragraph 5? If not, will those who wish to adopt Paragraph 5 please raise their hands. (They do.) Will those who do not wish to accept it please raise their hands. (Nobody does.) Paragraph 5 is herewith adopted at the second reading.

Please would you now read Paragraph 6.

Dr Wachsmuth reads Paragraph 6 of the Statutes:

‘6. Every member of the Anthroposophical Society has the right to attend all lectures, performances and meetings arranged by the Society, under conditions to be announced by the Vorstand.’

DR STEINER: My dear friends! You may perhaps be brought up short by the clause: ‘under conditions to be announced by the Vorstand.’ I considered it for a long time. I said to myself that the most natural formulation for this sentence would be: ‘Every member of the Anthroposophical Society has the right to attend all lectures, performances and meetings arranged by the Society.’ It could indeed have been left like this. But then in principle we should have been unable to do what unfortunately we do have to do. We would not, for example, have been able to fix the price of tickets for the different events. This is the kind of conditions meant. In fact the thought uppermost in my mind was the price of tickets. It is dreadful, is it not, to have this thought uppermost in one's mind. But it cannot be avoided. For just as human beings cannot live on air alone, so is it also not possible to exist with the Anthroposophical Movement if our idealism does not occasionally reach for our wallet. Other similar conditions might also arise. But I cannot help finding it necessary to lay down in this Paragraph this matter of conditions of entry which refer to the public aspect of the Society. Does anyone wish to speak to Paragraph 6? (Nobody does.) Mr Collison really is a magician! Does anyone want to speak to Paragraph 6? If not, will those dear friends who are in favour of adopting Paragraph 6 at the second reading please raise their hands. (They do.)

Will those friends who do not wish to do so raise their hands. (Nobody does.) Paragraph 6 is adopted at the second reading. (Applause.)

Will Dr Wachsmuth now please read Paragraph 7.

Paragraph 7 is read:

‘7. The organizing of the School of Spiritual Science is, to begin with, the responsibility of Rudolf Steiner, who will appoint his collaborators and his possible successor.’

DR STEINER: I have just been telling you how I see the leadership of the School. And I have nothing more in particular to say to this Paragraph. Will those respected friends who wish to speak to this Paragraph please do so. Does anyone want to speak to Paragraph 7? It seems not. So will those friends who wish to adopt Paragraph 7 at the second reading please raise their hands. (They do.) Will those who do not wish to adopt it please raise their hands. (Nobody does.) Paragraph 7 is adopted at the second reading.

Now will Dr Wachsmuth please read Paragraph 8.

Paragraph 8 is read:

‘8. All publications of the Society shall be public, in the same sense as are those of other public societies. The publications of the School of Spiritual Science will form no exception as regards this public character; however, the leadership of the School reserves the right to deny in advance the validity of any judgment on these publications which is not based on the same training from which they have been derived. Consequently they will regard as justified no judgment which is not based on an appropriate preliminary training, as is also the common practice in the recognized scientific world. Thus the publications of the School of Spiritual Science will bear the following note: “Printed as manuscript for members of the School of Spiritual Science, Goetheanum, ... Class. No one is considered competent to judge the content, who has not acquired—through the School itself or in a manner recognized by the School as equivalent—the requisite preliminary knowledge. Other opinions will be disregarded, to the extent that the authors of such works will not enter into a discussion about them.” ’

DR STEINER: My dear friends! With this I have attempted to put into practice something about which I have been thinking—if you would like to know a definite point in time—since the year 1913 before the laying of the foundation stone of the Gaetheanum. We must be clear about the fact that it is quite likely that a movement such as the Anthroposophical Movement will create a society to be its bearer which in some form smacks of sectarianism. You cannot really blame such people who take part in a society of that kind, for you know how great a tendency towards sectarianism coming from ancient atavistic impulses people still carry within them. Often they do not realize it, but people do bear sectarian impulses within themselves. Thus it has come about that amid what I might call the somewhat tumultuous arrangements for the printing of the cycles something has entered the Society, with regard to the way these matters are dealt with, which does make a sectarian impression. For it is incomprehensible to people in their modern consciousness that it is possible to print a number of copies of something, a number exceeding one hundred, and then to want to hide it within some sort of community. You just can't do this. In some fields it would indeed be fruitful to hide certain things, but it is not carried out. In the year 1888 I once spoke with the well-known philosopher, Eduard von Hartmann,⁵³ whose field concerned the unconscious, about how few people there are who read books about the theory of knowledge, even though 500 and even sometimes 1000 copies are printed. Eduard von Hartmann said that one ought to disseminate not more than 60-70 copies, for there were only 60-70 people who could really understand the theory of knowledge. I am referring to the theory of knowledge which Eduard von Hartmann was just preparing. I believe, though, that in my own little book on the theory of knowledge, The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethes World Conception⁵⁴—it has just appeared in a new edition—that I have contributed something in this field which everybody can read. However, I do believe that it is not possible to carry out the principle of keeping something secret once it has been put into print. In practice it has proved impossible. After all, we now have a situation in which our enemies are far more quick to speak in public about a new publication than are the anthroposophists themselves. Facts such as these have to be taken into account. We can only make progress with our great aims if on the other hand we take into account this spirit of the age. This spirit of the age cannot tolerate external secrets, but it can quite well tolerate internal secrets. For the really esoteric anthroposophical writings will still remain a very, very great secret for people for a long time to come. And externally we do not need to keep things physically secret if we can keep them private morally by working towards a recognition on the part of the world at large that, as with any other field of knowledge, there are boundaries between experts and non-experts. In dealing with the non-experts it must always be possible for us to point out that their judgment is comparable to the judgment of a peasant on differential calculus. If we work on this basis, we shall after a while—not straight away—succeed in solving the matter of the cycles in appropriate fashion. As I said, I have been thinking about this question for ten years and now a solution had to be found. This moral solution is the only one I can think of. After ‘All publications of the Society shall be public, in the same sense as are those of other public societies’ I want to add ‘The conditions under which one acquires a spiritual training have also been made public, and they shall continue to be presented publicly’. This is to be added in the form of a note in order to avoid the misunderstanding that was pointed out yesterday. I must of course reserve the possibility of perhaps improving the style of the imprint that is to go in the publications. Perhaps after ‘Printed as manuscript for members of the School of Spiritual Science, Goetheanum, ...’ should be added ‘but fully available to everyone’ or something like that. We shall see. It will have to be finalized very soon because the stamp to be used on the cycles that have already been printed, or are about to be printed, will have to be made up so that we can put the whole thing into practice as soon as possible once we have brought the Anthroposophical Society into being through our Conference here. Now, may I ask who would like to speak to Paragraph 8?

DR BÜCHENBACHER: Instead of ‘erkannt’ in the penultimate sentence, should it not say ‘anerkannt’?

DR STEINER: Yes, of course. It's a printer's error.^A

DR BÜCHENBACHER: May I ask whether the cycles which have already been in the possession of members for years are to be treated as publications of the School of Spiritual Science?

DR STEINER: All the cycles. In confronting the consciousness of our time we can do no other than make these measures applicable to all the cycles. This matter will mean that there will have to be a certain amount of piety among members, too. It is not a suggestion that they should sell off the cycles in their possession as quickly as possible to a second-hand bookseller.

FRÄULEIN SIMON: Does this also apply to all the publications similar to the cycles? Will they also have this note imprinted or stamped in them?

DR STEINER: On the whole it will apply only to the cycles and those publications which are equal to the cycles.

HERR WERBECK: What about the national economy course given here? Does that count as a cycle?

DR STEINER: The matter is somewhat different regarding the few works which have not actually been published by me or by the anthroposophical publishing company but which a particular circle has been given permission to print. In one way I am quite grateful to you for giving me the opportunity to speak about this rather vexed question. In the case of these papers it should be a matter of course that they are only to be used by those who have been permitted to do so. This national economy course is one, and the medical course is another, and so on. If they were to be published more widely, the author's rights would have to be returned to me. If we were planning to transform these papers into the form given to the cycles bearing this note, they would have to be returned to me, and they could only be brought out by the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag as cycles published bearing this note. The customary author's rights would have to be considered in such a case. Does anyone else wish to speak to this Paragraph?

DR KOLISKO: Regarding what Dr Steiner has just said I should like to say the following: I would be very happy to give the specialist courses, the three scientific courses which Dr Steiner gave in Stuttgart, and also the medical course, back to the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag because I am convinced that it would be better if all these publications were to be brought out by the School of Spiritual Science if Dr Steiner has this in mind. This is what I wanted to say about this vexed question.

DR STEINER: Does anyone else wish to speak to Paragraph 8?

HERR LEINHAS: It says here ‘the authors of such works will not enter into a discussion about them’. Does this mean that the intention is that members of the School belonging to a particular Class shall not enter into a discussion with others?

DR STEINER: Yes, of course.

HERR GOYERT: I want to ask whether it is intended that the note to be put in the cycles is also to be put in the copies that are already in the possession of members?

DR STEINER: In the Supplement to Das Goetheanum we shall appeal to members who possess such copies to write this note in their copies themselves. And as regards the copies still in stock, they will all have the note stamped in them. Every cycle, regardless of whether it came into being in the past or is yet to come into being in the future, will bear this note.

DR PEIPERS: Would it not be desirable, in order to avoid misunderstandings, to state in a note that the specialist scientific courses are included among the publications?

DR STEINER: What kind of misunderstanding is likely to arise? You cannot include something ephemeral in a statute. I mean it is impossible to say in a statute: ‘To avoid a misunderstanding’—about something that is obvious, and then expect it to refer, let us say for example, to the medical course. It is obvious that the medical course was given subject to certain conditions. And if it was given subject to these conditions, then, should it be published, it will be returned to me. I find this a matter of course. We should have to include an awful lot in the Statutes that does not belong there if we were to mention all kinds of things which are customary. I do not think this sort of thing belongs in the Statutes.

MR KAUFMANN: In future are we to advise new members to read the cycles even though they do not yet belong to the corresponding Class of the School?

DR STEINER: This is an entirely individual and personal matter. It is of course not possible to issue directives about it. There will be new members to whom it will be quite suitable to recommend the reading of the cycles, since they will be publicly available, and there will be others for whom this advice will not be suitable; the latter will then either abide by the advice or they will read them anyway. I think it is extremely difficult to give directives about this, and I have had some strange experiences in this connection. For instance I made the acquaintance of a branch⁵⁵ which even went to the extent of advising its members whether or not they should read this book or that book. Some people who were already members were not even allowed to read my book Theosophy because it was thought to be unsuitable for them. Well, it was up to these members themselves whether they found the leader of this group to be such an authority that they were prepared to stand to attention even in their souls! Or else they did not. You cannot issue generalized directives.

MADEMOISELLE SAUERWEIN: Will the cycles be published in the accustomed form or will they then be available from bookshops?

DR STEINER: The cycles will be published by the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag, but the route by which they make their way to those who possess copies will of course depend on those people themselves. If they want to order them by some means through the book trade—we shall of course not offer terms for them, as the expression goes—if someone wants to order a cycle from a bookseller, we shall have no objection to fulfilling the order. That is quite customary.

FRAU MUNTZ: If outsiders ask us to give them a cycle, should we do so?

DR STEINER: This has hitherto gone on to such an extent that I would not know how it could be prevented. Only by strictly emphasising the public nature of everything can we get beyond what smacks of sectarianism. Is there anyone else who would like to speak to Paragraph 8 of the Statutes? If not, then I shall now put this Paragraph to the vote. Will those friends who are in favour of adopting Paragraph 8 at the second reading please raise their hands. (They do.) Now will those friends who are against it please raise their hands. (Nobody does.) Paragraph 8 has been adopted at the second reading.

Would Dr Wachsmuth now please read Paragraph 9.

Paragraph 9 is read out:

‘9. The purpose of the Anthroposophical Society will be the furtherance of spiritual research; that of the School of Spiritual Science will be this research itself. A dogmatic stand in any field whatsoever is to be excluded from the Anthroposophical Society.’

DR STEINER: It seems to me that the content of this Paragraph is easily understood. I would only like to point out that it is not a repetition of what has been said in earlier Paragraphs but that it is necessary because it states the purpose of the Anthroposophical Society, namely the furtherance of spiritual research, that is in so far as it is cultivated at the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach. And it has to be stressed that anything dogmatic is excluded from the administration of the Anthroposophical Society.

Does anyone wish to speak to this Paragraph 9? If not, will those friends who wish to adopt Paragraph 9 at the second reading please raise their hands. (They do.) Now will those friends who are against it raise their hands. (Nobody does.) Paragraph 9 is thus adopted at the second reading.

Now we come to Paragraph 10. Will Dr Wachsmuth please read out Paragraph 10.

Paragraph 10 is read out:

‘10. The Anthroposophical Society shall hold a regular General Meeting at the beginning of the year at the Goetheanum, at which time the Vorstand shall present a full report with accounting. The agenda for this meeting shall be communicated by the Vorstand to all members, together with the invitation, three weeks before the meeting. The Vorstand may call special meetings and fix the agenda for them. Invitations to such meetings shall be sent to members three weeks in advance. Motions proposed by individual members or groups of members shall be submitted one week before the General Meeting.’

DR STEINER: Does anyone wish to speak to this Paragraph 10? My endeavour has been to say as much as is necessary in the Statutes.

HERR HOHLENBERG: I would like to ask whether this General Meeting has to take place at the beginning of the year or whether another time can be chosen?

DR STEINER: I am not capriciously attached to the beginning of the year if it is enough for you not to have the guarantee of being able to count on a particular time so that the meeting might sometimes be in January and sometimes in December. Would this suffice? We do not want to arrange any of these things in an abstract way and we will try to put out our feelers here and there. If you think it is enough, we can say: ‘The Anthroposophical Society shall hold a regular General Meeting each year at the Goetheanum.’ I only included it because I thought that not stating the time of the meeting would meet with contradiction.

DR KOLISKO: I am in favour of leaving it in.

DR STEINER: Why?

DR KOLISKO: Because after having had many conversations I have come to realize that very many friends attach great value to the meeting taking place at Christmas time when this Christmas Conference itself is taking place.

DR STEINER: Perhaps it would be better to state it as a general wish without including it in the Statutes. Such things can be arranged in a different way.

When we have finished the discussion on the Statutes I shall be announcing to you that the Vorstand—I hope it will still be possible during this Conference—will be presenting you with By-Laws as well. These will include a number of subsidiary points which do not belong in the Statutes. The Statutes should be composed in a way that makes it possible for anybody to read them in about a quarter of an hour, with five minutes to spare in which to think about them. So I am eager to make these Statutes as brief as possible. They must be so short that there is no room in them for any special points. So I think it will be quite alright to leave this out. Does anyone else wish to speak?

HERR DONNER: In connection with this point it would be good to consider whether the national Societies should hold their General Meetings first, before the General Meeting of the General Anthroposophical Society. Would it be practical for this to be done every time?

DR STEINER: It would indeed be quite practical if it could become customary for the national Societies to hold their meetings first, in which they would nominate their delegates for the meeting here, after which they would hold another meeting to report on what had gone on here. This would perhaps be the best custom if it comes about.

MRS MERRY: I do not think three weeks are enough for the invitation.

DR STEINER: Very well, let us say six weeks. I have already said in the Vorstand that it could be six weeks. There is also another sentence to be added. The sentence I want to add here is: ‘A certain number of members, to be determined from time to time in the By-Laws, has the right to request a special General Meeting at any time.’ The possibility for this must also be left open.

HERR LEINHAS: I only want to recommend that the time for calling a special meeting should remain at three weeks; for the General Meeting itself six weeks, for the special meeting a shorter period.

DR STEINER: Very well. Three weeks can be made to suffice for the special meeting. Would anyone else like to speak to Paragraph 10? It seems not. So may I ask those friends who are in favour of adopting Paragraph 10 to raise their hands. (They do.) Please will those who are against it raise their hands. (Nobody does.) Paragraph 10 is adopted.

Will Dr Wachsmuth please read Paragraph 11.

Paragraph 11 is read out:

‘11. Members may join together in smaller or larger groups on any basis of locality or subject. The headquarters of the Anthroposophical Society is at the Goetheanum. From there the Vorstand shall bring to the attention of the members or groups of members what it considers to be the task of the Society. The Vorstand communicates with officials elected or appointed by the various groups. Admission of members will be the concern of the individual groups; the certificate of membership shall, however, be placed before the Vorstand in Dornach, and shall be signed by them out of their confidence in the officials of the groups. In general, every member should join a group. Only those for whom it is quite impossible to find entry to a group should apply directly to Dornach for membership.’

DR STEINER: Does anyone wish to speak on this point? Naturally this point in particular can be explained further in the By-Laws. What is included here need not be said in general. This Paragraph shows how admissions are to be handled and everything else is a matter of general custom, which there is indeed no harm in changing from time to time.

Does anyone wish to speak to Paragraph 11? Seemingly not. So may I ask those friends who are in favour of adopting Paragraph 11 to raise their hands. (They do.) Now will those friends who are in favour of rejecting Paragraph 11 raise their hands. (Nobody does.) Paragraph 11 is thus adopted at the second reading.

Would Dr Wachsmuth now please read Paragraph 12.

Paragraph 12 is read out:

‘12. Membership dues shall be fixed by the individual groups; each group shall, however, submit ... for each of its members to the central leadership of the Society at the Goetheanum.’

DR STEINER: I would now ask you for the moment not to discuss the amount to be inserted here. It will be considered to start with after the Vorstand has made suggestions at the meeting of the General Secretaries tomorrow morning at 8.30. What the General Secretaries consider to be possible and necessary can then be reported at the subsequent meeting of members. I would ask you to accept this Paragraph in its overall sense. Does anyone wish to speak? If not, will those friends who accept Paragraph 12 in this sense please raise their hands. (They do.) Will those friends who wish to reject Paragraph 12 raise their hands. (Nobody does.) Paragraph 12 is adopted at the second reading.

Would Dr Wachsmuth now read Paragraph 13.

Paragraph 13 is read out:

‘13. Each working group formulates its own statutes, but these must not be incompatible with the Statutes of the Anthroposophical Society.’

DR STEINER: Does anyone wish to speak to Paragraph 13?—I think it is as obvious as anything could be. May I then ask those friends who adopt Paragraph 13 to raise their hands. (They do.) Will those friends who wish to reject Paragraph 13 raise their hands. (Nobody does.) Paragraph 13 is adopted at the second reading.

Would Dr Wachsmuth now read Paragraph 14.

Paragraph 14 is read out:

‘14. The organ of the Society is Das Goetheanum, which for this purpose is provided with a Supplement containing the official communications of the Society. This enlarged edition of Das Goetheanum will be supplied to members of the Anthroposophical Society only.’

DR STEINER: I have already spoken about this Paragraph 14 and would now ask those friends who wish to speak to it to do so. Does anyone wish to speak to Paragraph 14?

QUESTION: Will Das Goetheanum be available from Switzerland only?

DR STEINER: We will adopt as a custom whatever will be most practical in the circumstances. An arrangement has already been made with the German section, in whose case it will be distributed from Stuttgart. Obviously we shall do whatever is most practical in any given circumstances.

A SPEAKER: To make things quite clear it ought to say: ‘The organ of the Society is the weekly Das Goetheanum’.

DR STEINER: The weekly. Very well. Does anyone else wish to speak?

HERR GOYERT: If the weekly is changed into a different kind of journal, then this will no longer be correct.

DR STEINER: Let us hope that this will not be the case. Perhaps it will be quite a good thing if we have a means of keeping the weekly journal as it is, and not changing it. Does anyone else wish to speak? If not, will those friends who are in favour of adopting Paragraph 14 please raise their hands. (They do.) Please would those not in favour raise their hands. (Nobody does.) Paragraph 14 is adopted at the second reading.

Now we have to add a fifteenth Paragraph:

‘At the Foundation Meeting at Christmas 1923 the constitution of the Founding Vorstand will be:

Rudolf Steiner as President
Albert Steffen as Vice-president
Frau Dr Wegman as Recording Secretary
Dr Guenther Wachsmuth as Secretary and Treasurer
Frau Dr Steiner as a member
Fräulein Dr Vreede as a member.’

Now I still want to mention that this is to be the Vorstand responsible for the Society but that for all matters pertaining to the leadership of the soul of the Anthroposophical Society, namely the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum, the relevant meetings and consultations shall also be attended by those Section Leaders who are not members of the Vorstand. At the moment all the Section Leaders except one are also members of the Vorstand. Does anybody wish to speak to this point? It says: The total Vorstand is ‘formed’, which is an indication of the fact that it is neither elected nor nominated but that it is a self-evident Vorstand which is designated as a result of the reasons which have been given; it is a Vorstand designated by the facts themselves and receives the ground on which it stands at this Foundation Meeting.

QUESTION: Is it not possible for there to be an accumulation of offices?

DR STEINER: I expressly said yesterday that it will be incompatible for members of the Vorstand to hold other offices in the Anthroposophical Society. For example it is not desirable for one of the members of the Vorstand to be the General Secretary of some group, or for instance the leader of a branch or something similar. Then he can devote himself exclusively to his task. But for the leadership of the School it is naturally necessary to call those who are most suitable. And the leadership of the School is likely for the most part to consist of members of the Vorstand. Therefore in this instance there is an accumulation of offices whereby the Section Leaders will be advisory members of the Vorstand. Does anybody else wish to speak to Paragraph 15? No. Then I would now ask you to give your consent, not by voting in the sense of the votes conducted for the other Paragraphs but with the feeling that you acknowledge the justification of this fundamental manner of leadership of a true Anthroposophical Society. I would ask you to give your agreement that this Vorstand be constituted for the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society. (Long applause.)

DR STEINER: My dear friends, I believe I speak also on behalf of those who stand here beside me, the members of the Vorstand who are not unprepared but more than enough prepared, when I express the most cordial gratitude for your consent and when I give the promise that the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society will be conducted in the sense of its spiritual foundations and conditions.

We are now coming to the end of our meeting. Having completed the second reading, we now come to the adoption of the Statutes as a whole in the third reading. May I now ask, after the discussion of the individual Paragraphs in the detailed debate, whether anybody would like to speak once more about the Statutes as a whole? I only wish to say that I would like to add the following historical note, which was asked for yesterday, after Paragraph 2: ‘The Anthroposophical Society is in continuity with the Society founded in 1912. It would like, however, to create an independent point of departure, in keeping with the true spirit of the present time, for the objectives established at that time.’

This is the note with which we can add what was said on this point yesterday. Now, would anyone still like to speak about the Statutes as a whole? If this is not the case, may I ask those respected friends who are in favour of adopting the Statutes at the third reading to raise their hands. (They do.) Will those who are not in favour please make this known by raising their hands. (Nobody does.)

My respected friends, the Statutes of the Anthroposophical Society are adopted herewith. We shall once again continue with this meeting of members tomorrow morning after Herr Werbeck's lecture. Would you please remain seated for a few more seconds as I have some announcements to make.

Firstly: The next gathering today will be for the eurythmy performance at 4.30 this afternoon. The programme will be entirely new. Secondly: The General Secretaries are requested to meet at 8.30 on Saturday morning, as they did last Tuesday at 2.30, down in the Glass House. I would also request the representatives of the various Swiss branches to be present, as the question already mentioned about the Swiss Anthroposophical Society will be discussed to start with in this smaller circle.

Further: Unfortunately the meeting of members of the school associations for free education in Switzerland cannot take place here in the hall because it is needed for eurythmy rehearsals. There is therefore no room large enough for all the members to participate as listeners at this meeting. The meeting Will take place this afternoon down in the Glass House and in consequence I unfortunately have to ask for the attendance only of the members of the Swiss school association itself and of those friends from non-German speaking countries, that is America, England, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Holland and so on. Alas, the baby has to be chopped in half somewhere, and so, to start with for today's meeting, I would ask those from countries with really weak currencies not to attend. That means all the German members and also, if they cannot find any room, the members from Austria.

Also: It has been drawn to my attention—we never seem to get away from these things—that people should be more careful about what they say on the street, in the tram, or wherever they are staying. It is quite a good thing not to irritate other people by saying all sorts of peculiar things. This is all I am able to say just now. Other things can be said when the Vorstand presents you with some By-Laws. They can be said tomorrow in the members' meeting.

At 4.30 this afternoon is the eurythmy performance. This evening at 8.30 will be my lecture. It will be necessary to have the lecture at 8.30 every evening. And tomorrow morning at 8.30 is the meeting I have announced for the General Secretaries and the members of the Swiss councils. Then at 10 o'clock Herr Werbeck's lecture on the opposition to Anthroposophy, and after a short interval the continuation of this meeting.

• 52. No. 21 of 30 December 1923 on Rudolf Steiner's relationship to geometry. Now Chapter One of Rudolf Steiner The Course of my Life, op.cit.
• 53. Eduard von Hartmann, 1842–1906. Philosophie des Unbewussten. Versuch einer Weltanschauung, (Philosophy of the Unconscious), Berlin 1896. See also Rudolf Steiner The Course of my Life, op.cit. especially Chapter Nine.
• 54. See Rudolf Steiner A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception. Fundamental Outlines with Special Reference to Schiller, Anthroposophic Press, New York 1940. GA 2.
• A. The difference has no bearing on the translation of this sentence into English.(Tr.)
• 55. See Rudolf Steiner's letters to Marie Steiner-von Sivers of 18 and 20 February 1911 in Correspondence and Documents. Rudolf Steiner and Marie Steiner von Sivers, op cit.