The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I want during the next few evenings to talk to you about various things in connection with our present civilisation, things which are necessary to right understanding and action in the world to-day. It is not very difficult—in view of the many facts that meet one almost at every turn—to perceive signs of decline within our civilisation, and that it contains forces that make for its downfall. Recognising these forces of decline and fall within our civilisation, we have then to seek out the quarters from which it may draw fresh sources of new strength. If we survey our present civilisation we shall see that there are present in it three main downward forces,—three forces which gradually and inevitably must bring about its overthrow. All the distressing phenomena which we have hitherto experienced in the course of man's evolution, and all those that we have still to go through,—for in many respects we are only just at the beginning,—are all only so many symptoms of a vast process going on in our age, which, taken as a whole, presents a phenomenon of decline and fall.

If we look beyond our own immediate civilisation, beyond what has taken place in our own times merely, or during the last three or four hundred years,—if we take a wide survey of the whole course of man's evolution we may observe that earlier ages had a groundwork for their civilisation, a foundation for the habits and thoughts of everyday life, such as we to-day only believe ourselves to have. These old civilisations, especially the heathen civilisations, had something of a scientific character about them, a scientific character of a sort which made men realise that what lived within their own souls was part of the life of the whole universe. Just think what a vivid conception the Greeks still possessed of worlds extending beyond the bounds of everyday existence, of a world of gods and spirits behind the world of sense. One has but to recall how great a part was played in everyday life by whatever could form any sort of link between the people of those older civilisations and a spiritual world to which they were no strangers. In all their daily transactions, these men of the old civilisations were conscious of forming part of a creation that was not exhausted within the limits of the everyday world, but where spiritual beings made their activities felt. The commonest everyday affairs were carried on under the guidance of spiritual forces. Thus, in the heathen civilisations especially, we find when we look back on them, a dominant scientific character, which is best described by saying: in those days people—we can put it in that way—people had a COSMOGONY; that is, they recognised themselves to be members of the whole universe. They knew that they were not merely beings that had gone astray and were wandering about over the face of the green earth like lost sheep, but that they were part and parcel of the whole wide universe, and had their own functions in the universe as a whole. The men of old days possessed a COSMOGONY.

Our civilisation possesses no instinct for the creation of a cosmogony in real life. Our mode of conception is not, in the strict sense of the term, a genuinely scientific one. We have tabulated isolated facts and have constructed a logical system of concepts, but we have not got a real science, forming a practical link between us and the spiritual world. How paltry is the part played by the science of our day in common life, compared with what a man of old felt pulsing through him from forces of the spiritual world! In all his actions, he had a cosmogony; he knew himself a member of the whole vast universe. When he looked up at the sun and the moon and the stars, they were not to him strange worlds; for he knew himself, in his own deepest nature, akin to the sun and moon and world of stars. Thus, the old civilisation possessed a Cosmogony; but for our civilisation this cosmogony is lost. Without a cosmogony in life, man cannot be strong.—That is one thing,—what I might call the scientific element,—that is bringing about the downfall of our civilisation.

Another, the second element that is bringing about its downfall, is that there is no true impulse for FREEDOM. Our civilisation lacks the power to ground life upon a broad basis of general freedom. Only very few people in our day arrive at any real conception of freedom. There are plenty who talk about it; but very few to-day arrive at any real conception of what freedom really is, and fewer still have any real impulse for it. And so, it comes, that our civilisation is gradually sinking into something where it can find neither strength nor support—into fatalism. Either we have religious fatalism, in which men yield themselves up to religious forces of some sort or another, make these religious forces their master, and ask nothing better than to be pulled about by strings, like puppets at a show; or else we have the fatalism of natural science. And the effects of such scientific fatalism are seen in the way people have come to regard everything that happens as happening by natural necessity, or by economic necessity, and as leaving no scope for free action on the part of man. When men feel themselves fettered to the world of economics or the world of nature, that is, to all intents and purposes, fatalism. Or else, again, we have that fatalism which has come in with the more modern forms of religious faith,—a fatalism that deliberately precludes freedom. Just ask yourselves how many hearts and souls there are to-day that consciously yearn to yield themselves up, for Christ, or a spiritual power of some kind, to do what he pleases with them. Why, it is even an accusation that one frequently hears made against Anthroposophy, that it lays too little stress on men being redeemed by Christ and not by themselves. People prefer to be led; they prefer to be guided; they would really prefer fatalism to be true. How often lately, in these troublous [troubled?] years, has one not heard that kind of talk from one person or another. They would say: “Why doesn't God, why doesn't Christ, come to the help of this or that set of people? There must, after all, be a divine justice somewhere!” People would like this divine Justice ... They would like to have it suspended aloft as a fate. They do not want to get to that ingrained innate strength which comes from the impulse of Freedom and permeates the whole being. A civilisation that does not know how to foster the impulse of Freedom weakens men and dooms itself to downfall.

That is the second thing. Of the forces that are bringing about the decline of our civilisation, the first is the lack of a COSMOGONY, and the second is the lack of a genuine impulse for FREEDOM.

The third is that our civilisation is incapable of evolving anything that can give fresh fire to religious feeling and purpose. Our civilisation, in truth, aims at nothing more than nursing the old religions and fanning their cold ashes. But to bring new religious impulses into life,—for that our civilisation lacks the strength. And lacking this, it lacks also the strength for true altruistic action in life. That is why all the processes of our civilisation are so egoistic, because it has within itself no real, no strong, altruistic motive-power. There is nothing, friends, that can supply altruistic motive-power, but a spiritual view of life. Only when a man comes to recognise himself as a member of the spiritual world, does he cease to be so tremendously interested in himself that the whole world revolves round him. When he does,—then, indeed, egoistic motives cease and altruistic ones set in. Our age, however, is little given to cultivating so great an interest in the spiritual world. The interest in the spiritual world has got to be a good deal further developed before people really feel themselves members of it.

And so, one might say that it was like impulses given from on high that REINCARNATION and KARMA came amongst us and into our civilisation. But how were these impulses interpreted? At bottom it was in a very egoistic way that these ideas of Reincarnation and Karma were understood, even by those who took them up. For instance, they would say: “Oh, well! In some life or other everyone has deserved what he gets.” Even otherwise quite intelligent people have been known to say that the ideas of Reincarnation and Karma of themselves sufficiently warranted the existence of human suffering. There was at bottom no justification for the social question,—so said many otherwise intelligent people,—for, if a man was poor, it was what he had earned in his previous incarnation, and he has to work off in this incarnation only what he deserved from a previous one. Even the ideas of reincarnation and karma are unable to permeate our civilisation in any way except one which gives no stimulus to the altruistic sense. It is not enough for us merely to introduce ideas such as those of reincarnation and Karma,—the question is, in what way we introduce them. If they become merely an incentive to egoism, then they do not raise up our civilised life, they only serve to sink it lower.

There is another way, again, in which reincarnation and karma become unethical, anti-ethical, ideas; many people say: “I must be good, so that I may have a good incarnation next time.” To act from such a motive, to be virtuous in order that one may have as pleasant a time as possible in one's next incarnation,—this is not mere simple egoism, it is double egoism; yet this double egoism is what many people did actually get out of the ideas of reincarnation and karma. So that one may say that our civilisation possesses so little of any altruistic religious impulse that it is incapable of conceiving even such ideas as those of reincarnation and karma in the sense that would make them a stimulus to altruistic, not to egoistic actions and sentiments.

Those are the three things which are acting within our civilisation as forces of decline and fall:—lack of a COSMOGONY, lack of a sound foundation of FREEDOM, lack of an ALTRUISTIC SENSE. But without a cosmogony there is no real science or system of knowledge, there is no real knowledge; then all knowledge ultimately becomes a mere game, in which all the worlds and the civilisation of man are toys. And this is what knowledge has, in many respects, become in our age,—in so far as it is not merely a utilitarian incident of external culture, of external technical culture. Freedom has become in many respects in our age an empty phrase, because the force of our civilisation is not that which lays a large foundation of freedom nor spreads abroad the impulse of freedom. Neither have we in the economic field the possibility of progressing further in the social direction, because our civilisation contains no altruistic motive-force, but only egoistic, that means anti-social motive-forces,—and one cannot socialise with antisocial forces. For socialising means creating a social framework such that each man lives and works for the rest. But just imagine in our present civilisation each man trying to live and work for the rest! Why, the whole order of society is so instituted that each one can only live and work for himself. All our institutions are like that.

The question then arises:—How are we going to surmount these signs of our civilisation's decline and fall? To plaster over such signs of decline in our civilisation, my dear friends, is quite impossible. There is nothing for it but to recognise the facts as they have just been stated, to regard them dispassionately and without reservations, and to harbour no illusions. One must say to oneself: There they are, these forces of decline and fall, and one must not imagine that one can in any way turn them in another direction, or anything of that sort. No, they are very powerful forces of decline, and it is necessary to give them their proper name, and to speak of them as we are doing now. This being so, what we have got to do is to turn to where forces can be found for the re-ascent. That is not to be done by theorising, People in the present day may invent the most beautiful theories, may have the most beautiful principles, but with theories one can do nothing. To do anything in life, it must be by means of the forces that are actually present in the world; and one must summon them up. If our civilisation were through and through as I have been describing it,—I mean, if it were like that through and through,—then there would be nothing for it but to say to ourselves: “There is nothing for it, but just to let our civilisation go to pieces, and ourselves go to pieces along with it.” For to attempt in any way to redress the signs of the times by mere theories or conceptions would be an utter absurdity.

One can but ask:—Does not the root of the matter perhaps lie really deeper? It does lie deeper; and in this way:—People to-day—and I have here often pointed out the same thing from different aspects,—people to-day are too much bent upon the absolute. When they ask: “What is true?” they mean, “What Is true absolutely?”—not what is true of a particular age. When they ask, “What is good?” they are asking, “What is good absolutely?” They are not asking, “What is good for Europe? What is good for Asia? What is good for the 20th century? What is good for the 25th century?” They are asking about absolute Goodness and Truth. They are not asking about what actually exists in the concrete evolution of mankind. We must put the question to ourselves in a different way, for we must look at the actuality of things, and from the point of view of actuality; questions must be differently put, very often so put that the answers seem paradoxical compared with what one is inclined to assume from a surface view of things. We must ask ourselves: Is there no possibility of arriving once more at a mode of conception which is cosmogonical, which takes in the universe as a whole? Is there no possibility of arriving at an impulse of freedom which shall be an actual influence in social life? Is there no possibility for an impulse which shall be religious and at the same time an impulse of brotherhood, and therefore the real basis for an economic social order? Is there no possibility^ of arriving at such an impulse? And if we put these questions before us from a real aspect, then we get real answers. For the point, we have here to remember is this: that the various types of people on the earth to-day are not all adapted to the whole all-comprehensive universal truth, but that the various types of men are only adapted to particular fields of the true activity. We must ask ourselves; Where in the life of earth to-day may there, perhaps, exist the possibility for a cosmogony to evolve? Where does the possibility exist for a sweeping impulse of freedom to evolve? And where does the impulse exist for a communal life among men, which is religious and also, in a social sense, brotherly?

We will take the last question first; and if we contemplate the state of affairs on our earth impartially, we shall come to the conclusion that the temperament, the mode of thought for an actual brotherly impulse upon our earth is to be sought amongst the Asiatic peoples, the peoples of Asia, especially in the civilisations of Japan and India. Despite the fact that these civilisations are already fallen into decadence, and despite the fact that external, superficial appearances are against it, we find there enshrined in men's hearts those impulses of generous love towards all living things, which alone can supply foundations for religious altruism in the first place, and, in the second, for an actual, altruistic, industrial form of civilisation.

But here we are met by a peculiar fact: that the Asiatics have, it is true, the temperament for altruism, but that they have not got the kind of human existence which would enable them to carry their altruism into practice; they have merely got the temperament but they have no possibility, no gift, for creating social conditions in which altruism could begin to be externally realised. For thousands of years the Asiatics have managed to nurse the instincts of altruism in human nature. And yet they brought this to a state in which China and India were devastated by monster famines. That is the peculiar thing about the Asiatic civilisation, that the temperament is there, and that this temperament is inwardly perfectly sincere, but that there exists no gift for realising this temperament in outward life. That is just the peculiar thing about this Asiatic civilisation, that it contains a tremendously strong instinct for altruism in men's inward nature, yet no possibility for the moment of realising 4t externally. On the contrary, if Asia were left to herself alone, this very fact, that she has this capacity for paying the inward basis of altruism, without any gift for realising it outwardly, would turn Asia into an appalling desert of civilisation.

We may say, then, that of these three things: the impulse for COSMOGONY, the impulse for FREEDOM, the impulse for ALTRUISM, Asia possesses more especially the inward temperament for the third. It is, however, but one third of -what is necessary to bring our civilisation into the ascendant, which Asia possesses,—the inward temperament for altruism.

What has Europe got? Well, Europe has got the utmost necessity for solving the social question; but she has not got the temperament for the social question. To solve the social question, she would need to have the Asiatic temperament. The social necessities of Europe are such as to supply all the conditions requisite for a solution of the social question; but the Europeans would first need to become permeated through and through with the way of thought which is natural to the Asiatic, only the Asiatic has no gift for actually perceiving social needs as they exist externally. Often, indeed, he even acquiesces in them. In Europe, there is every external incentive to do something about the social question, but the temperament is lacking. On the other hand, there is in Europe, in the very strongest degree, the talent, the ability which would provide the soil for Freedom,—for the impulse of freedom. The strong point of European talents, specifically European talents, lies in developing in the very highest degree the inner sentiment, the inner feeling for freedom. One might say that the gift for getting to a real idea of Freedom is specifically European; but among these Europeans there are no people who act freely, who could make freedom a reality. Of Freedom as an idea, the Europeans can form the loftiest conception. But just as the Asiatic would be able to set about doing something, if he possessed the clear thought of the Europeans without their other failings, if he could only get the clear-out European idea of Freedom, so the European can evolve the most beautiful conception of Freedom, but there is no possibility, politically, of realising this idea of freedom through the direct agency of the European peoples, for, of the three essentials to civilisation,—the impulse for altruism, the impulse for freedom, the impulse for cosmogony,—the European possesses only one-third, the impulse for Freedom. The other two he has not got.

So, the European also has only got one-third of what is necessary in order really to bring forth a new age. It is very important that people should at last recognise these things as being the secrets of our civilisation. In Europe we can, at least, say that we have all the conditions of thought and feeling requisite for knowing what freedom is, but, without something more, there is no possibility for us to actualise this freedom. I can assure you, for instance, that in Germany the most beautiful things were written by various individuals about freedom, at the time when all Germany was groaning under the tyranny of Ludendorff and Co. Most beautiful things were written about freedom at the time. Here in Europe, a talent undoubtedly exists for conceiving the impulse of freedom. That is one-third, so far, towards the actual upraising of our civilisation,—one-third, not the whole.

Leaving Europe and going westwards—and I take Great Britain and America together in this connection,—passing, then, to the Anglo-American world, we find there again, one-third of the impulses, just one out of the three impulses necessary to the upraising of our civilisation, and that is, the impulse towards a cosmogony. Anyone acquainted with the spiritual life of the Anglo-American world knows that, formalistic as Anglo-American spiritual life is in the first instance, that, materialistic as it is in the first instance, and though, indeed, it even tries to get what is spiritual in a materialistic fashion, yet it has got in it the makings of a cosmogony. Although this cosmogony is to-day being sought along altogether erroneous paths, yet it lies in Anglo-American nature to seek for it. Again, a third, the search for a cosmogony. But there the possibility of bringing this cosmogony into connection with free altruistic man does not exist. There is the talent for treating this cosmogony as an ornamental appendage, for working it out and giving it shape; but no talent for incorporating the human being in this cosmogony as a member of it. Even the spiritualist movement, in its early beginnings in the middle of the 19th century, of which it still preserves some traces, had, one may say, something of a cosmogony about it, although it led into the wilderness. What they were trying to get at were the forces that lay behind the sense-forces; only they took a materialistic road, a materialistic method, to find them. But they were not endeavouring through these means to arrive at a science of the formalist kind that you get, for instance, among the Europeans; they were trying to become acquainted with the real actual super-sensual forces. Only, as I said, they took a wrong road, what is still known as the “American” way. So here, again, we have one-third of what will have to be there before our civilisation can really rise again.

One cannot to-day arrive at the secrets of our civilisation, my dear friends, unless one can distinguish how these three impulses needed for its rise are distributed among the different parts of our earth's surface; unless one knows that the tendency towards Cosmogony is an endowment of the Anglo-American world, that the tendency towards Freedom lies in the European world, whilst the tendency towards Altruism and towards that temperament which, properly realised, leads to socialism is, strictly speaking, peculiar to Asiatic culture. America, Europe, Asia, each has one- third of what must be attained for any true regeneration, any real reconstruction of our civilisation.

These are the fundamental ideas which must inspire thought and feeling to-day for anyone who is in earnest and sincere about working for a reconstruction of our civilisation. One cannot to-day shut oneself up in one's study and ponder over which is the best programme for the coming times. One has got to-day to go out into the world and search out the impulses already existing there. As I said, if one looks at our civilisation and at all that is hurrying it to its fall, one cannot avoid an impression that it is impossible to save it. And it cannot be saved unless people come to see that one thing is to he found amongst one people, and the second amongst another, the third amongst a third,—unless people all over the earth come together and set to work on big lines to give practical recognition to what none of them, singly, can of himself achieve, in the absolute sense, but which must be achieved by that one who is marked out, so to speak, by destiny for that particular work. If the American to-day, besides a cosmogony, wants also to evolve freedom and socialism, he cannot do it. If to-day the European, besides founding the impulse for freedom, wants to supply cosmogony and altruism, he cannot do it. No more can the Asiatic realise anything save his long- engrained altruism. Let this altruism be once taken over by the other groups of the earth's inhabitants, and saturated with that for which each has a special talent, then, and then only, we shall really get on.

We have got once for all to admit to ourselves that our civilisation has grown feeble, and must again find strength. I have expressed this in a rather abstract way, and to make it more concrete will put it as follows:—The old pre-Christian civilisations of the East produced, as you know, great cities. Great cities existed in them. We can look back over a wide spread range of civilisations in the East, which all produced great cities. But the great cities they produced had, as well, a certain character about them. All the civilisations of the East had this speciality for creating, along with the life of great cities, the conception that, after all, man's life is a void, a nothing, unless he penetrates beyond the merely physical into the super-physical. And so, great cities such as Babylon, Nineveh, and the rest, were able to develop a real growth, because men were not led by these cities to regard what the cities themselves brought forth as being itself the actual reality, but, rather, what is behind it all. It was in Rome that people came to make the civilisation of cities a gauge of what was to be regarded as real. The Greek cities are inconceivable without the country round them. If history, as we have it, were not such a conventional fiction,—a “fable convenue,”—and would only revive past times in their time aspect, it would show us the Greek cities rooted in the country. But Rome no longer had her roots in the country. Indeed, the whole history of Rome consists in the conversion of an imaginary world into a real world, the conversion of a world which is unreal into one which is real. It was in Rome that the Citizen was first invented,—that ghastly mock-figure alongside the living being, Man. For man is a human being; and if he is a citizen besides, that is a fiction. His being a citizen is something that is entered in the church register, or the town register, or somewhere of the sort. That besides being a human being, endowed with particular faculties, he is also the owner of assessed property, duly entered in the land register,—that is a fiction alongside the reality. That is thoroughly Roman thought. But Rome achieved a great deal more than that. Rome managed to take all that results from the separation of the town from the country,—the real, actual country,—and to give it a fictitious reality. Rome, for instance, took the old religious concepts and introduced into them the Roman legal concepts. If we go back to the old religious concepts with an open mind, we do not find the Roman legal concepts contained in the old religious ones. Roman jurisprudence simply invaded religious ethics. All through religious ethics, thanks to what Rome has made of them, there is, at bottom, a notion of the supersensible world as of a place with judges sitting, passing judgment on human actions, just as they do on the Benches of our law-courts, that are modelled on the Roman pattern.

Yes, so persistent is the influence of these Roman legal concepts, that when there is any talk of Karma, one actually finds that the majority of people to-day who accept the doctrine of Karma picture it working, as though Justice were sitting over there beyond, meting out rewards and punishments according to our earthly notions, a reward for a good deed, and a punishment for a bad one,—exactly the Roman conception of law. All the saints and supernatural beings exist after the fashion of these Roman legal concepts which have crept into the supernatural world.

Who to-day, for instance, comprehends the grand idea of the Greek “Fate”? The concepts of Roman jurisprudence do not help us much to-day, do they, towards the understanding of the “Oedipus.” Indeed, men seem altogether to have lost the capacity for comprehending tragic grandeur, owing to the influence of Roman legal concepts. And these Roman legal concepts have crept into our modern civilisation; they live in every part of it; they have become in their very essence a fictitious reality, something imaginary,—not something one imagines, but something that is imaginary. It is absolutely necessary for us clearly to see that, in our whole way of conceiving things, we have lost touch with reality, and that what we need is to impregnate our conceptions afresh with reality. It is because men's concepts are, at bottom, hollow, that our civilisation still remains unconscious of the need for the common co-operation of men all over the round earth. We are never really willing to go to the root of what is taking place under our eyes; we are always more or less anxious to keep on the surface of things. Just to give you another example of this. You know how in the various parliaments throughout the world in former days,—say, the first half of the 16th century, or a little later,—party tendencies took shape in two definite directions, the one Conservative the other Liberal,—which for a long time enjoyed considerable respect. The various other parties that have come up since were later accessions to these two main original ones. There was the party of a conservative tendency, and the party of a liberal tendency. But, my dear friends, it is so very necessary that one should nowadays get beyond the words to the real thing behind, and there are many matters about which one must ask, not what people, who stand for a certain thing, say about it, but what is going on subconsciously within the people themselves. If you do so, you will find that the people who attach themselves to one or other of the parties of a conservative tone are people who in some way are chiefly connected with agrarian interests, with the care of land and cultivation of the soil; that is to say, with the primal element of human civilisation. In some way or other this will be the ease. Of course, on the surface, there may be all sorts of other circumstances entering in as well. I do not say that every conservative is necessarily directly connected with agriculture. Of course there is here, as everywhere else, a fringe of people who adhere to the catchwords of a cause. It is the main feature that one has to consider; and the main feature is that that part of the population which has an interest in preserving certain forms of social structure and in keeping things from moving too fast, is agrarian.

On the other hand, the more industrial element, drawn from labour that has been detached from the soil, is liberal, progressive. So that these two-party tendencies have their source in something that lies deeper; and one must, in every case, try to lift such things out of the mere phrases into which they have fallen,—to get through the words to the real thing behind them.

But ultimately, it all tells the same tale,—that the form of civilisation in which we have been living is one whose strength lies in words. We must push forward to a civilisation built upon real things, to a civilisation of real things. We must cease to be imposed upon by phrases, by programmes, by verbal ideals, and must get to the clear perception of realities. Above all, we must get to a clear perception of realities of a kind that lie deeper than forms of civilisation in city or country, agricultural or industrial. And much deeper than these are those impulses which to-day are at work in the various members of the body human distributed over the globe,—of which the American is making towards Cosmogony, the European towards Freedom, and the Asiatic towards Socialism.

At present, this certainly comes out, has and does come out, in a curious way. Anglo-American civilisation is conquering the world, But, in conquering the world, it will need to absorb what the conquered parts of the world have to give; the impulse to Freedom and the impulse to Altruism; for in itself it has only the impulse to Cosmogony. Indeed, Anglo-American civilisation owes its success to a cosmogonic impulse. It owes it to the circumstance that people are able to think in world-thoughts. We have often and often talked about this during the war, and how the successes of that side proceeded from supersensible impulses of a particular kind, which the others refused to recognise. The cosmogonic element cannot and must not be left thus isolated; it must be permeated from the domain of freedom.

Yes, my dear friends, but then, to see the full meaning of this, it is, I need hardly say, necessary to get right, right away from phrases, and pierce to the realities. For anyone who is tied to phrases would naturally think; Well, but who of late has stood out as the representatives of Freedom, if not the Anglo- American world?—Why, of course, in words, yes, to any extent, but what matters about a thing is not how it is represented in words, but what it is in reality. We have had over and over again, as you know, occasion to refer to -the language of “Wilsonism.” Phraseology of the Wilson type has been gaining ground in Western countries for a long-time past. In October 1918, it even for a time laid hold of Central Europe. And over and over again here,—I remember there was always quite a little commotion here when, over and over again, as the years went on, one had to point out the futility of all that Woodrow Wilson's name stood for, how utterly hollow and abstract it all was, for which Woodrow Wilson's name stood. But now, you see, people even in America are apparently beginning to see through Wilsonism, and hour hollow and abstract it all is. Here, there was no question of any national feeling of hostility towards Wilson, there was no question of antagonism proceeding from Europe. It was an antagonism arising from the whole conception of our civilisation and its forces. It was a question of showing Wilsonism for what it is,—the type of all that is abstract, all that is most unreal in human thought. It is the Wilson type of thought which has had such one-sided results, because it has absorbed the American impulse without really possessing the impulse of freedom (for talking about freedom is by no means a proof that the impulse of freedom itself is really there), and because it had not the impulse for really practical Altruism.

The life of Central Europe, with all that it was, lies in the dust. What lived in Central Europe is, to a great extent, sunk in a fearful sleep. At the present moment, the German is, one might say, forced to think of freedom, not as they talked of it in all manner of fine phrases at the time when they were groaning under the yoke of Ludendorff,—when constraint of itself engendered an understanding of the idea of freedom. Mow they think of it, but with crippled powers of soul and body, in total inability to summon up the energy for real intense thought. We have in Germany all sorts of attempts at democratic forms, but no democracy. We have a republic, but no republicans. And this is in every way a symptom that has especially manifested itself in Central Europe, but it is characteristic of the European world in general.

And Eastern Europe?—For years and years, the proletariat of the whole world have been boasting of all that Marxianism was going to do. Lenin and Trotsky were in a position to put Marxianism into practice; and it is turning into the wholesale plunder of civilisation, which is identical with the ruin of civilisation. And these things are only just beginning. Yet for all that, there does exist in Europe the capacity for founding freedom, ideally, spiritually. Only, Europe must supplement this in an actual practical sense, through the co-operation of the other people on the earth.

In Asia, we can see the old Asiatic spirit lighting up again in recent years. Those people who are spiritual leaders in Asia (take, for example, the one I have already alluded to, Rabindranath Tagore),--the leading spirits of Asia show by their very way of speaking that the altruistic spirit is anything but dead. But there is still less possibility now than there was even in old days, of achieving a civilisation through this one third only of the impulses that go to the making of a civilisation.

All this is the reason why to-day there is so much talk about things which are peculiar to the civilisation that is dying, but which people talk about as though they stood for something that could be effective as an ideal. For years, we have had it proclaimed that “Every nation must have the possibility of ...” well, I don't quite know of what, living its own life in its own way, or something of that sort. Now, I ask you: For the man of to-day, if he is frank and honest about it, what is a “nation”?—Practically just a form of words, certainly nothing real. If one talks about the Spirit of a Nation, in the sense in which we speak of it in Anthroposophy, then one can talk about a Nation, for then there is a reality at the back of it; but not when it merely signifies an abstraction. And it is an abstraction that people have in mind today when they talk of the “freedom” of nationalities, and so forth. For they certainly don't believe in the reality of any sort of national Being. And herein lies the profound inward falsity to which men to-day do homage. They don't believe in the reality of the national Being, yet they talk of the “Freedom of the Nation,” as if to the materialist man of our day, the “nation” meant anything at all. What is the German nation? Just ninety millions of persons, who can be added together and summed up, A plus A plus A. That is not a National Being—a self-contained entity—for men to believe in. And it is just the same with the other nations. Yet people talk about these things and believe that they are talking about realities, and all the while are lying to themselves in the depths of their souls.

But it is with Realities we are dealing when we say; The Anglo- American Being—a striving towards cosmogony; the European Being—a striving towards freedom; the Asiatic Being—a striving towards altruism. When we then try to comprehend these three divided forces in a consciousness that embraces the universe as a whole,—when, from out of this consciousness of the universal whole, we say to ourselves: “The old civilisation is bursting through its partitions, it is doomed,” to try to save it -would be to work against one's age, not with it. We need a new civilisation upon the ruins of the old one. The ruins of the old civilisation will get ever smaller and smaller; and that man alone understands the present times who has will and courage for one that shall be really new. But the new must be grounded, neither in a sense of country as among the Greeks and Romans, nor in a sense of the Earth, as with men of modern times. It must proceed from a sense of the Universe, the world-consciousness of future man, that world-consciousness which once more turns its eyes away from the earth here, and looks up to the Cosmos. Only, we must arrive at a view of this Cosmos which shall carry us in practice beyond the Schools of Copernicus and Galileo.

My dear friends, the Europeans have known how to express the earth's environment in terms of mathematics; but they have not known how, from the earth's environment, to extract a real science. For the times in which he lived, Giordano Bruno was a remarkable figure, a great personality; but to-day we need to realise that where he could only perceive a mathematical order, there a spiritual order reigns, reality reigns. The American does not really believe in this purely mathematical world, in the purely mathematical cosmos. His particular civilisation leads him to reach out to a knowledge of the supersensible forces beyond, even though he is, as yet, on the wrong road. In Europe, there was no sort of knowledge that they did not pursue; and yet when Goethe, in his own way, really put the question: “What is scientific knowledge?” there was no getting any further; for Europe had not got the power to take what can be learnt from the study, say, of Man, and widen it into a cosmogony, a science of the universe. Goethe discovered metamorphosis, the metamorphosis of plants, the metamorphosis of animals, the metamorphosis of man. The head, in respect of its system of bones, is a vertebral column and spinal marrow, transformed. So far, so good; but you need to follow it up and develop it, until you realise that this head is the transformed man of the previous incarnation, and that the trunk and limbs are the man in the initial stage of the coming incarnation. Real science must be cosmic, otherwise it is not science. It must be cosmic, must be a cosmogony, otherwise this science is not something that can. give inward human impulses which will carry man on through life. The man of modern times cannot live instinctively; he must live consciously. He needs a cosmogony; and he needs a freedom that is real. He needs more than a lot of vague talk about freedom; he needs more than the mere verbiage of freedom; he needs that freedom should actually grow into his immediate life and surroundings. This is only possible along paths that lead to ethical individualism.

There is a characteristic incident in connection with this. At the time when my Philosophy of Freedom appeared, Edouard von Hartmann was one of the first to receive a copy of the book, and he wrote me: “The book ought not to be called The Philosophy of Freedom,” but “A Study in Phenomena connected with the Theory of Cognition, and in Ethical Individualism.” Well, for a title that would have been rather long-winded; but it would no# have been bad to have called it “Ethical Individualism,” for ethical individualism is nothing but the personal realisation of freedom. The best people were totally unable to perceive how the actual impulses of the age were calling for the thing that is discussed in that book, The Philosophy of Freedom.

Turning now to Asia,—indeed, my dear friends, Asia and Europe must learn to understand each other. But if things go on as they have in the past, then they will never understand each other, especially as Asia and America have to understand each other as well The Asiatics look at America and see that what they have there is really nothing more than the machinery of external life, of the State, of Politics, etc, The Asiatic has no taste for all this machinery; his understanding is all for the things that arise from the inmost impulses of the human soul. The Europeans have, it is true, dabbled in this same Asiatic spirit, the spiritual life of Asia; but it must be confessed that they have not, so far, given proof of. any very great understanding of it. Nor have they been in very perfect agreement, and the kind of disagreement that arose plainly showed that they had very little understanding of how to introduce into European culture what are the real actuating impulses of Asiatic culture. Just think of Mme. Blavatsky; she wanted to introduce into the civilisation of Europe every kind of thing out of the civilisation of India, of Thibet. Much of it was very dubious, that she tried to introduce. Max Müller tried another way of bringing Asiatic civilisation into Europe. One finds a good deal in Blavatsky that is not in Max Müller; and there is a good deal in Max Müller that is not in Blavatsky. But from the criticism Max Müller passed on Blavatsky it is plain how little insight there was into the subject. In Max Müller's opinion, it was not the real substance of the Indian spirit that Blavatsky had brought over to England, but a spurious imitation, and he expressed his opinion in a simile, by saying: That if people met a pig that was grunting, they would not be astonished; but if they met a pig talking like a man, then they would be astonished. Well, in the way Max Müller used the simile he can only have meant that he, with his Asiatic culture, was the pig that grunted, and that Blavatsky was as if a pig should start talking like a man! To me it certainly seems that there is nothing remarkably interesting about a pig grunting; but one would begin to feel rather interested if a pig were suddenly to start running about and talking like a man Here the simile of itself shows that the analogy they found was a very thin one and lies chiefly in the words. But people do not notice that nowadays; and if one does make bold to point out the absurd side of the matter, then people think one ought not to treat “recognised authorities” like Max Müller in that kind of way, it is not at all proper!

That is just where it is, my dear friends, the time is at hand when one must speak out honestly and straightforwardly. And if one ie to be honest and straightforward, one must speak out quite plainly about the occult facts of our civilisation in the present day,—such facts as these: That the Anglo-American world has the gift for Cosmogony, that Europe has the gift for Freedom, Asia the gift for Altruism, for religion, for a social-economic order.

These three temperaments must be fused together for a complete humanity. We must become men of all the worlds, and act from that standpoint, as inhabitants of the universe. Then, and then only, can that come about which the age really demands.

We will talk more about this tomorrow. To-morrow we meet at 7 o'clock. First there will be the Eurhythmic performance, then a break, and after that the lecture.

Dear attendees! The events unfolding today in the field of the social movement, which are alarming for some, seem to truly lead people who observe them to a new language, a language that is unfamiliar compared to everything that has been experienced in the course of human history. In view of what is coming to the surface today from the depths of social life, must we not conclude that, despite the fact that what is called the social question has been in the making in humanity for more than half a century, the thoughts and will impulses of people are actually quite poorly prepared for what is being expressed in facts today? For decades, anyone who has had the opportunity to gain access to the real social movement has very often had the opportunity to notice how socialist thinkers, those thinkers who, with all their hearts, believe they are in line with the proletarian will , how such thinkers repeatedly pointed out that the economic facts themselves, which have emerged in the development of people through modern technology and capitalism, that these economic facts themselves, through their own progression, will, as it were, bring about something like a solution to the social question. If I am to briefly indicate what was thought there, it is something like the following:

The spread of economic life, with the division of labor and everything else that goes with it, has all led to the fact that the private capitalist economy has gradually been concentrated in the hands of a few, and that ever larger and larger masses of the proletariat have been harnessed to this will of a few. It was hoped that that which had so to speak extended an economic power over the proletariat would be driven to the point where it would destroy itself, as it would to a certain extent no will be able to advance on its own path, and where the proletariat, as I said, will be in a position, through the development of economic facts, to take power into its own hands, which it was previously dominated by. From radical revolutionary views, which played a role in this direction in earlier times, one has moved on to more reformist ones, through which it was expected that the gradual transition of economic power from the capitalist enterprise to the proletarian enterprise itself would take place through the measures that could be brought about by the proletariat within the regulated life of the state. So, to a certain extent, it was thought that objective facts independent of people would bring about a certain crisis, and with this crisis a certain solution to the social question.

Do we not already see clearly today that it has become different, that all thoughts that have moved in this direction actually miss the point? Do we not see that it is now the proletarian as such, with his will, with his demands, who is bringing about the facts that are now, as I said, appearing on the horizon of historical life in such a frightening way for many people? Does this not force us to look at proletarian life and to demand that we should no longer allow ourselves to be beguiled by what has been regarded as the right thing for decades by the doctrine?

In the lectures that I have recently been allowed to give on this question, I have already pointed out that these present facts, above all, force us to direct our consideration of the social question to the realm of the proletarian himself. And I have already stated why the proletarian has become what he actually appears today. What is the position of the proletariat, with its desires, its impulses, its demands, in the light of the present situation? Is it not that of a powerful criticism of world history, of that which the leading circles of humanity have hitherto regarded as correct and have made the basis and guiding principle of their actions? A criticism that could not be expressed in words is expressed by this criticism, which simply lives in the characteristics and actions of the present proletariat.

This present proletariat sees itself harnessed into pure economic life by the economic process that has been looming for a long time. And again I must emphasize, for the sake of the context, what I have already discussed in the earlier lectures, that in that this modern proletariat finds itself harnessed into bare economic life with its entire destiny, it above all, in the deepest sense, as unworthy of it that the proletarian's labor power for this present economic life means the same as the commodity that is brought to market, the circulation of which is regulated according to supply and demand, and which can be bought. However things may be expressed, even by socialist thinkers in this field, the feelings that prevail among the proletariat, that which lives in the unconscious depths of the proletarian soul, is much more important than that which is consciously thought and expressed. And these feelings are as follows: How is it possible, within the capitalist economic order, to divest the human labor power that the proletarian has to offer on the market and that can be bought, of the character of a commodity?

By stating this, attention is drawn to the first link in today's social question, to the extent to which this social question is an economic question, to what extent it is a wage question. Now, anyone who has learned over the decades not just to think about the proletariat, but to think with the proletariat, knows how the Marxist doctrine, which pointed out to the proletarians with particular intensity how their labor power as a commodity is integrated into the economic process, has taken hold. One must refer again and again to the illumination that Karl Marx has given to this matter, since this illumination lives on intensely in the faith and perception of the proletariat. The capitalist, within today's economic system, is the one from whom the proletarian worker sees how he is called to the factory, how he is called to the machine, how he is paid for his labor.

Marx then tried to make the following clear to the proletarians. He tried to show them that the proletarian's labor is actually essentially underpaid. This labor power must be continually produced by the food and other means of subsistence that the proletarian needs. If the proletarian is able to obtain food and other means of subsistence, then he can restore his labor power that has been expended in the economic process, and then he can perform his work. This leads to the situation – or so the view goes – that the employer pays the worker what is necessary to produce this labor, but that he lets him work far beyond the time that would be necessary to earn what is necessary to produce this labor. This is how the added value arises, which, as I said, had such a profound effect on the proletarians' perceptions. The worker produces for the entrepreneur. He produces more than the entrepreneur compensates him for. And what he produces more is the entrepreneur's profit. Achieving this added value by changing the economic process has become the ideal of proletarian endeavor.

Now, esteemed attendees, the opinions that have been formed about these matters, in both bourgeois and non-bourgeois circles, basically all point in the same direction. These opinions all suggest that proletarian labor for the production of goods must itself necessarily be treated as a commodity. In the face of this, one is indeed compelled to look deeper into economic life and to ask oneself the question: Is there perhaps something quite different at the bottom of it all than what proletarians and non-proletarians believe? Has this part of the social question been grasped correctly at all? The development of the facts, which the present shows, proves that this cannot be the case, that the matter has been grasped correctly. If we examine the matter more closely, we see that the economic process must necessarily be exhausted by the production, circulation, and consumption of commodities.

We may ask: What is it that actually gives this economic process its laws? What does what happens in the economic process depend on? Nevertheless, everything that happens in the economic process comes down to human needs and interests, however it is disguised. Everything that happens in the economic process boils down to the production of what is demanded by human needs and, as a result, consumed by people. And every view of what a commodity is, my dearest present, proves to be false in the face of a real economic study; every other view, except the one that regards the commodity as that which acquires its value by being consumed in the most expedient way [by] human society, by man in general. It is through the most expedient use that the commodity acquires its value. And everything that is the exchange of the commodity in the economic process is determined precisely by this. The mutual values of the commodities can only depend on the extent to which these commodities are consumed.

Anyone who now delves into this fundamental character of the commodity within the economic process will realize something that unfortunately many people have not realized: that human labor power is something that cannot be compared at all with what a commodity is, and that therefore, because it cannot be compared in real terms, because there is no relationship between labor power and a commodity, it cannot be a commodity. A strange contradiction, isn't it? On the one hand, one must actually recognize that human labor power is quite incomparable to a commodity and therefore cannot be exchanged for one; on the other hand, one sees that within today's economic order, proletarian labor power has truly become a commodity. What is the basis for this contradiction of life? This contradiction of life is based on the fact that the employee cannot actually buy the labor power from the worker. And by believing that he can buy it, one is labouring under a great fallacy. It is a fundamental economic fallacy that expresses itself in the belief that one can buy human labour at all. In reality, one does not buy it. What does the employer buy from the employee? In truth, the employer buys the services from the employee. The goods produced by the employee and the value of these goods are determined by their relation to other goods on the labor market. And the real fact of the matter is that the employer does not pay at all for the goods produced by the employee, that he, as a result of today's economic process, so to speak, evades payment – one can put it so radically – and that he pays for something else that, in principle, should never be paid for within the human social order because it can never be a commodity: he pays for labor. And he pays for this labor to the extent that he is able to do so, in that he holds the economic power, that he can, so to speak, exert a compulsion on the employee, that this employee, in order to live, goes to the machine, goes to the factory.

Thus we have the fact, the serious and significant fact, that something in our economic life has shifted, that something is being hidden, concealed. The fact is hidden that in reality one buys goods from the employee or purchases services, but evades the payment for this purchase, that is, one does not actually buy them, but forces the worker to give them up voluntarily in return for something else. By feeling like today's proletarian, he feels that his existence is degrading. And we will never be able to properly penetrate the souls of the modern proletariat if we are unable to see the matter in this way, if we are unable to rise to the view that a commodity must be consumed in the most expedient way if it is to serve the economic process in the right way. When proletarian labor power is commodified, it must take on the character of the commodity, that is, it must be consumed in the economic process. In this way, the human being is consumed, and it is in this mere consumption that proletarian man perceives what is degrading about it.

But how is it possible that such a concealment, that such a masking of the facts has actually occurred? Here again, proletarians and non-proletarians in the present day are not at all in agreement. What must be seen in this area is that the integration of human labor into the social process, into the coexistence of human beings, cannot be a question of economic life at all, that what regulates this labor must be taken out of the economic process.

This brings us to what is so necessary for the recovery of the social organism, and to being able to shed light on the damage caused by the fact that the social organism, in its own structure, is not understood in the right way. This social organism is viewed as if it were a unified, centralized structure. This view is just as wrong as it would be wrong to believe – as I have already pointed out in earlier lectures – that the human natural organism is a single centralized system. This centralized natural organism has, for example, the processes of rhythmic life, of breathing and of the heart, and the processes of the sensory-nervous system, in addition to the processes of metabolism. All of this is merely centralized in one place – and it works, each with a certain independence and serves the other precisely through its independence. The lungs take in air from the outside, quite independently of what is going on in the processes of the sensory nervous system and in the processes of metabolism. But it is precisely because these organs are independent that they harmonize best with each other. With regard to the social organism, such a consideration has not yet been reached. The necessary relationship between all economic aspects of social organization and all legal aspects has not yet been recognized.

In more recent times, it has become apparent that, to begin with, the leading classes have, as they say, nationalized certain branches of economic life. It has been deemed right and in the interest of human progress to nationalize, or one might say socialize, such branches of economic life as the postal service, the telegraph, the railways and the like. In doing so, they added further branches of this economic life to those already previously administered by the state. The leading and governing circles were the first to take this step of socializing economic life. But they were followed along this path by the views of the proletarian circles and their leaders. And today, what is being thought in this [area] comes to a head in the demand for the total socialization of the entire economic life. Thus, the proletariat is only drawing the final conclusion of what the leading circles have begun and which they have indeed limited according to their advantage. But if it were to be realized, the entire social organism would become a unified, centralized system. This is detrimental to its health. If it is to be healthy, it must be just as internally structured as the natural human organism. For just as air enters the natural human organism to be further processed in that natural human organism in a completely different way, in a completely different way than the food that enters the metabolism, so too must that which lies in the legal life, what is effective in the legal life, in the system of public rights, must enter the social organism in a completely different way than that which is in the economic life and leads to the production of goods, to the circulation of goods and to the consumption of goods.

What is the basis of economic life? As I have already pointed out, it is human interest. The laws that serve human interest must be realized in economic life. In this process, one person is always confronted with another person, depending on their interests: the consumer with the producer, one professional group with another, and so on. In a healthy social organism, alongside what takes place purely as a result of the effect of human interests, another element of this social organism must exist: the element in which the life of public law unfolds. This life of public law is based on human impulses that develop in a completely different, radically different way than impulses that lie in human needs and lead to the economic process. That which expresses itself as a need in human life and leads to the economic process arises from the elementary nature of human nature and the human soul. This is something that does not directly depend on man as such.

The situation is different with law, with everything that can be established as public law through the coexistence of people. This law is formed in a similar way to human language itself. Human needs are there by nature, insofar as they intervene in economic life. Human law, which has to do with the relationship from person to person, must, insofar as you are human, must ignite in the direct intercourse from person to person, as language is formed, or at least formed, in the intercourse from person to person. While political economy is concerned with the relationship between circles of interests, what is the life of public law is concerned with relationships that may take place only between human and human, independently of everything else. Relationships must be justified by the law, by which man feels himself within human society, worthy only as a human being. Such legal impulses cannot arise out of economic life itself. If such legal impulses were to be formed out of economic life itself, then they would always be only a transformation of economic interests. However you imagine the state or human society, or however you want to call it, to be formed, if rights are established in it according to economic interest, then these rights will only be the expression of revelation, only the transformation of economic interests. Just as little can arise from the economic organism that is present in the legal system as can arise from the metabolism that is present in the respiratory process.

What is important, dear attendees, is not that it goes without saying that people who are involved in economic life know what rights between people are, but rather that, in addition to the independent economic life in a healthy social organism, an equally independent legal life must arise, which, precisely because of its relative independence, can in turn intervene in the economic life in just the right way.

Nothing has shown more forcefully that this is a necessity than the relationship in which human labor power has been incorporated into the modern economic process. To understand this, one need only realize what is meant here by public law. In the economic process, one is concerned only with goods, the exchange of goods, and so on. The economic process does not include, for example, the ownership relationship; the ownership relationship belongs in the legal sphere. Why? What does it actually mean if I am the owner, say, of a piece of land? It means that the human institutions within which I live have been established in such a way that I alone have the right to use that land in the economic process. This is a right to this land; this is a right that is quite different from what can take place according to the laws of the economic process. And so one could cite many things that would define the opinion one must have about the difference between the actual economic life and the legal life.

Human labor power, by its very nature, because it is incomparable to the commodity, as I have discussed, does not belong in economic life, but in legal life. Today, there is a lot of talk about the socialization of economic life. The only question, dear attendees, is whether this socialization can really be achieved with the means and ways in which we are trying to achieve it today. What matters is not that we have this or that view based on certain human demands, but that we can also realize them, that they make the life of the social organism possible.

It is not considered that everything that can develop in an independent life of public law must have a social character from the outset, that it works from the outset towards socialization, towards the socialization of human society. And only when this public law is not brought about by the pure relationship between human beings, not brought about from the elementary sense of right itself, but from political or economic power, then it bears not a social character, but an anti-social character. The rights that we have in today's social body largely bear this anti-social character, because they do not serve to establish a relationship between people that arises from the elementary sense of right and wrong, but rather they serve to offer advantages to one class or another, to one profession or another, and so on.

In a healthy social organism, the relationship between employer and employee must not be based on an economic relationship, but must be based on a legal relationship. The relationship between employer and employee with regard to the labor force must be established not within the economic process, not within the institutions that are established within the economic process, but in a separate legal organism. This has certainly already been attempted in the course of modern life with the establishment of trade unions and the like and employment certificates and the like. However, anyone who understands this modern life will know that all these are only surrogates for what the proletarian actually feels as his natural demand from the foundations of human nature. But, dear ladies and gentlemen, if you say that the relationship between employer and employee is a legal one, and in truly civilized countries it is based on a contract between employer and employee, then you are only obscuring the real facts. Of course, this contract is concluded, and a great deal is made of it; but what use is this contract in real life when it is concluded about something that should never be concluded about, according to the nature of the economic process and the legal process? According to the nature of the social organism, an employment contract can only be concluded about what the employee produces for the employer as goods. If it is concluded for the purpose of regulating the relationship between the employee's labor and the employer, then it is based on a false social foundation.

As you can see, esteemed attendees, one must look for things at much greater depths than one usually does today, otherwise one will increasingly encounter the objection: Yes, what you want is actually already there, that is already being striven for. But if it is pursued in the very wrong way, it destroys the healthy organism instead of contributing to its healing. Since human labor can never be compared to a commodity, it must be lifted out of the mere economic process and placed in the realm of the legal, and no contract should be made at all about it. It should be placed in human social life by means of quite different forces and impulses. Contracts that are concluded within the economic sphere between the person who manages the work and the person who does the work should relate only to the services. Then, if they were based on performance, the proletarian would be able to see how he actually stands within the economic process; then he would have an overview of what can flow from his own free will into his own upkeep from this economic process, and what is necessary for the upkeep of the entire social order. However strange it may still sound to people today, the worker would be in complete agreement with what is withdrawn from his own labor, from his work performance, for his own gain. Because he would reasonably understand: I must be part of the social organism, I must serve it, and I enter into a contract with the entrepreneur, by which I do not sell my labor, but through which what I achieve is regulated in a healthy way in the social organism.

What is important, dear attendees, in real life, is not that rights develop out of economic life, but rather that life itself is shared, so to speak, on the one hand economic life, on the other the legal life, that on the one hand people integrate themselves into the circumstances of economic life according to human interests, human needs and according to what must be produced afterwards, and that on the other hand they in turn lift themselves out of this mere economic process and can place themselves in such a human coexistence in which only the relationship between human being and human being plays a role. What matters is that we really separate these two areas in life, not just in thought, not just in institutions, but really separate them in life.

Therefore, when we speak of the recovery of the social organism today, we must also speak of the fact that, in addition to other needs, this healthy organism has, on the one hand, the economic body, which is concerned solely with the circulation of goods, and, on the other hand, the legal body. Both bodies have their own legislation and their own administration. The legislation and administration of the economic body arise out of the economic process of circulation, out of the needs of this process of circulation. What is determined by the legal body in relation to the relationship between people will arise out of quite different prerequisites. And one can say: the actual state life, which has to include the determination of public rights, security, what is called political in the narrower sense, and economic life – must stand side by side like sovereign states. They will best interact like the individual parts of the human organism when they are independent.

If this seems too complicated to you, dear attendees, then you should also remember that what really matters is not whether something seems complicated or not, but whether it is necessary for life; because life itself is complicated. As soon as legal life is distinguished in a healthy way from mere economic life, the socialization of the social organism occurs. For the legal life as such has an effect, proceeding from the democratic principle on which it must be based, socializing.

Of course, you may already believe that some of the things being tried are similar to what is being called for here. But anyone who delves deeper into the matter will find that the very thinking of today's world is moving in the opposite direction. A certain idolatry of the state is what has taken hold in all minds. That is why economic life and the state, political life and the economic process should become one.

As I said, in this point proletarians and non-proletarians do not see eye to eye. It is not a matter of drawing up a social program, but of realizing how human social life must develop so that out of this social life, through what people will do, the healthy will arise, the healthy will form. But in modern times, this healthy element has been resisted. Nationalization has become more and more popular. And those who wanted to retain control over their private economic lives sought at least some kind of support from the state, so that they could then use the state to further their private interests. Confusion, a merging of economic life with political life, which should be kept strictly separate for the healthy organism, has become the ideal for many.

The situation is similar with regard to intellectual life. Today, the social question is not only a unified one, but, in the sense that I have just tried to explain, it is first of all an economic question, because ways and means must be sought to lift labor out of the circulation of commodities in the social organism itself, through the right interaction of humanity. This social question is a legal question because it must first be comprehended in a comprehensive way as an independent legal life, which is precisely what will have a socializing effect. This independent legal life, of which we do not even have the beginnings today due to the course of recent history. But something similar must be said with regard to the intellectual life. In the last two lectures I have already indicated how deeply it actually intervenes in the proletarian question of the present, without proletarians and non-proletarians having the right ideas about it. And I have already pointed out one thing: Again and again, those who, as I said, do not think about the proletariat but with the proletariat, can hear from the proletariat itself or from the leaders of the proletariat: What is going on in intellectual life, everything artistic, everything religious, everything scientific, customs, law and so on, that is actually an ideology, that is not something that has its own independent reality in itself, but it is something that arises out of the economic process, which is, so to speak, a spiritual superstructure of the economic process, depending on the relationship between the economic classes in the historical course of humanity, depending on how they stand today, depending on the way in which the individual is connected to what he does in economic life, depending on that he forms ideas, artistic perceptions, religious beliefs. This economic, purely material life is reflected in these ideas and feelings. Indeed, they may in turn have an effect on economic institutions, arising from these ideas and feelings. But originally these ideas and feelings are rooted entirely in purely material economic life, they are merely its reflection. This is the fundamental conviction of the proletarian soul today. You can hear this over and over again, and it is encapsulated in the saying: All spiritual life is actually just an ideology. And you can see how this attitude towards spiritual life, arising from the proletariat's entire disposition, fills the proletarian soul, even if it does not yet realize this, but all of this takes place in subconscious concepts. You see, these things can actually only be learned from life. What has emerged, I would say, simultaneously with the development of modern technology and modern capitalism in the historical development of humanity, modern, scientifically oriented thinking, has a completely different effect on the members of the previously ruling class and on the proletarian. No matter how much the ruling classes may be inclined to say, “Oh well, the proletarian doesn't want what he demands out of some scientific way of thinking, but it's a bread question or something like that.” Of course it is also a bread question; but how this bread question comes to light depends on completely different things, it is by no means as banausically oriented as many members of the ruling circles believe. And it is true that at the time when a certain form of scientific orientation had taken hold of the intellectual life of people in the leading circles, it was precisely at that time that the worker was tied to the machine, to the factory, that he was torn out of other life contexts and had no other context. Because the bleak machine and soulless capitalism do not provide him with a sense of life. He was forced to answer the question, “What am I as a human being in the world and in social science?” from within himself. Then he turned his great trust, his boundless trust, to the leading circles and took from these leading circles, as his heritage, the scientific orientation. The proletarian was in a completely different situation from the members of the leading circles. These leading circles could easily turn to the modern science that provides good information about nature and the natural course of human development from the lowest living creature to today's perfect human being. But these leading circles did not need to ask themselves the question: How do I actually stand within human society if this is true about man? They had their old traditions, even if they no longer believed in these old traditions, even if they were or are free spirits, even if they are atheists. They are part of human society, as it has been formed, certainly not according to the principle of scientific orientation, but out of old religious, out of old social impulses that really have nothing to do with today's scientific orientation.

Yes, dear attendees, one can be a naturalist, a natural scientist like Büchner, one can be completely convinced that everything that happens is only in the natural order, but one will only come to a certain theoretical conviction for the head. With one's whole being, one is part of the human social order, the structure of which is conditioned in a completely different way than by such a scientific foundation. One must learn in life what it means that the bourgeois-oriented person can gain a scientific conviction through the scientifically oriented way of thinking. The proletarian, however, needs what religion gives the other person, and he demands that from the scientific orientation.

If you let life teach you, you can see the difference in how the scientific orientation speaks from the soul of the member of the previously leading circles, and how differently it enters into the soul of the proletarian when you speak to him of this fully scientific orientation, which is supposed to instruct him about his position as a human being among other human beings, as a human being in the world and in human society in general. Let me give you an example that could easily be multiplied a hundredfold, even if I have to go into the personal for a moment. I once stood on the same podium, directly in front of a rather large gathering of the Berlin proletariat, giving a speech together with Rosa Luxemburg, who recently met a tragic end. Rosa Luxemburg spoke to the proletarians about science and the workers. She spoke in her own simple and inspiring way. She spoke like someone who speaks in the spirit of modern scientific orientation. She made it clear to these people that it is a prejudice to believe that man descended from something angelic, that he was somehow rooted in a spiritual life of the distant past. No, she said, man was not such an angel in prehistoric times, man was not such an angel at all in the place of prehistoric man; he behaved most indecently by climbing like monkeys in trees, and from such beginnings he had raised himself to his present existence. This does not justify the distinctions that are made in the human order today, it justifies a completely different consciousness of man as man.

You see, dear attendees, this is something that the proletarian has heard over and over again. And when one speaks of the uneducated proletariat, one simply does not know what is going on in the proletarian movement. But this is also something that seizes his soul quite differently, seizes it with the power of a creed, than the soul is seized by the leading circles. One must look at it. And then one will be trained to reflect on where it actually comes from. Then one arrives at the following. Then one arrives at being able to answer the question of how it actually happened that, as I said, another thing developed at the same time as modern technology and modern capitalism. The other thing that has developed is that the earlier, relatively independent spiritual life has developed out of the instincts of humanity, which today, however, must be transformed into conscious impulses. The leading circles, whose interests were linked to the emerging state, were guided by these instincts. What we call the “state” today is actually only four centuries old. And it is a prejudice to believe that there have always been states in our sense in our historical development. The earlier development was something quite different. But with what has developed there, the interests of the leading, guiding circles have become connected. Only the interests of the modern proletariat have been excluded from this, they have simply been excluded by the modern economic process. The consequence of this was that just as individual circles and individual areas of economic life have been introduced into the state in modern times, so has intellectual life been introduced into the state, schools, secondary schools, universities; and efforts are being made to introduce more and more and more into this purely political life of the state.

What happened as a result? The state sucked out the spiritual life. And anyone who follows the process that took place here closely knows that not only did the administration and legislation of this spiritual life become dependent on the state, but the content of so-called science and the other branches of the spiritual life became very dependent on the state life of the circles that had previously been in charge. The state became the decisive factor for the impulses of humanity's intellectual activity. Therefore, the state had its interests represented by these intellectual powers. And the consequence of this was that what emerged in intellectual life now really became only a reflection, only a superstructure, of those interests that were connected with state life by the ruling circles. It is the truth that through an historical process, the spiritual life has become a reflection, a superstructure, an ideology at the time when the proletariat was excluded from participating in this state life. What could it want other than to participate in this state life like the other classes?

And so we see how this intellectual life – it can't just be mathematics, but it can be in other branches – has really become a mirror image of what is happening outside in purely political life according to the interests of the ruling circles. Perhaps especially in the present catastrophe of humanity one will already be able to see this for oneself. Anyone who has taken the trouble to follow the course of German history, culminating in this world war catastrophe, will be able to see quite well that what the scholars have told the people as “history” was only an expression of the various areas of the state will of the ruling powers. For I would like to ask the question: Will the history of the Hohenzollerns perhaps look the same in the future as it has done so far? It will very much reveal how it has so far been a reflection of what the leading circles wanted according to the powers they had. (Applause.) That is particularly striking in such an example. But these examples could be multiplied, where the corresponding thing may not be so radical, but perhaps all the more effective precisely because it is hidden.

The modern proletarian saw this, dear attendees. From this he formed the view that all intellectual life is merely a reflection, merely a superstructure of what is happening below in the real process. And since he was deprived of participation in political life, he formed the view that everything intellectual is only a reflection of the economic process as such.

Those who really have the opportunity, and even the ability, to penetrate these processes will come to the realization that, at the dawn of modern times, the proletariat great confidence in the leading circles, to accept from them as inheritance what had been developed in the intellectual life, [this germination, which became an unhappily soul-destroying inheritance]

And so it has come about that the modern proletarian has indeed been placed in circumstances that he, in his nature, perceives as inhumane, but that he still thinks today, continues to think about the circumstances in the same way as he has learned from the leading circles. In this regard, esteemed attendees, one makes the strangest experiences about human illusions. Those who know that the last consequences of bourgeois thinking are rampant in the proletarian soul and in the soul of thinkers who serve proletarian life know that it is necessary for the social question to be understood as a spiritual question in its third aspect as well. It will only be understood as a spiritual issue if the proletariat also experiences the fact that it will want to think differently from what it has learned from the leading circles in addition to everything else that it experiences in its soul.

This is perhaps not what one would expect if one looks more deeply into the events of recent history. Perhaps it will be even more terrible than what is happening today, for those who are frightened by such things, when not even the proletarians have come to the conclusion that they do not have to transform the conditions in which they feel unhappy, but that humanity has to rethink, to think differently about the conditions themselves. Then they will realize that what must be overcome is the modern scientific orientation, and that a new spiritual life must be accepted – a new spiritual life for which perhaps the proletarian, precisely because he can be the first to be disillusioned with the old, is being prepared in the right way. Perhaps he, the proletarian, is the right modern man, while the others cannot break away from that which is old tradition.

Now, one can, again, especially me – forgive me for mentioning something personal for a moment – one can perhaps make the objection to me in particular: Well, you usually speak of an intellectual life, you must think that is the right thing. Do you think that today's proletarians are more willing to accept this intellectual life than the bourgeois or other leading classes? I certainly do not believe that for the present time, for the facts clearly indicate the opposite. But in this respect, do the proletarians as proletarians judge at all? Have the proletarians become free enough to gain an inner judgment, a truly inner judgment? Have they not received the scientific orientation, the whole way of thinking of the inner man, from the leading circles? The ruling circles are opposed to this new spiritual life because they live in old traditions, and because the newer school of thought must radically break with the newer traditions with regard to the thinking, feeling and willing of man. And to be against it, the others have learned from these ruling circles – except for a few exceptions, of course. When the time comes that the proletarian realizes that the human soul must become desolate through the lack of a spiritual life, that something quite different is needed than a mere ideology, a mere reflection of purely material reality, then he will certainly not go back to the old world-view traditions; but he will need the realization of the connection between man and the spiritual world. This knowledge of the connection between man and the spiritual world can only be properly integrated into the social organism if a third element is added to the two already mentioned. This means that the developments of recent centuries, which have been pushed forward to a certain extent, must be reversed. what has been nationalized in the field of intellectual life is denationalized, when, alongside the independent economic body and the independent legal body, a third area of the social organism is the area of intellectual life, which is immediately freed from all other influences and impulses and is left to its own devices. It is only when it can arise out of free human initiative that the spiritual life can flourish and take hold of people. Of course, one can learn something when forced to do so by circumstances. But one cannot let the spirit take effect on one, experience the spirit as it can only truly be effective for human coexistence when the spirit is left to its own devices. And however strange it may sound to the thinking habits of today's people, we must strive for a time when not only the economic body receives its own legislation [and] administration from its own relationship, when not only the legal life receives its democratic structure from the relationship between human and man, but where the spiritual life is also completely independent of the economy and the state, purely on its own, so that it can only give the state and the economy even more good through its achievements, because it only develops them energetically in its own field.

I would say that people today still think very retrogressively about this matter. Above all, they think according to comfortable habits of thought. Time and again, the question is raised, also with regard to the spiritual part of the social question: what do the proletarians actually want? Are there not enough aspirations today? Are not all kinds of educational associations being founded here and there, lectures being given by the leading circles, and other educational opportunities being provided for the proletariat? Well, dear attendees, the proletariat may go to all of this. What does it receive there? It receives what it has received for centuries and what it perceives as an ideology, as a mere spiritual superstructure of the economic order, which it basically cannot use for the real development of its soul. One may well-intentionedly justify all of this, but it has no value for the recovery of the social organism. For the recovery of the social organism, it has value only if one turns to a school of thought that makes itself independent of the other two social fields, which is therefore suited to bring real spiritual life into the development of humanity.

What will be the consequence of this spiritual life also imprinting itself on the human being for his entire human existence and for the consciousness of his human dignity, so that it can be a real asset in life for him? The proletariat can only think of the intellectual life that has passed from the ruling circles to the proletariat as a legacy in the manner described, as being there more or less for the entertainment of the ruling circles. And finally, in most cases it is only there to serve these leading circles, for they have ultimately managed to form a closed society for themselves with their intellectual life. There is an abyss between what the members of the leading circles receive for themselves as art, religion, science, custom and even as law, and what those outside these leading circles, as proletarians, cannot understand at all, because it is born out of the mere impulses of the ruling circles, which are aimed at making these ruling circles a closed society.

Mutual understanding would only be possible if there were a common spiritual life. This common spiritual life can only develop on the basis of a socializing constitutional state that has been established from the economic body. And it can develop on the other side when there is complete emancipation from the other two powers, the spiritual life itself. For this spiritual life will have a completely different impact than what is regarded as the spiritual life today. And this spiritual life will be soul-bearing, will be able to fulfill man quite differently than religious views once fulfilled, to which the modern proletariat will certainly not return.

Thus the social question is indeed, in the most eminent sense, a spiritual question, ladies and gentlemen. What is needed is a yearning for a new spiritual life. And an attempt at a solution in this area can only come about by acquiring a sense of what such an independent new spiritual life wants to bring into humanity. Objections are always easy. You can start with the very lowest objections; you can say: No, let's free the school so that, firstly, its maintenance is based only on what people voluntarily give for it, then we will return to the age of illiteracy. We shall not do that, dearest attendees, nor will the highest studies suffer if they are freed from the other powers; but we will see how, precisely when this spiritual life is emancipated from the other powers, it will have the right effect on those people who are otherwise involved in economic or legal life. It will have an effect because they and those who lead them will then be aware that they are voluntarily leading to this spiritual life so that they can grow into the rest of the healthy social organism. What matters is not what one or the other wants today with regard to this healthy social organism, but what people will do when it is striven for, or when it is at least realized to a certain extent. People will then most certainly, let us say, for example, only admit to the administrative body of the constitutional state those who have a certain school education. And I really believe that I am one of those who can not only think about the proletariat, but can think with the proletariat. I know that which will prevail in the people who grow out of the modern proletariat and integrate themselves into the tripartite, healthy social organism. These people will certainly not refuse to admit only those into political life who have received a certain education. But illiteracy will have ceased to exist wherever it still exists today; it will certainly not begin again.

This is how specific questions are answered, because today it is important above all to point out the major impulses as such. Today we need a realistic view of these things, a view that can be immersed in life and can form ideas about the forms that life must take so that, in this life, people gradually turn their impulses into a healthy social organism. Because it must be repeated again and again: The social question has emerged, is manifesting itself, revealing itself in powerful facts, in facts that are quite terrible for some. It has not emerged in such a way that it will be solved by doing this or that tomorrow, and then it will be solved, then it will cease to exist – no, the development of humanity is such that this social question is now here, that it must be viewed in this threefold way as an economic, legal and as a spiritual question, and that when people see it this way, when a feeling about it becomes a social feeling in such a way that it becomes a self-evident demand for people to distinguish between the three parts of the social organism, then the ongoing solution of this social question will always arise from human behavior. For economic life will always consume people to a certain extent. The legal system must always protect him from this consumption, always protect him from what economic life wants. The social question cannot be solved all at once; the social question is solved in a continuous process of becoming. And to gain insight into it means to delve into the becoming of humanity from the outset, as its dawn is in the present, as the sun must rise for it more and more towards the future.

Thus it turns out that a realistic view of the social question must be seen in a completely different way than it is usually seen. One thinks that it can be solved by this or that; it could be solved by offering one's hand to a reorganization of the social organism itself, indeed only to a real formulation of the social body, to an organism that has the three limbs described, which, if they are independent, can then work together in the right way. As long as we do not engage with these things, we will not be able to practice a real healing art of the social organism in the social question. Wherever the attempt may come from, from the proletarian or non-proletarian side, it will be quackery. And things have come so far today, esteemed attendees, that one should truly ask oneself the serious question: how do you practice real healing in this field, rather than quackery?

Of course, I do not think that such a thing can be achieved overnight. The socialists do not think that either; they talk about a slow development, insofar as they are based on a certain rationality. But with every single measure that man takes, he can already orient his thinking and acting towards the threefold social organism. If those who want to take part at all - and basically, every human being is granted this, to one with greater, to the other with lesser responsibility - if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take part in the development of the social order, if those who want to take The social organism must be structured into the three distinct parts described, if everything that is done in legislation, everything that is done in administration, and everything that is done in ordinary life is oriented in this way, then we are moving towards what we must move towards. It is easy to think about how happiness is established by the social organism. It is not a proper thought. A proper thought, Most Excellent Presence, is to realize, above all, how the social organism can be made viable and healthy. Then, precisely because the spiritual life is emancipated from other powers, because the legal life stands in its independence, because this legal life, in its independence, has a socializing effect on economic life, precisely because of this, the possibility will arise that in this healthy social organism, through completely different factors than through its processes themselves, what people call a dignified, perhaps even a happy existence, will be established. The human organism, the natural organism, must be healthy. Does its healthiness already give us the elevation of the soul, the satisfying soul life? No, it does not give us that. Our organism, when it is sick, certainly it depresses the soul life, it makes us unhappy, humanly speaking. But when it is healthy, we must still strive for something else in order to have a gladdened, a contented soul, one that is inwardly filled with spiritual life, in a healthy organism. We will only be able to do this if we have a healthy organism, if we are not paralyzed by illness. The social organism must be made viable; then the people who live in the viable, healthy social organism will be able to base their happiness on other factors of life. The proletarian world – we must not harbor any illusions about this – cannot do it today, because it is tied to the mere economic organism. It must be liberated from the mere economic life in the healthy social organism. Only then will the social impulse be able to take on the right modern character, especially in the proletarian masses of humanity.

Simply by saying these things, the weight they carry for present-day life must be felt, esteemed attendees. In these matters, he who devotes himself to them, as I believe with real inner understanding, is not so absorbed that he merely wants to gain a view or merely wants to be right in some form or another, but is so absorbed that he thinks above all of gaining something that can have an effect on real life, that can enter into people's hearts, into their souls, from which their actions and their life situation must surely arise.

What I am saying here in these lectures is what I have been saying for a long time, even while the terrible catastrophe of war raged. I have said it to many who were in leading positions at the time, saying on the one hand: It is not invented, it is not that one should think that I am representing something imagined, but what is represented here has been taken from the views of the developmental forces of humanity, namely of European humanity for the next ten, twenty, thirty years. This wants to be realized. That it wants to be realized does not depend on any of us, it will be realized because it is inherent in the development of humanity and wants to be realized objectively. One can only say to the person who wants to intervene in social life in some way: You have the choice either to intervene in the sense of these forces or to oppose them. In the first case it is possible to serve the development of the times through reason; in the other, one simply has to wait idly for revolutions and cataclysms. These revolutions and cataclysms have come more quickly than many people believed, to whom I spoke of them years ago.

And now it is taking on different forms, though. And there are already more people who are sympathetic to such things because the facts speak even more clearly today. But on the other hand, I also said the following to those to whom I was allowed to speak about the same thing that I have already discussed here: I could imagine that people would set about attacking things in reality in such a way that they would move in the direction indicated in the treatment of the social question. Then something could arise from it that might not leave a stone unturned in what I myself say today, but that would be beneficial. Because I don't have the faith that I am so clever as to know every single thing that needs to be done, but I do have the unquestioning faith that reality itself is tackled with these things. And if you open yourself to such reality, then those people who place themselves in this threefold organism will be so clever that they will work together to achieve the right thing. Therefore, of what I say today, no stone need be left unturned; everything can turn out differently, but it will turn out as it lies in the direction of developmental reality. That is what matters.

Therefore, it was a certain satisfaction for me – everyone tries to do what they can do in the place where the fate of life has put them – it was a certain satisfaction for me to see how an appeal that wants to speak to people about the terrible catastrophe of the last few years, an appeal that also contains in brief words, with a few suggestive sentences only, but which indicates that this can be justified in full detail, that this appeal has found well over a hundred signatures in Germany, and around a hundred signatures among the Germans of Austria, in a relatively short time, and now also signatures of Swiss personalities, which we must value particularly highly for this cause.

And I believe that through this appeal, which is to appear in the near future, supported by those personalities who today can already more or less intensively, or less intensively, identify with such a will as it is characterized here, that with this appeal, I believe a beginning will be made. I will then support what is only hinted at in this appeal, what one must feel more through this appeal, with what one already understands oneself. This booklet is already in print. And so I hope, dear readers, that precisely those ideas which I believe correspond to a realistic social view can enter the human soul in these difficult times, now supported by a larger number of people reflecting on them. And that is necessary. The facts that are emerging today on the horizon of world-historical becoming challenge us to do so.

And it would be a failure if everyone did not try, in their own place, to arrive at some kind of judgment that can be realized in their actions, to arrive at a judgment about what is actually needed. What is actually the true nature of what is called the social movement? Today we have to start with what later has to be a kind of schooling like the multiplication table is today, or like the four types of arithmetic. We must begin with the insight: how is the social question shaped as an economic, legal and spiritual question? And will humanity be able to live in the future if it must continually solve recurring problems within the development of the social structure as an economic, legal and spiritual question?

Today's facts speak so strongly, and they are already intervening so strongly in the lives of many people. And it is already becoming apparent that they will intervene in the life of every single person. These facts are so strong. They reveal themselves in such a way that they must lead people to the conclusion, to the feeling: I must acquire some kind of view in this area, I cannot continue to stand in the present turmoil of facts with a sleeping soul. Otherwise, if it is impossible to find any understanding for a development in these matters that is born out of the soul, then it would have to come to the point where people's instincts simply gain the upper hand, that these instincts bring about the decision, which would then be not a decision but a terrible test for humanity, a gruesome test for humanity, that the instincts bring about this test, this horrible fate. In view of what is now emerging, but which can perhaps still be averted if only each individual consults with himself, the words repeatedly come to our lips, welling up from the heart that wants to take part in the fate of the times and in the fate of people in this time: one tries to penetrate into the essence of the social movement before it is too late.

The only way to get a sound judgment as to what action is needed in the social field is through insight into the basic forces at work in the social organism. The basic idea behind the preceding chapters was an attempt to arrive at such an insight. The facts of social life show that the social disturbances are not merely on the surface but are fundamental. Vision that penetrates to the foundations is needed to cope with them.

It is in capital and capitalism that the worker looks for the cause of his grievances. But to arrive at any fruitful conclusion as to capital's part, for good or ill, in the social structure, one has first to be perfectly clear as to how capital is produced and consumed. One has to learn how this process takes place as a result of the individual abilities of people and the effects of the rights system and the forces of economic life.

One points to human labor as the factor that, together with capital and the nature-basis of the economy, creates the economic values. Through these three factors, the worker becomes conscious of his social situation. To reach any conclusion as to the way in which human labor must be placed into the social organism without injuring the worker's self-respect, requires keeping in mind the relation of human labor to the development of individual abilities, and to the rights-consciousness.

Today, quite rightly, people are asking what the first step must be (the most immediate action) if the claims presented by the social movement are to be met. Even a first step will not succeed unless we first know how it is to be related to the basic principles of a healthy social order. Once this is known, then, in whatever part of the social structure one is working, one will discover the particular thing that requires doing. What keeps people from this insight is the fact that they take their opinions from the social institutions themselves. Their thoughts follow the lead of the facts instead of mastering them. Today, however, we need to see that no adequate judgment can be formed without going back to those primal creative thoughts that underlie all social institutions.

The body social requires a constant, fresh supply of the forces residing in these primal thoughts. If the suitable channels for these thoughts are not there, then social institutions take on forms that impede life instead of furthering it. Yet the primal thoughts live on in men's instinctive impulses, even if their conscious thoughts are mistaken and build up stumbling blocks. It is these primal thoughts that come to expression, openly or in a hidden way, in the revolutionary convulsions of the social order.

Such convulsions will only cease when the body social takes a form in which two things are possible: First, an inclination to notice when an institution is beginning to deviate from its original intention, and second, the counteracting of every such deviation before it becomes strong enough to be a danger.

In our times the actual conditions have come to deviate widely from the demand of the primal thoughts. We need to turn vigorously back to these primal thoughts and not dismiss them as “impractical” generalities. From them we need to learn the direction in which the actual realities must now be consciously guided, for the time has gone by in which the old, instinctive guidance sufficed for mankind.

One of the basic questions raised by the practical criticism of the times is how to put a stop to the oppression the worker suffers under private capitalism. The owner, or manager, of capital is in a position to put other men's bodily labor into the service of what he undertakes to produce.

It is necessary to distinguish three elements in the social relation that arises in the cooperation of capital and human labor-power. First, there is the enterprising activity, which must rest on the individual ability of some person or group of persons. Second, the relation of the entrepreneur to the worker, which must be a relation in right. Third is the production of an object, which acquires a commodity value in the circuit of economic life.

For the enterprising activity to come to expression in a healthy way, there must be forces at work in social life that let individual abilities function in the best possible way. This can only happen if the body social includes a sphere that gives an able person the freedom to use his capacities, and leaves the judgment of their value to the free and voluntary understanding of others.

It is clear that what a man can do socially by means of capital comes into the sphere of society where the laws and the administration are taken care of by the spiritual life. If the political state interferes to influence these personal activities, the decisions will unavoidably show a lack of understanding of individual abilities. This is because the political state is necessarily based on what is similar and equal in all men's claims on life. It is its business to translate this equality into practice. Within its own domain it must make sure that every man has a fair chance to make his personal opinion count. Its proper work has nothing to do with understanding individual abilities, so it ought never to have any influence on the exercise of these.

Just as little, where capital is needed for something, should the prospect of economic advantage determine the exercise of individual abilities. Many, weighing the pros and cons of capitalism, put great stress on this prospect. In their opinion it is only this incentive that can induce individual ability to exert itself. As “practical men,” they refer to the “imperfections of human nature.” There is no doubt that in the social order under which the present state of things developed, the prospect of economic advantage has come to play a very important part. The fact is that to no small extent, this is the cause of the state of things today. Thus there is need for the development of some other, different incentive. This can only be found in the social sense that will develop out of a healthy spiritual life. Out of the strength of the free spiritual life, a man's education and schooling will send him into activity equipped with impulses that will lead him, thanks to this social sense, to making real the things toward which his individual capacities drive him.

Visionary illusions have certainly caused tremendous harm in social endeavor, as in other fields, but such a point of view as that expressed above need not come into the “visionary” category. What is stated here does not rest on any notion that “the spirit” will work wonders if only the people who think they are filled with it, continually speak about it. It comes, on the contrary, out of observation of how people actually do work when they work together freely in the spiritual field. This work in common takes on a social character of its own accord, provided only that it can develop in real freedom.

It is only the lack of freedom in spiritual life that has kept its social character from coming to expression. The spiritual forces of social life have come to expression among the leading classes in a way that has, anti-socially, restricted their use and value to limited circles. What was produced in these circles could only be brought to the workers in an artificial way. They could get from it no support for their souls, because they did not really have any part in it. Schemes for popular education, for “uplifting the masses” to appreciation of art, etc., are no way of spreading spiritual property among “the people,” for “the people” are not within its life. All that can be given them is a view of these treasures from a point outside.

This also applies to those offshoots of spiritual activity that find their way into economic life on the basis of capital. In a healthy social order the worker should not merely stand at his machine while the capitalist alone knows what is going to become of the products in the circuit of economic life. The worker should be able to form a conception of the part he is playing in society through his work on the production line. Conferences, regarded as much a part of the operation as the work itself, should be held regularly by the management. Their aim will be the developing of a common set of ideas for the employed and the employer. Such activity will bring the workers to a sense of the fact that control of capital, properly carried out, benefits the whole community, including the worker. Also, an approach aimed at promoting a full understanding, will make the employer careful to keep his business methods above suspicion.

Only those unable to appreciate the effects of the community of feeling that arises from sharing a common task will consider the foregoing to be meaningless. Others will see clearly the benefits to economic productivity that will come from having the direction of economic affairs rooted in the free spiritual life. If this preliminary condition is fulfilled the present interest in capital and its increase merely for the sake of profits, would be replaced by a practical interest in producing something and getting work done.

The socialistic-minded thinkers of today are struggling to get the means of production under the control of society. What is legitimate in their aims can only be achieved if this control is exercised by the free spiritual sphere of society. In that way economic compulsion, which goes out from the capitalist and which is felt as something unworthy of human beings, will be made impossible. Such compulsion arises when the capitalist acts out of the forces of economic life. At the same time the crippling of men's individual abilities, which results when these abilities are governed by the political state, will not arise.

Earnings on everything done through capital and individual ability must result, like the results of all other spiritual work, from the free initiative of the doer and the free appreciation of those who wish the work done. A man himself must estimate what these earnings must be, taking into consideration preliminary training, incidental expenses, etc. Whether he finds his claims gratified or not depends on the appreciation his services meet with.

Social arrangements on such lines will lay the basis for a really free contractual relationship between the employer (work-director) and the work-doer. It will rest, not on barter of commodities, or money, for labor, but on an agreement as to the share due to each of the two joint producers of the commodity.

The sort of service rendered to the body social on the basis of capital depends, from its very nature, on the way in which individual human capacities reach into the social organism. Nothing but the free spiritual life can give men's abilities the impulse they need for their development. Even in a society where this development is tied up with the political state administration or with the forces of economic life, real productivity in things requiring the expenditure of capital depends on the extent to which free individual capacities can force their way through the hindrances imposed on them. Under such conditions, however, the development is not a healthy one. This free development of individual ability, using capital as a basis, is not what has brought about the commodity status of human labor power, but, rather is it the shackling of labor-power by the political state or by the circuit of economic processes.

Recognition of this fact is a necessary preliminary to everything that has to be done by way of social organization. For the superstition has grown up that the measures needed (for the health of society) must come from either the state or the economy. If we go any farther along the road on which this superstition has led us, we shall be setting up all sorts of institutions that will make oppressive conditions increasingly worse instead of leading man towards the goal he is striving for.

People learned to think about capitalism at a time when it had induced a disease in the body social. They experience the disease, and see that something must be done about it, but they must see more, namely, that the disease originates in the absorption into the economic circuit of the forces at work in capital. If one wants to work in the direction called for by the forces of human evolution, one must not be deluded into considering as “impractical idealism” the idea that the management of capital should be in the sphere of the free spiritual life.

At present people are little inclined to connect the idea that is to lead capitalism in a healthy direction, with the free spiritual life. Rather they connect it with something in the circuit of the economic life. They see how production has led to large scale industry and this, in turn, to the present form of capitalism. Now they propose to replace this by a system of syndicates that will work to meet the wants of the producers themselves. Since, of course, industry must retain all the modern means of production, the various industrial concerns are to be united into one big syndicate. Here, they think, everyone will be producing to meet the orders of the community, and the community cannot be an exploiter because it would simply be exploiting itself. Since they must link onto something that already exists, they turn their attention to the modern state, with the idea of converting it into a comprehensive syndicate.

What they leave out of account is that the bigger the syndicate, the less likelihood of its being able to do what they expect of it. Unless individual ability finds its place in the organism of the syndicate, in the manner and the form already described, the community control of labor cannot lead to healing of the social organism.

People are unwilling to look without bias at the idea of the spiritual life taking an active part in the social organism because they are used to thinking of it as at the opposite pole from everything material and practical. Many will find something grotesque in the view presented here, namely, that a part of the spiritual life should manifest itself in the activity of capital in the economic life. It is conceivable that on this point members of what have been up to now the ruling classes, may find themselves in agreement with socialistic thinkers. To see what this supposed absurdity means for the health of the body social requires that we examine certain present-day currents of thought. These, springing from impulses in the soul, are quite honest in their fashion, but they check the development of any really social way of thinking wherever they find entrance.

These thought currents tend, more or less unconsciously, away from everything that gives energy and driving power to inner experience. They aim at a world conception, an inner life, that strives for scientific knowledge as an island in the general sea of existence. One finds people who think it “distinguished” to sit in cloud castles meditating abstractly on all sorts of ethical and religious problems, such things as virtue and how best to acquire it, how to find an “inner significance” for one's life, etc. One sees how impossible it is to build a bridge between what these people call good, and everything that is going on in the outer world. There, in men's everyday surroundings, we see what is happening with the manipulation of capital, the payment of labor, the consumption, production and circulation of commodities, the system of credit, of banking, and the stock exchange.

One can see two main streams running side by side even in people's very habits of thought. One of them remains aloft, as it were, in divine-spiritual heights, and has no desire to build a bridge from spiritual impulses to life's ordinary activities. The other stream runs on, void of thought, in the everyday world.

But life is a single whole. It cannot thrive unless the forces that dwell in all ethical and religious life bring driving power to the commonplace, everyday things of life—that life that some people may think a bit beneath them. For if people neglect building a bridge between the two regions of life, then not only their religious and moral life, but also their social thinking degenerates into mere wordy sentiment, far removed from everyday reality. This reality then has its revenge. Out of a sort of “spiritual” impulse man goes on striving after every imaginable ideal, and everything he calls “good,” but to those instincts that underlie the ordinary daily needs of life (the ones that need an economic system for their satisfaction), he devotes himself minus his “spirit.” He knows no pathway between the two realms, and so everyday life gets a form that is not even supposed to have any connection with those ethical impulses. Then the ordinary things of every day are avenged, for the ethical, religious life turns to a living lie in men's hearts because (without this being noticed) it is being separated from all direct contact with life.

How many people there are today who, out of a certain ethical or religious quality of mind, have the will to live on a right footing with their fellow men. They really want to deal with others only in the best way imaginable, but they cannot lay hold of any social conception that expresses itself in practical habits of life.

It is people like these who, at this epoch-making moment when social questions have become so urgent, are actually blocking the road to a true practice of life. They see themselves as practical while they are, in fact, visionary obstructionists. One can hear them making speeches like this:

“What is really needed is for people to rise above all this materialism, this external material life that drove us into the disaster of the great war and into all this misery. People must turn to a spiritual conception of life.”

To illustrate man's path to spirituality, they harp on great men of the past who were venerated for their spiritual way of thinking. When one tries to bring the talk around to the thing the spirit has to do for practical life, the creation of daily bread, one is reminded that the first thing, after all, is to bring people again to acknowledge the spirit.

At this moment, however, the urgent thing is to employ the powers of the spiritual life to discover the right principles of social health. For this it is not enough that men make a hobby of the spirit. Everyday existence needs to be brought into line with the spirit. It was this taste for turning spiritual life into bypaths that led the classes that have been ruling up to now, to favor the social conditions that ended in the present state of affairs.

In contemporary society, the management of capital for the production of commodities, and the ownership of the means of production (thus also of capital) are tightly bound together. Yet the effects in the social system of these two relationships between man and capital—management and ownership—are quite different. The control, the management, of capital by individual ability is, when suitably applied, a means—to everybody's interest—of enriching the body social with goods. Whatever a person's position in life, it is to his interest that there should be no waste of those individual abilities that flow from the springs of human nature. Through them are created goods that are of use to the life of man. Yet these abilities are never developed unless the people endowed with them have free initiative in their exercise. Any check to the free flow from these sources means a certain measure of loss to human welfare, but capital is the means for making these abilities available for wide spheres of social life.

To administer the total amount of capital in such a way that specially gifted individuals or qualified groups can get the use of it to apply it as their particular initiative prompts them, must be to the true interests of everybody in a community. Everybody, brain-worker or laborer, must say (if he steers clear of prejudice and consults his own interests):

“I not only wish an adequate number of persons, or groups of people, to have absolutely independent use of capital, but I should also like them to have access to it on their own initiative. For they themselves are the best judges of how their particular abilities can make capital a means of producing what is useful to the body social.”

It does not fall within the scope of this work to describe how, as individual human abilities came to play a part in the social order, private property grew up out of other forms of ownership. Up to the present day this form of ownership has, under the influence of the division of labor, gone on developing within the body social. It is with present conditions, and the necessary next stage of their evolution, that we are concerned here.

In whatever way private property arose—by the exercise of power, conquest, etc.—it is an outcome of the social creativeness that is associated with individual human ability. Yet Socialists today, with their thoughts bent on social reconstruction, hold the theory that the only way to get rid of what is oppressive in private ownership is to turn to communal ownership. They put the question this way: How can private possession of the means of production be prevented, so that its oppressive effect on the un-propertied masses may cease? In putting the question this way, they overlook the fact that the social organism is something that is constantly developing, growing. About a growing organism one cannot ask: What is the best arrangement for preserving it in the state one regards as suitable for it? One can think in that way about something that goes on essentially unchanged from the point at which it was when it started. That will not do for the body social. Its life is a continual changing of each thing that arises in it. To fix on some form as the best, and expect it to remain in that form, is to undermine the very conditions of its life.

One of the requisites for the life of the social organism is that, as already stated, those who can serve the community through their individual abilities should not lose the possibility of doing so on their own initiative. This includes independent use of the means of production. I shall not use the common argument that the prospect of the gains associated with the means of production is needed as a stimulus. The concept presented here, of a progressive evolution in social conditions, must lead to the expectation that this kind of stimulus to social activity can drop away. This result can come through the setting free of the spiritual life from the political and the economic social entities.

The liberated spiritual life will of itself inevitably evolve a social sense, and out of this will arise stimuli of quite a different sort from those that lie in the hope of economic advantage. The question here is not so much concerned with the kind of impulse that makes men like private ownership of the means of production. We must ask whether the independent use of them, or use directed by the community, meets the requirements for the life of the social organism. We cannot here draw conclusions from conditions supposed to be found in primitive communities, but only from what corresponds to man's present stage of development.

At this present stage, the fruitful exercise of individual ability through the use of capital cannot make itself felt in the economic life unless the access to it is free and independent. Where there is to be fruitful production, this access must be possible, not because it will bring advantage to an individual or group but because, directed by a social sense, such use of the means of production is the best way of serving the community.

Man is connected with what he (alone or with others) is producing, as he is connected with the skill of his own arms and legs. Interfering with this free access to the means of production is like crippling the free exercise of bodily skill.

Private ownership is simply the means of providing this free and independent use of the means of production. As far as the body social is concerned, the only significance of ownership is that the owner has the right to use his property on his own free initiative. One sees, joined together in the life of society, two things of quite different significance for the social organism. There is the free access to the capital basis of social production, and on the other hand there is the rights relationship that arises between the user and other people. This comes up through the fact that his right of use keeps these other people from any free activity on the basis of this same capital.

It is not the original free use that leads to social harm but the continuance of the right of use after the conditions that tied it to his individual abilities have come to an end. One who sees the social organism as something growing, developing, cannot fail to understand what is meant. For what is living, there exists no fruitful arrangement by which a finished process does not later, in its turn, become detrimental. The question is entirely one of intervening at the right moment, when what had been opportune and helpful is beginning to become detrimental.

There must be the possibility of the free access of individual capacities to the capital-basis. It must also be possible to change the right of ownership connected with it in the moment that this right starts to change into a means for the unjust acquisition of power. There is an institution, introduced in our times, that meets this social requirement, but only partially since it applies simply to “spiritual property.” I refer to copyrights. Such property, after the author is dead, passes after a certain length of time into the ownership of the community, for free use. Here we have an underlying conception that accords with the actual nature of life in a human society. Closely as the production of a purely spiritual (cultural) possession is bound up with the gifts and capacities of the individual, it is at the same time a result of the common social life and must pass, at the right moment, back into this. It is just the same with other property. By the aid of his property the individual produces for the service of the community, but this is only possible in cooperation with the community. Accordingly, the right to the use of a piece of property cannot be exercised separately from the interests of the community. The problem is not how to abolish ownership of the capital-basis, but how this ownership can be so administered that it serves the community in the best way possible.

The way to do this can be found in the Threefold Order of Society. The people united in the social organism act as a totality through the rights state. The exercise of individual abilities comes under the spiritual organization.

Everything in the body social, viewed from a sense of actualities (and not from subjective opinions and theories), indicates the necessity for the three-folding of this organism. This is especially clear as regards the relation of individual abilities to the capital-basis and its ownership. The rights state will not interfere with the formation and control of private property in capital so long as the connection of this with personal ability remains such that the private control represents a service to the whole social organism. Moreover, it will remain a rights state in its dealings with private property. It will never, itself, take over the ownership of private property. It will only bring it about that the right of use is transferred at the proper moment to a person, or group of persons, who are, again, capable of establishing a relation to this ownership that is based on individual abilities. This will benefit the body social in two quite different ways. The democratic foundation of the rights state being concerned with what touches all men equally, there will be a watch kept to see that property rights do not in the course of time become property wrongs. The other benefit is that the individual human abilities into whose control the property is given (since the state itself does not administer property), are thus furnished the means of fructifying the whole social organism.

Under an organization of this sort, property rights, or their exercise, can be left attached to a personality for as long as seems opportune. One can conceive the representatives of the rights state as laying down quite different laws at different times concerning the transfer of property from one person or group to another. Today, when all private property has come to be regarded with great distrust, the proposal is to convert it wholesale into community property. If people go far on this road they will see that they are strangling the life of the social organism and, taught by experience, they will then pursue a different path. It would surely be better now, at this time, to take measures that would secure social health on the lines here indicated.

So long as an individual (alone or with a group) continues to carry on that productive activity that first procured him a capital-basis to work on, he shall retain the right to use accumulations arising as gains on the primary capital, if these are used for the productive extension of the business. As soon as this particular personality ceases to control the work of production, this accumulation of capital shall pass on to another person or group, to carry on the same kind of business or some other branch of productive industry useful to the whole community. Capital accumulating from a productive industry, that is not used for its extension, must from the beginning go the same way. Nothing shall count as the personal property of the individual directing the business except what he gets in accordance with the claims for compensation that he made when he first took over the business. These were claims he felt able to make on the ground of his personal abilities, and that appear justified by the fact that he was able to impress people sufficiently with his abilities for them to trust him with capital. If the capital has been increased through his personal exertions, then a portion of this increment will also pass into his private ownership—this addition to his original earnings representing a percentage of the increase of the capital. Where the original person controlling an industry is unable or unwilling to continue in charge, the capital used to start it will either pass over to the new person in charge (along with all its incumbent obligations), or will revert to the original owners, according to their decision.

In such an arrangement one is dealing with transfers of a right. The legal regulation of the terms of such transfers is a matter for the rights state. It will also be up to the rights state to see that these transfers are carried out and to administer them. It is conceivable that details of such regulations for transfers of a right will vary greatly in accordance with how the common sense of right (the rights-consciousness) varies in its view of what is right. No mode of conception, which, like this one, aims at being true to life, will ever attempt to do more than indicate the general direction that such regulation should take. Keeping to this direction and using one's understanding, one will always discover the appropriate thing to do in any concrete instance. One must always judge the right course according to the circumstances and from the spirit of the thing. For instance, it is obvious that the rights state must never use its control of rights-transfers to get any capital into its own hands. Its only business will be to see that the transfer is made to a person or group whose individual abilities seem to warrant it.

This way of thinking also presupposes, as a general rule, that anyone who has to undertake such a transfer of capital from his own hands will be free to select his successor in the use of it. He will be free to select a person or group, or else transfer the right of use to a corporate body of the spiritual organization. For anyone who has given practical services to society through his management of capital is likely, from native ability and social sense, to be able to judge what should be done with the capital afterwards. It will be more to the advantage of the community to abide by what he decides than to leave the decisions to people who have no direct connection with the matter.

Some settlement of this kind will be required in the case of capital accumulations over a certain amount, acquired through use of the means of production—and land also comes under this category. The exception is where the gains become private property by terms of the original agreement for the exercise of the individual's capacities.

In the latter case, what is so earned, as well as all savings coming from the results of a person's own work, will remain in the earner's private possession until his death, or in the possession of his descendants until some later date. Until this time, these savings will draw interest from any person who gets them to create means of production. The amount of interest will be the outcome of the general rights-consciousness and will be fixed by the rights state.

In a social order based on the principles described here it will be possible to draw a complete distinction between yields resulting from the employment of the means of production and sums accumulated through the earnings of personal labor, spiritual or physical. It accords with the common sense of right, as well as being to the general social interest, that these two things should be kept distinct. What a person saves and places at the disposal of a productive industry is a service in the interests of all, since this makes it possible for personal ability to direct production. Where, after the rightful interest has been deducted, there is an increase that arises out of the means of production, that increase is due to the collective working of the whole social organism. This must accordingly flow back into it again in the way described above. All that the rights state will have to do is to pass a resolution that these capital accumulations are to be transferred in the way prescribed.

The state will not decide which material or spiritual branch of production is to have the disposal of capital so transferred, or of capital savings. For it to do so would lead to the tyranny of the state over spiritual and material production. But anyone who does not want to select his successor to exercise the right of disposal over capital he has created, may appoint a corporate body of the spiritual sphere to do this.

Property acquired through saving, together with the interest on it, will also pass at the earner's death, or a little while later, to some person or group actively engaged in spiritual or material production, but it must only go to a producer; if it went to an unproductive person, it would simply become private income. The choice will be made by the earner in his last will. Here again, no person or group can be chosen direct; it will be a question of transferring the right of disposal to a corporation of the spiritual organism. Only when a person himself makes no disposition of his savings will the rights state act on his behalf and require the spiritual organization to dispose of them.

In a society ordered on these lines, due regard is paid both to the free initiative of the individual and to the social interests of the general community. In fact these are fully met through the setting free of private initiative to serve them. Whoever has to give his labor over to the direction of another person can know that under such an order of things their joint work will bear fruit to the best advantage of the community, and therefore to that of the worker himself.

The social order here conceived will establish a proportionate relation, satisfactory to healthy human feeling, between the prices of manufactured goods and the two joint factors of their production. These two factors are, as has been shown, human labor and the right of use over capital (embodied in the means of production), which are subject to the common sense of right.

No doubt all sorts of imperfections may be found in what is presented here. Imperfections, however, do not matter. The important thing, if we want to be true to life, is not to lay down a perfect and complete program for all time but to point out the direction for practical work. The special instances discussed here are simply intended as illustrations, to map out the direction more clearly. Any particular illustration may be improved upon, and this will be all to the good, provided the right direction is not lost.

The claims of general humanity and justified personal and family interests can be brought into harmony through social institutions of this kind. For instance, it may be pointed out that there will be a great temptation for people to transfer their property during their lifetime to their descendants or some one of them. It is quite easy to give such a person the appearance of a producer while in fact he may be quite incompetent as compared with others who would be much better in the place he holds. The temptation to do this can be reduced to a minimum: the rights state has only to require that property transferred from one member of a family to another must under all circumstances be made over to a corporation of the spiritual system after a certain period of time following the first owner's death. Or an evasion of the rule may be prevented in some other way by rights-law. The rights state will merely see to it that the property is made over in this fashion. The spiritual organization must make provision for the choice of the person to inherit it.

Through the fulfilling of these principles there will arise a general sense that the next generation must be trained and educated to fit them for the body social, and that one must not do social damage by passing capital on to non-productive persons. No one in whom a real social sense is awakened cares to have his own connection with the capital-basis of his work carried on by any individual or group whose personal abilities do not warrant it.

Nobody who has a sense for what is practicable will regard these proposals as Utopian. For the kind of institutions here proposed are such as can grow directly out of existing circumstances anywhere in life. The only thing is that people will have to make up their minds to give up administering the spiritual life and industrial economy within the rights state. This includes not raising opposition when what should happen really happens—when, for instance, private schools and colleges are started, and the economy is put on its own footing. There is no need to abolish state schools and the state economic undertakings at once. Beginning perhaps in a small way, it will be found increasingly possible to do away with the whole structure of state education and state economy.

The first necessity is for people who are convinced of the correctness of these social ideas, or similar ones, to make it their business to spread them. If such ideas find understanding, they will arouse in people confidence in the possibility of a healthy transformation of present conditions into conditions that do not show the evils we see about us. Only out of this sort of confidence can a really healthy evolution come. To achieve such confidence one must be able to see clearly how new institutions can be connected with what exists at present. The essential feature of the ideas being developed here is that they do not propose to bring about a better future by destroying the present social order further than has already been done. Their realization builds on what already exists, and in the process brings about the falling away of what is unhealthy. A solution that does not establish confidence in this respect will fail to attain something that is absolutely necessary: a further evolution in which the values of the goods already transformed through human labor, and the human faculties men have developed, will not be cast away but be preserved.

Even a radical person can acquire confidence in a form of social reconstruction that includes the preservation of already accumulated values if he is introduced to ideas capable of initiating really sane and healthy developments. Even he will have to recognize that whatever social class gets into power, it will not be able to get rid of existing evils unless its impulses are supported by ideas that can put life and health into the body social. To despair because one cannot believe there will be enough people with understanding for these ideas—provided the ideas are spread with the necessary energy—would be to despair of human nature's capacity for taking up healthy and purposeful impulses. All one should ask is, what must be done to give full force to the teaching and spread of ideas that can awaken men's confidence?

The first obstacle will be in current habits of thought. It will be objected that any dismemberment of social life is inconceivable, that the three branches cannot be torn apart because, in actual practice, they are everywhere intertwined. Or else there will be the opinion that it is quite possible to give each of the branches its necessary independent character under the One-fold State, and thus these ideas are mere empty cobweb-spinning. The first objection comes from unreal thinking. Some people believe that unity of social life is only possible when it is brought about by law. The facts of life itself require just the opposite: that unity must be the result, the final outcome, of all the streams of activity flowing together from various directions. Recent developments have run counter to this principle and so men resisted the “order” brought about from outside. It is this that has led to present social conditions. The second prejudice (the idea that these things could be accomplished under the One-fold State) arises from the inability to distinguish the radical differences in the operation of the three organs of the body social. People do not see that man stands in a separate and peculiar relation to each of the three. They do not see that each of these relationships needs the chance to evolve its own form, apart from the other two, so that it may work together with them.

People think that if one sphere of life follows its own laws, then everything needed for life must come out of this one sphere. If, for example, economic life were regulated in such a way as to meet men's wants, then a proper rights life and spiritual life would spring out of this economic soil as well. Only unrealistic thinking could believe this to be possible. There is nothing whatever in economic life that provides any motive for guiding what runs through the relations of man to man and comes from the sense of right. If people insist on regulating this relationship by economic motives, the result will be that the human being, his labor and his control of the means of labor, will all be harnessed to the economic life. The economy will run like clockwork but man will be a wheel in this mechanism. Economic life has a tendency always to go in one direction, a direction that we must balance from another side. It is not a question of rights regulations following the course set by economic life, but rather, economic life should be constantly subject to the rules of right that concern man simply as man. In this way a human existence within the economy then becomes possible. Economic life itself can develop in a way beneficial to man only when individual ability grows on its own separate soil (detached from the economic system) and continuously conveys to it the forces that economics and industry themselves are powerless to produce.

It is a curious thing that in purely external matters people can readily see the advantage of a division of labor. They do not expect a tailor to keep a cow in order to get milk. When it comes to a recognition of the individual functions of the different spheres of human life, however, they think no good can come of anything but a one-fold system.

It is clear that social ideas that are related to life as it really is, will stimulate objections from every side. Real life breeds contradictions, and anyone accepting this fact will work for social arrangements whose own contradictions will be balanced out by means of other arrangements. He dare not believe that an institution that is “ideally perfect” according to his thinking will involve no contradictions when it is realized in practice.

It is an entirely justified present-day demand that institutions in which production is carried on for the benefit of the individual be replaced by institutions in which production is carried on for the general consumption. Anyone who fully recognizes this demand will not be able to come to the conclusion of modern Socialism, that therefore the means of production must go over from private to common ownership. Indeed, he will be forced to a quite different conclusion, namely, that proper methods must be used to convey to the community what is privately produced by individual energy and capacity.

The tendency of the more recent economic impulses has been to obtain income by mass production. The aim of the future must be to find out, by means of economic Associations, the best production methods and distribution channels for the actual needs of consumption. The rights institutions will see that a productive industry does not remain tied up with any individual or group longer than personal ability warrants. Instead of common ownership, there will be a circulation of the means of production through the body social. This will constantly bring them into the hands of those whose individual ability can employ them best in the service of the community.

That same connection between personality and the means of production, which previously existed through private ownership, will thus be established for periods of time. For the head of a business and his assistants will have the means of production to thank for being able to earn, by their personal abilities, the income they asked. They will not fail to improve production as far as is possible, since every improvement brings them, not indeed the whole profit, but nevertheless a portion of the added returns. For profits, as shown above, go to the community only to the extent of what is left over after deducting the percentage due to the producer for improvements in production. It is in the spirit of the whole thing that if production falls off, the producer's income must diminish in the same proportion in which it rises with increased production, but at all times the manager's income will come out of the spiritual work he has done. It will not come out of the profits that are based on the interplay of forces at work in the life of the community.

One can see that with the realization of social ideas such as these, institutions that already exist will acquire an altogether new significance. Property ceases to be what it has been up until now, and it will not be forced back to an obsolete form, such as that of communal ownership. It is, rather, taken forward, to become something quite new. The objects of ownership will be brought into the stream of social life. The individual cannot, motivated by his private interests, control them to the injury of the general public. Neither can the general public control them bureaucratically to the injury of the individual. It is rather that the qualified individual will have access to them as a means of serving the public.

A sense for the general public interest will have a chance to develop when social impulses of this sort are realized, with approaches that place production on a sound basis and safeguard the social organism from the danger of sudden (economic) crises. Also, an Administrative Body occupied solely with the processes of economic life, will be able to bring these back into balance when this appears to be necessary. Suppose, for instance, that a concern were not in a position to pay its creditors the interest due them on their invested personal savings. Then, if the firm is nevertheless recognized as meeting a need, it will be possible to get other business concerns, by free agreement, to make up the shortage in what is due to these investors.

A self-contained economic life that gets its rights basis from outside, and is supplied from without by a constant flow of fresh human ability as it comes on the scene, will, itself, have to do only with economic matters. Through this fact it will be able to facilitate a distribution of goods that procures for everyone what he can rightfully have in relation to the general state of prosperity of the community. If one person seemingly has more income than another, this will only be because this “more” resulting from the individual's talents benefits the general public.

In a social organism that shapes itself in the light of these conceptions, the taxes needed for the rights life can be regulated through agreement between the leaders of the rights life and those of the economic life. Everything needed for the maintenance of the cultural-spiritual life will come as remuneration resulting from voluntary appreciation on the part of individuals active in the body social. This spiritual life rests on a healthy basis of individual initiative, exercised in free competition among the private individuals suited to spiritual-cultural work.

Only in the kind of social organism meant here will the rights administration develop the necessary understanding for administering a just distribution of goods. In an economic life that does not have the claim on men's labor prescribed by the single branches of production, but rather has to carry on business with the amount of labor power the rights-law allows it, the value of goods will be determined by what men actually put into it in the way of work. It will not allow the work men do to be determined by the goods-values, into the formation of which human welfare and human dignity do not enter. Such a social organism will keep in view rights that arise from purely human conditions.

Children will have the right to education. The father of a family will be able to have a higher income as a worker than the single man. The “more” that he gets will come to him through agreement among all three branches of the body social. Such arrangements could meet the right to education in the following way. The administration of the economic organization estimates the amount of revenue that can be given to education, in line with general economic conditions, and the rights state determines the rights of the individual in this regard, in accord with the opinion of the spiritual organization. Here again, since we are thinking in line with reality, this instance is merely intended to indicate the direction in which such arrangements can go. It is quite possible that for a specific instance quite other arrangements may be found to be the right thing. In any case, this “right thing” will only be found through the working together of all three independent members of the social organism. For the purposes of this presentation, our concern is merely to discover the really practical thing—unlike so much that passes for practical today. We refer to such a membering of the social organism as shall give people the basis on which to bring about what is socially useful.

On a par with the right of children to education is the right of the aged, of invalids and widows to a maintenance. The capital basis for this will flow to it through the circulatory system of the social organism in much the same way as the capital contributed for the education of those who are not yet capable of working. The essential point in all this is that the income received by anyone who is not personally an earner should not be determined by the economic life. Rather should it be the other way round: the economic life must be dependent on what develops in this respect out of the rights consciousness. The people working in an economic organism will have so much the less from what is produced through their labor, the more that has to go to the non-earners. Only, this “less” will be borne fairly by all the members of the body social when the social impulses meant here are really put into practice. The education and the support of those who cannot work, concerns all mankind in common. Under a rights state, detached from economic life, it will become the common concern in actual practice. For in the rights state there works what in every grown human being must have a voice.

A social organism so arranged will bring the surplus that a person produces as a result of his individual capacities into the general community. It will do it in just the same way as it takes from the general community the just amount needed for the support of those less capable. “Surplus value” will not be created for the unjustified enjoyment of the individual, but for the enhancement of what can give wealth of soul and body to the whole social organism, and to foster whatever is born of this organism even though it is not of immediate service to it.

Someone might incline to the thought that the careful separation of the three members of the body social only has a value in the realm of ideas (ideal value), and that it would come about “by itself” under a one-fold state or under a cooperative economic society that includes the state and rests on communal ownership of the means of production. He should, however, consider the special sorts of social institutions that must come into being if the three-folding is made a reality. For instance, the political government will no longer have to recognize the money as a legal medium of exchange. Money will, rather, owe its recognition to the measures taken by the various administrative bodies within the economic organization. For money, in a healthy social organism, can be nothing but an order for commodities that other people have produced and that one can draw out of the total economic life because of the commodities that one has oneself produced and given over to this sphere. It is the circulation of money that makes a sphere of economic activity into an economic unit. Everyone produces, on the roundabout path of the whole economic life, for everyone else.

Within the economic sphere one is concerned only with economic values. Within this sphere, the deeds that arise out of the spiritual and the state spheres also take on the character of a commodity. What a teacher does for his pupil is, for the economic circuit, a commodity. The teacher's individual ability is no more paid for than is the worker's labor-power. All that can possibly be paid for in either case is what, proceeding from them, can pass as a commodity or commodities into the economic circuit. How free initiative, and how rights, must act so that the commodity can come into being, lies as much outside the economic circuit itself as does the action of the forces of nature on the grain crop in a bountiful or a barren year. For the economic circuit, both the spiritual sphere—as regards its claim on economic returns—and the state, are simply producers of commodities. Only, what they produce is not a commodity within their own spheres. It first becomes one when it is taken up into the economic circuit.

The purely economic value of a commodity (or an accomplishment), as far as it is expressed in money terms, will depend on the efficiency, in the economic organism, that is developed by the management of the economy. On the measures taken by management, will depend the progress of economic life—always on the basis of the spiritual and the rights foundation developed by those other members of the social organism. The money-value of a commodity will then indicate that the economic organization is producing the commodity in a quantity corresponding to the demand for it. If the premises laid down in this book are realized, then the body economic will not be dominated by the impulse to amass wealth through sheer quantity of production. Rather will the production of goods adapt itself to the wants, through the agency of the Associations that will spring up in all manner of connections. In this way the proportion, corresponding in each case to the actual demand, will become established between the money-value of an article and the arrangements made in the body social for producing it.¹

In the healthy society, money will really be nothing but a measure of value, since behind every coin or bill there stands the tangible piece of production, on the strength of which alone the owner of the money could acquire it. The nature of these conditions will necessarily bring about arrangements that will deprive money of its value for its possessor when once it has lost the significance just pointed out. Arrangements of this sort have already been alluded to. Money property passes back, after a fixed period, into the common pool, in whatever the proper form may be. To prevent money that is not working in industry from being held back by its possessors through evasion of the provisions made by the economic organization, there can be a new coinage, or new printing of bills, from time to time. One result of this will no doubt be that the interest derived from any capital sum will gradually diminish. Money will wear out, just as commodities wear out. Nevertheless, such a measure will be a right and just one for the state to enact.

There can be no compound interest. If a person puts aside savings, he has certainly rendered past services that gave him a claim on future counter-service in terms of commodities. This is in the same way as present services claim present services in exchange. Nevertheless, his claims cannot go beyond a certain limit. For claims that date from the past require the productions of labor in the present to satisfy them. Such claims must not be turned into a means of economic coercion. The practical realization of these principles will put the problem of the currency standard on a sound basis. For no matter what form money may take owing to other conditions, its standard will lie in the intelligent arrangement of the whole economic body through its administration. The problems of safeguarding the currency standard will never be satisfactorily solved by any state by means of laws. Present governments will only solve it when they give up attempting the solution on their own account and leave the economic organism—which will have been detached from the state—to do what is needful.

There is a lot of talk about the modern division of labor in connection with its results in time-saving, in perfecting the manufacture and facilitating the exchange of commodities. Little attention is paid to its effect on the relation of the human individual to his work. Nobody working in a social organism based on the division of labor really earns his income himself. He earns it through the work of all those who have a part in the social organism. A tailor who makes a coat for his own use does not have the same relationship to it as does a person who, under primitive conditions, still has all the other necessities of life to provide for himself. The tailor makes the coat in order to enable him to make clothing for other people, and its value for him depends entirely on what other people produce. The coat is really a means of production. Many people will say this is hair-splitting. They won't say this when they come to consider the formation of values in the economic process. Then they will see that in an economic organism based on the division of labor one simply cannot work for oneself. All a person can do is work for others and let others work for him. One can as little work for oneself as one can eat oneself up. One can, however, establish arrangements that are in direct opposition to the very essence of the division of labor. That happens when the production of goods only takes place in order to transfer to the individual as private property what he can only produce because of his place in the social organism.

The division of labor makes for a social organism in which the individual lives in accordance with the conditions of the whole body of the organism. Economically it precludes egoism. If, then, egoism nevertheless persists in the form of class privileges and the like, a condition of social instability sets in, leading to disturbances in the social organism. We are living under such conditions today. There may be people who think it futile to insist that rights conditions and other things must bring themselves into line with the non-egoistic production resulting from the division of labor. Such a person may as well conclude, from his own premises, that one cannot do anything at all, that the social movement can lead nowhere. As regards the social movement, one can certainly do no good unless one is willing to give reality its due. It is inherent in the mode of thought underlying what is written here, that man's activities within the body social must be in line with the conditions of its organic life.

Anyone who is only capable of forming his ideas by the system he is accustomed to, will be uneasy when he is told that the relation between the employer (work director) and the worker is to be separated from the economic organism. For he will believe that such a separation is bound to lead to the depreciation of money and a return to primitive conditions of industrial economy. (Dr. Rathenau takes this view in his book, After the Flood, and from his standpoint it is a defensible one.) This danger is, however, counteracted by the three-folding of the social organism.

The autonomous economic organism, working jointly with the rights organism, completely detaches the money relationships from the labor conditions, which rest on the rights laws. The rights conditions cannot have any direct influence on money conditions, for these latter are the result of the administration of the economic organism. The rights relationship between employer and worker will not one-sidedly show itself in money values at all. For with the elimination of wages, which represent a relation of exchange between commodities and labor, money value remains simply a measure of the value of one commodity, or piece of work, as against another. If one studies the effects of the three-folding upon the social organism, one will become convinced that it will lead to institutions that do not as yet exist in the forms of the state as we have experienced them up to now.

These arrangements can be swept clear of all that today is felt as class straggle, for this straggle is based on the wages of labor being tied up in the economic processes. Here, we are describing a form of the social organism in which the concept of the wages of labor undergoes a transformation, no less than does the old concept of property. Through this transformation there is created a social relationship between human beings that is vital, is related to life.

Only a superficial judgment would find that these proposals amount in practice merely to converting hourly wages into piece wages. One might be led to this conclusion by a one-sided view of the matter, but this one-sided view is not what we are considering here. Rather, the point is the elimination of the wage-relation altogether and its replacement by a share-relation (based on contract) between employer and workers. We approach this in terms of its connection with the whole organization of the body social. It may seem to a person that the portion of the product of labor that falls to the worker is a piece wage. This is because one fails to see that this “piece wage,” which is not a “wage” at all, finds expression in the value of the product. Furthermore, it does so in a way that puts the worker in a position with relation to other members of the social organism that is quite different from the one that arose out of class supremacy based one-sidedly on economic factors. Therewith, the demand for elimination of the class straggle is satisfied.

To those who hold the theory (heard also in Socialist circles) that evolution must bring the solution of the social question and that it is impossible to present views and say they ought to be realized, we must reply: Certainly evolution will bring about what must be, but in the social organism men's idea-impulses are realities. When time has moved on a little and what today can only be thought, can be realized, then this will be present in the evolution. If one waits until then, it will be too late to accomplish certain things that are required now by today's facts. It is not possible to observe evolution in the social organism objectively, from outside, as one does in nature. One must bring about the evolution. That is why views bent on “proving” social requirements as one “proves” something in natural science are so disastrous for healthy social thinking. A “proof” in social matters can only exist if it takes into account not only what is existing but also what is present in human impulses like a seed (often unknown to the people themselves) that will realize itself.

One of the ways in which the three-folding of the social organism will prove that it is founded on what is essential in human social life will be the removal of the judicial function from the sphere of the state. It will be up to the state institutions to determine the rights that are to be observed between individuals or groups of men. The passing of judgment, however, is the function of institutions developed out of the spiritual organization. In passing judgment, a great deal depends on the opportunity the judge has for perceiving and understanding the particular circumstances of the person he is trying. Nothing can assure this except those ties of trust and confidence that draw men together in the institutions of the spiritual sphere. These must be the main consideration in setting up the courts of law.

Possibly the administration of the spiritual organization might nominate a panel of judges who could be drawn from the widest range of spiritual professions and would return to their own calling at the expiration of a certain period. Within definite limits, everybody would then have the opportunity of selecting a particular person on the panel for five or ten years. This would be someone in whom he feels sufficient confidence to be willing to accept his verdict in a civil or criminal suit, if it should come to that. There would always be enough judges in the neighborhood where anyone was living, to give significance to this power of choice. A complainant would always have to apply to the defendant's judge.

Only consider the importance such an institution would have had for the territories of Austria-Hungary. In districts of mixed language, the member of any nationality would have been able to choose a judge of his own people. Apart from nationality, there are many fields of life where such an arrangement can be of benefit to healthy development.

For more detailed acquaintance with points of law, the judges and courts will have the help of officials (also selected by the spiritual administration) who will, however, not themselves decide cases. The same administration will also have to set up courts of appeal. The kind of life that will go on in society through a realization in practice of the conditions we are presuming here will bring it about that a judge is in touch with the life and feelings of the ones brought before him. His own life—outside the brief period of his judgeship—will make him familiar with their lives and the circles they move in. The social sense developed in such a society will also show in the judicial activity.

The carrying out of a sentence is the affair of the rights state.

It is not necessary at this time to go into arrangements that will be necessitated in other fields of life by the realization of what has been presented here. This would obviously take up unlimited space.

The instances of social arrangements given here make clear that this is not an attempt to revive the three old “estates” of the Plough, the Sword and the Book. The intention is the very opposite of such a division into classes. It is the social organism itself that will be functionally membered, and just through this fact man will be able to be truly man. He himself will have his own life's roots in each of the three members. He will have a practical footing in that member in which he stands by way of occupation. His relation to the other two will be actual and living, developing out of his connection with their institutions. Threefold will be the social organism as apart from man, forming the groundwork of his life, and each man as a man will unite the three members.

• 1. Authors Note. A sound proportion between the prices of the various goods produced can only be achieved in economic life as an outcome of a social administration that springs up in this way from the free cooperation of the three branches of the body social. The proportion between prices of various goods must be such that anyone working receives as counter-value for what he has produced as much as is necessary to satisfy his total wants and the wants of his dependents until he has again turned out a product requiring the equivalent labor. It is impossible to fix such a price relation officially in advance. It must come as the result of the living cooperation between the Associations actively at work in the body social. Prices will however certainly settle down into such a normal relationship, provided the joint work of the Associations rests on a healthy cooperation between the three members of the social organization. It must develop with the same sureness that a safe bridge must come into being when it is built according to the proper laws of mathematics and mechanics. It may be said that social life does not invariably obey its own laws, like a bridge. No one, however, will make this objection who is able to recognize that it is primarily the laws of life and not those of mathematics that, throughout this book, are conceived as underlying social life.

In the present grave situation of a large part of humanity, especially of humanity in Central Europe, it would be disastrous if the cure for various serious social ills were sought with small and petty means. It is necessary today to strive for comprehensive, forceful impulses that are based on a real understanding of what has driven us into confusion and chaos. It is necessary to turn our eyes, impartially, honestly and sincerely, to what actually is there and from which we want to escape. These considerations, which are characterized by the few sentences just quoted, were the starting point for the writing of that appeal for the threefold social order, which you know and which I also want to talk about today. It is only possible, I might say, to point out the necessity of what is said in this appeal and, in somewhat more detail, in my book, The Essential Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Present and Future Life, from this or that point of view. And many lectures would be needed if one wanted to point out everything that underlies the impulses that led to this appeal. Therefore, I must ask you to accept that what I can say in a single lecture can only be a part of what is actually needed to understand the social ideal that is meant by the appeal. Above all, however, I would like to point out today that a glance at the international situation that led to the terrible catastrophe of recent years, if viewed objectively and without prejudice, must lead to this appeal. Foreign political conditions and domestic political conditions, if we speak from the point of view of Germany, seem to force us to the impulses that are meant here. The basic idea of this appeal is that the terrible situation in which we find ourselves is essentially due to the fact that in modern times there has been a tendency to mix and blend three areas of life that must now develop independently: the three areas of intellectual life, the actual political or legal or state life, and economic life.

In the unitary state, which has increasingly been regarded as the panacea for the social order, hypnotizing humanity, all the forces of these three areas of life have been merged. Today, salvation for our social organism must be sought in the independence of these three areas of life, as a practical goal. This is, in the abstract, the basic impulse underlying this appeal. If we want to understand from one of the many points of view that come into consideration, we must look to the left and to the right, so to speak, if we want to understand what has led Central European humanity, in particular, into today's terrible and dreadful catastrophe. Germany and the German people were involved in the war to the west and to the east, and it can be said that it is only by looking at the circumstances in the west and the east and how they interacted that we can understand our current situation in Central Europe.

If we look to the West, we will see, if we first consider social hardship, how, especially in the countries of the West, in those countries with which the war lasted the longest, in the historical development of modern times, clear fusion of economic life with political life has taken place, so that from the national instincts, especially of the English-speaking population, I might say, in this part of the world, as if naturally and elementarily, a striving for the state has arisen, above all, from the particular point of view of economic life. Everything political was permeated by the economic. The economic laws became political laws. Thus we see the fusion of political and economic life when we turn our gaze to the West.

In another way, we see the fusion of political life with cultural life initially in the form of nationalist folk cultures and their intellectual life, which emerges from this nationalism. Looking eastward, we see the fusion of intellectual life with political life. Everything – here it can only be hinted at, but a thorough study of the European and American situation proves it – everything indicates that the explosive materials which have gradually accumulated between Central Europe and the West can only be understood from the conflict that arose in the West itself between economic and state life due to the fact that economic and state life, but with a particular predominance of economic life, had merged in a chaotic way. In the East, the explosive materials were stored due to the merging of the individual spiritual cultures of the national communities with the political life of the state.

We were placed between these accumulations during the development of modern times. We have so far failed to learn what our task is in this wedging between West and East. The terrible world catastrophe that arose from these two impulses, which I have characterized, should teach us where to steer, especially in Central Europe, which should learn from the West and the East. From the West it should learn that, as a neighbor of the West, it has the task of separating and achieving independence in economic life and political state life. From the East it has to learn the separation of spiritual life from - if we look superficially at it only in national life - state life. Huge errors – there is no use closing our eyes to this fact today – huge errors have piled up in the politics of the middle states, in the careless politics of these middle states, which finally led to nothingness, because the statesmen were not able to see how certain national instincts in the West have so far prevented economic life from merging with political life and gaining the upper hand in the latter, just as it provided one explosive charge after another in the East, how intellectual life has merged with state life in an unorganized way. Huge political errors, which one must recognize in their historical necessity, are what finally had to be discharged in that catastrophe that brought us the most terrible disaster. Has one in recent times, and I mean a long time, yes, has one actually until today the good will to look at these conditions in a penetrating way? Are there not, in spite of the present terrible situation, many people among us who look down on truly practical impulses as worthless idealism because these practical impulses are great ideals today, and who, out of complacency and timidity of spirit, long for small goals, which they alone call practical, while they turn against the great goals that are necessary today as against the impractical ones. These people, who today reject the truly practical, great goals as idealisms and only want to look at the very nearest, these people are the same or the descendants of the same who brought Central European humanity, European humanity in general, into its present situation and who will cause the damage to become even greater. If it is not possible for the so-called practice of life of the philistines to be replaced by the real practice of life — today the situation must be viewed impartially and honestly — then the result of a true foreign policy, which leads to the impulses of the threefold social organism, will never come.

But today we are not only dealing with a consequence of foreign policy. We are dealing with developmental forces that are surging from quite a different direction and making waves in humanity! What we are facing today can be compared to the migration of peoples and the encounter of this migration with Christianity at the beginning of the Middle Ages. Anyone who considers the great impulses of Christianity in their effectiveness through the Middle Ages and the modern era must actually notice the character of Christianity's impulses, especially among the peoples who are usually referred to when the migration of peoples is considered, and the character it has taken on among the more southern peoples. Originating in Asia, Christianity first took hold among the highly developed peoples of Greece and Italy, among the highly developed intellects of these southern regions of Europe. Only then did it penetrate into the lands of the “barbarians,” as the southern peoples called those storming in from the north. If we take a survey of these conditions, we find that what actually made Christianity effective in the world did not develop through its passage through the southern peoples, who were at the highest stage of development but already in a state of decline, but that it unfolded its mighty impulses in the hearts and minds of those peoples who still had unspent intelligence and unspent soul power. That was, I might say, the horizontal migration of peoples with its peculiarities at the beginning of the Middle Ages. Today, when we look at the proletarian movement, we are faced with a vertical migration of peoples. That which can be called the proletariat flows out of the depths of cultural life to the leading currents of culture. But what we must seek as the new, saving element of culture, as the great impulses that lead us out of the confusion, that works, I would say, from the depths of the spirit, as Christianity once did for the Greek and Roman peoples. And we see how that which wants to seize the future in order to reshape the world in spiritual, state and economic terms needs the unspent intellects, the unspent minds of those masses of people who, in today's vertical migration of peoples, are streaming from bottom to top, while, as I already I have already stated here, in the worn-out brains of those who, like the Greeks and Romans of old, are at the height of culture, there is hardly any trace of that fire in the leading circles that have been in charge up to now, a fire that we urgently need today to find the way out of social distress and to achieve truly great, practical goals for humanity. That such paths must be found is indicated above all by the fact that the vertical migration of peoples has played itself out in the course of the more recent development of humanity.

Foreign policy points to the threefold nature of the social organism. What does domestic political life show us? It shows us that precisely those elements of the people who carry the unspent intellect, the unspent powers of the soul from below upwards – however little many people today may want to admit it, however little the proletariat itself can find suitable and appropriate words and ideas for certain phenomena today – that these people feel this in their souls, they feel it in the hardship of their bodies, and in everything that confronts them, one can say that for three to four centuries, but especially in the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, they feel the triple hardship of the social order in three ways. They felt that they were facing, first of all, a spiritual life with which they felt no community other than the one that had been characterized for them in the last half-century by Karl Marx's words about “surplus value”. What underlies this has by no means been fully understood, neither on the one hand by the bourgeoisie nor on the other by the proletariat. In fact, things are taken rather superficially, especially in more recent education. What underlies it is that the entire, so much praised, so much vaunted intellectual culture of modern times in all its ramifications could only develop as the culture of a few on the subsoil of the deprivation of culture on the part of the great, broad masses. Not as if the hitherto leading classes had brought want and misery to the proletarian masses out of a malicious will, out of devilry. No, they brought it about, as I tried to show last Monday, through lack of understanding of the tasks that arose in world history from the fact that ever broader and broader masses were seized by the modern vertical migration of peoples, by the striving for a spiritual life that they lacked. But that was how it was, and the essential thing is that what we have achieved in art, indeed in science, what we have achieved in education with regard to intellectual life, could, on the one hand, only be for a few and that it had to be worked for under the deprivations of many. This special kind of intellectual life could not exist without creating an abyss between the privileged and the disadvantaged. The broad masses, striving upwards, felt this in relation to the main aspect of human life, in relation to the intellectual life.

In contrast to the life of the state, or of politics or law, the upwardly striving masses felt more and more that there is something for human nature that is the same for all people. This equality cannot be developed in any theory; it simply exists in the experiences of every healthy soul. Just as one cannot speak to a person with blind eyes about the color blue or red, so one cannot speak to an unhealthy soul about what lives in every healthy soul as a sense of right and wrong, that sense of right and wrong that makes man equal to all other men in the second sphere of social life, in the life of the state. But this feeling, which was still suppressed in the broad masses in the old patriarchal conditions, and even in the conditions of the Middle Ages, this feeling of equal rights, it came up more and more intensely in the last centuries and especially in the proletarian development of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The ruling and leading classes could not help but call on the broad masses for democracy. They needed it for their own interests. They needed a proletariat that was increasingly educated in schools. But you cannot educate one soul without educating the other at the same time. By making the proletarians into skilled workers for the complicated tasks in their factories and elsewhere, the ruling and leading classes had to, because one is not possible without the other, because the other develops by itself, at the same time allow the legal consciousness that is inherent in every self-aware human soul to arise in the proletariat. But this sense of justice developed quite differently in the proletarian than in the previously leading, guiding circles of humanity. In the previously leading, guiding circles of humanity, feelings of justice developed around the circles of interests into which these classes had long been born. The proletarian, by being placed at the machine, by being harnessed in the soul-destroying capitalism, was not equipped with such interests. Those relationships that existed everywhere between what the leading classes represented in social life and what they felt as their humanity, those contexts of interest did not exist for the proletarian. I do not mean it humorously when I say that for the members of the leading classes, something may have emerged from the social context in which they were placed, from an inner sense of humanity that gave them a certain sense of right and wrong when they could write, let us say, “factory owner” on their business card and the like, or even “reserve lieutenant”. But for the proletarian, there was no such connection of interests between the soul-destroying machine and his humanity, and between being harnessed into capitalism and his humanity. The proletarian was reduced to his bare human rights, and by looking at the others, he saw not universal human rights, but class privileges and class disadvantages. That was the second experience, the experience in the field of state life.

And the third experience arose for the proletarian in the economic sphere. There he saw how his labor power in the wage relationship was treated by the leading, leading circles in exactly the same way as a commodity. This had a deep, profound impact on the feelings of the modern proletariat. It created an awareness that perhaps did not express itself clearly in the mind, but that took root more and more deeply and intensely in the hearts of proletarians who were aware of their humanity: In ancient times there were slaves, the whole man could be sold and bought like a thing; later there was serfdom, less of the human being could be bought and sold, but still enough; today there is still buying and selling of human labor for those who own nothing but that labor. This labor power, one must go with it, by having to sell it, one cannot carry it to the market like an object and go back again after selling the object, one must deliver oneself to the one who buys the labor power. The enslavement of the laborer to the economic cycle was the third experience of the modern proletariat. Thus, in the social order that emerged as a welfare state, the proletarians found themselves united in the same way that we found them united in foreign policy; they found themselves united in the modern state, in intellectual life, in state and legal life, and in economic life. Just as the amalgamation of the great imperialisms led to the explosion of the world war, so, on the other hand, what moves from the bottom up, what is experienced threefold in intellectual life, in legal or state life and in economic life, leads to social explosion. The two belong together. The old order exploded into the world war catastrophe from the empires, into which modern capitalism saw itself transformed from large-scale enterprise without really knowing it. Large-scale enterprise has become imperialism, and the clash of imperialisms has given rise to the world war catastrophe. That which moved vertically, from bottom to top, contains the same impulses. It only leads in the opposite direction to that social distress that was a world social distress in the conditions of the newer empires, which either, as in the West, became empires of interests, or as in the East, amalgamations of state empires with national empires. The fusion of the three spheres of life led to the explosion of the world war and into a social distress of the greatest magnitude, because this so-called world war is nothing different than previous wars. It is the last gasp of the old order in a terrible form. Let us see how a new one is about to begin, from the bottom up. Let us not fail to see what impulses are striving to develop differently for the further development of humanity than those that developed from the old economic order into world imperialism and thus led to the most terrible horrors of recent times. This is how the signs of the times speak today. And so man must know how to face these signs of the times today. Have we not experienced how, especially in Central Europe, it has become apparent that people have gradually lost a truly healthy judgment about intellectual, economic, and political life because of the unnatural, the impossible gradual fusion of the three areas?

I ask you, without getting involved in a critique of the circumstances, I ask you whether events and facts of the last human development – let us look at them only with regard to Europe for now – have not emerged almost entirely under the influence of the fusion, for example, of politics and economic life? The whole world has screamed – I do not want to get involved in a critique of this screaming, of course, there are not only lambs on this side and only wolves on the other – but the whole world has screamed about the breakthrough through Belgium at the beginning of the war. How could this breakthrough have come about? It could only have come about because the strategic railways had been built there. They would not have been there if the economic forces had been separated from the political forces within the German territory. Look at the map of Europe, consider the many railway networks and then study from a healthy industrial science - which we do not yet have - whether these purely economic institutions, the railways, would be as they are - you can even do these studies in neutral countries - if they only served economic life and developed out of it. Or do we not notice, when we look at the relationship between economic and political life, how, precisely because the empire has become more and more merged with economic conditions, all of Central Europe has gradually become more and more of a large commercial building, following the Western model? Do we not notice that political education is increasingly fading away? Just think of the vast sums of intelligence, the vast sums of prudence that have been directed towards pure business life, towards economic life, while the peoples of Central Europe have become more and more apolitical, even compared to their apolitical nature of earlier centuries. We have become depoliticized by merging politics with economic life.

And finally, more and more we have come to depend completely on state life for all intellectual life. Here, too, it must be pointed out again and again how not only the filling of positions but also the administration of schools have come to depend on modern state life, but also the content of intellectual life itself, the content of art, the content of science. People are not yet aware of this today, which is why the most monstrous prejudice arises in this very area, when people attack what is important. And what is important today is that we rise up to work towards a healthy separation of economic life from state or political or legal life on the one hand, and again towards a separation of the entire intellectual life from state life on the other.

Today, the call for socialization runs through our economic life. It emerges, one might say, from the aforementioned vertical migration of peoples like a motto in world history. And even though there is still little sign of even a reasonably adequate understanding of true socialization, we must nevertheless say, when we look at social life without prejudice: However unclear the thinking on the matter may be, the call for socialization expresses something significant in world history. We see this perhaps most clearly from the fact that, precisely because of the terrible economic experiences of the war, even capitalistically oriented thinkers could not avoid speaking of the necessity of socializing the economy. This necessity for socialization of the economy is, for example, very energetically emphasized by an otherwise capitalist-minded man, Walther Rathenau. Indeed, in some of the points the Appeal makes, one can even find points of contact with what Walther Rathenau says, for example, in his little book 'The New Economy'. But as we shall see in a moment, for those who really understand the impulses of the threefold social organism, there is a radical, fundamental difference in the socialization of the economic between what must be demanded on the basis of this threefold social organism as such socialization and Rathenau's views. And this fundamental difference shows precisely what is most necessary in contemporary social striving.

But how did people actually arrive at the idea of socialization in the economic sphere, at the demands for socialization? For a long time, the human ideal was seen in what was called the free play of economic forces. Much of what can be called the modern private-capitalist economic system came into being as a result of the free play of economic forces, of the free competition of economic personalities and groups. But then, in the course of the development of the economic system that had emerged under the influence of modern technology, under the influence of modern capitalism and under the influence of the free play of economic forces, it became apparent that more and more was being separated from a human minority, namely the proletarian majority, which became the bearer of the three great demands that I have just characterized. And so the justified demand arose within the proletariat for socialization, that is, for the opposite of the pure play of forces in the economic sphere. According to the ideas of the leading figures of the proletariat, the development of economic life should henceforth be based on the thorough organization of the whole of economic life. And we see, of course, how in certain areas, albeit to the horror and disgust of many, such thorough organization is being implemented. For the old free play of forces, one still found the beautiful saying of the salutary of throne and altar as an echo of earlier state and economic orders. Now, out of the catastrophe of world war, the call and enthusiasm for throne and altar is abandoned, but we see something lurking that opens up in the face of the former throne and altar. Not only the former ruling classes, but also the broadest sections of the truly rational, thinking proletariat feel something frightening in the question: What will happen when office and machine take the place of throne and altar? Will it be better for us? Could it not be that the same dictators might develop from among those who work in the factory and office as have developed under the influence of throne and altar? This is a significant question, but also one that, if answered in a healthy way, must lead to a way out of social hardship to truly practical goals. I am still speaking in a very abstract way, but the idea I am about to express can be practically applied in all areas of economic life if all those involved in economic life are called upon to organize these matters. But it must be done in such a way that trust can prevail between all these links in the economic chain.

Let us speak openly and honestly on this matter. The days I have spent here in Stuttgart addressing numerous proletarian assemblies have been a great experience for me. I hardly spoke, only in form at most, to the proletarians differently than I speak here. I was, it turned out, understood in Switzerland and here in the broadest circles of the proletariat. And what did this teach me? It taught me that it is only possible to make progress, whether with socialization or with other social demands of the present, if we work with the trust of humanity. That we will only make progress if we work with people and align ourselves with their desires, if we stop seeking salvation only in issuing decrees from above out of a seemingly superior intellect. Today we can only avoid dictatorships if we find the right words that, when spoken by individuals, are spoken from the heart, from the feelings of the broad masses, especially the working population. I wanted to say that first. It points out that the social issues that are immediately urgent cannot be resolved in small circles, however they may call themselves, but that they must be resolved on the broad basis of the factories and workshops, from the people, not from socialist theories.

One of the first demands, if we take this human factor into account, is that the economic life should learn from the bitter and terrible events of the world war catastrophe, that is, from what the world war catastrophe has become, how socialization should be carried out. We must learn that everything that leads to such socialization must be disastrous, especially if it again confuses state or legal life with economic life.

Time and again I have to point out the unnatural amalgamation of economic life with state and legal life, as it developed in Austria in the last third of the nineteenth century. The fact that Austria fell into such a terrible decline, and was ripe for decline long before the world war catastrophe, is due to the fact that, on this hotbed of conflict, it was not understood how destructive it would be to form the state based on the rule of law from economic curiae at the dawn of the newer constitutional life. Only through coercion was a change made, much later, but it was much too late, to something other than what was attempted in the 1860s. The so-called Reichsrat was formed from four economic curiae: large landowners; chambers of commerce; cities, markets and industrial towns; rural communities. Purely economic interests were asserted on the territory of the state, where the law was to arise. Economic interests were transformed into rights! And anyone who has properly studied this political development of Austria, which under the Taaffe Ministry in the last third of the nineteenth century was called muddling through, knows what seeds of destruction lay in the fact that in these territories, which were based on the most diverse nationalities, the impulse was not found to develop the legal life separately for itself and the economic life separately for itself. I could say a great deal, and I could say a great deal in the parliaments of practically all the present States, if I wanted to show in detail how the impossibility of merging political or state or legal life with economic life has increased everywhere. From today onwards, the first requirement must be to separate this economic life from the state life. Then we can proceed with the claim of all human resources involved in economic life, trusting in them to carry out the appropriate socialization, which will consist - as I have explained in my book and also hinted at in other places - in the formation of associations, first by profession, then by context, coalitions, cooperatives, which arise from the pursuit of harmonization of conditions in consumption and production. Only on this basis can healthy socialization arise. It will arise when people see the damage caused by both the free play of forces and mechanical socialization – both of which have been prejudicial to humanity. It will only arise when we learn from the lessons of world's history, so that socialization will come about not through the extinction of the free play of forces, but precisely through the understanding work of the free play of human forces. You can only do that if you spread trust, but then you can do it! That, more or less, is what Walther Rathenau meant, and he was echoing a certain saying of Gretchen to Faust. But the threefold social organism means something quite different. You see, that is why Walther Rathenau's concept of socialization is quite different from the socialization that had to be proposed by the threefold order, because Walther Rathenau cannot imagine anything other than socialization taking place while state supervision continues and the state draws a steady profit from what is produced in the socialized enterprises.

This only proves that a person who might have learned from practical experience remains trapped in blind theory. This only proves how powerfully suggestive the thoughts that have formed in the course of the development of modern capitalism continue to be, even in those who strive for socialization, how necessary it is to struggle against prejudices in this area with all the strength of free practical insight into the circumstances. Everything that is to be raised in the way of order in economic life, of reasonableness and understanding permeating economic life, of morality, must come from the independent personalities and bodies that themselves direct economic life. Economic life will only develop healthily when the state has nothing to say in economic life other than what it has to say through the personalities involved in economic life, as personalities with rights. Of course, if someone cheats others in the field of economic life, then he is subject to the state law. He is subject to the state law as a personality. But the functions and activities of the personality in economic life must be based, in the economic partnership, on the mere contract, on mere trust. Even if this still meets with many prejudices on the socialist side today, anyone who judges not from concepts and ideas but from the experience that the last decades of European economic life have brought, up to the economic downfall in the war, will say this. And he must say: We will not achieve sound economic conditions until the separation of economic life from state life has been accomplished. We have arrived at the present situation through the intermingling of what should be based on trust and contract with the state, which should be based solely on laws. The laws of the state may only shine into economic life insofar as they shine through personalities. Only in this way can we bring out of economic life what must be brought out, that which, as labor power, is today, like a commodity, unlawfully harnessed into the economic cycle, according to the proletarian sense.

On the one hand, economic life borders on natural conditions. Imagine the following absurdity: some economic consortium would get together, determine its balance sheet, the probable balance sheet for 1919; and this consortium would take the 1918 balance sheet and then, based on assets and liabilities, determine how many days it should rain in the summer of 1919, for example, in order to achieve a desirable business situation for the next year. Of course this is pure nonsense, isn't it. But I only mention this nonsense because it should be seen from it that, on the one hand, economic life is based on natural conditions, which we cannot completely regulate from within this economic life. We can do some things through technical devices, but we cannot completely regulate them from within mere economic life. Just as economic life borders on natural life on the one hand, so in the future economic life must border on the legal life of the state, and in the legal life of the state everything must be regulated that is subject to the legal life, above all human labor. For the economic cycle, the regulation of the human labor of the worker must lie outside this economic process. Just as the natural forces of the soil ripen the corn and wheat outside the economic process, so the regulation of the measure, time and type of labor must be outside the economic process. Nothing must be determined by the economic situation, nothing must be determined by the economic conditions and forces with regard to the measure and type of human labor. With regard to labor, man stands quite differently to man than with regard to the satisfaction of human needs, which are met by the economic cycle of production, circulation and consumption of commodities. From this cycle of production, labor must be taken out and regulated in the purely democratic life of the state, in the separate state emancipated from economic life. Thus the economic process is healthily constrained between nature on the one hand and the legal life of the state on the other. All this must be organized in the spirit of threefolding. This can only be achieved if the state does not develop what can only develop within the economic process from person to person, but only develops everything that relates to the relationship between individuals, where each individual is equal to every other individual. Therefore, no profit that comes from a consortium of people, from an economic group, from an economic community, may prevail on the basis of this state life. What is gained in the economic sphere must in turn flow back into the economic life of the people to raise their standard of living. Whatever flows into the state, let us call it a tax or whatever, must, if I am to express myself clearly, come only from the pocket of the individual human being. Only the individual human being can stand in relation to the state; then, on the basis of the state, only the individual human being stands in relation to the individual human being. Then human rights will truly flourish on the basis of the state. Then the social question, insofar as it is a labor question, will be solved by emancipating state life from economic life, in which the compulsion can no longer prevail by which labor itself becomes an object of the free play of forces in the free play of forces. The worker must have organized his labor power before he enters the workshop, before he enters the factory, before he enters the economic process. Then he appears as a free personality, whose freedom is guaranteed by the state labor law, to the head of labor; only then does a healthy relationship develop.

Here we are on truly practical socialization ground. Those who understand the conditions of this ground know that you can make socialization framework laws without end from other conditions. You can make them today, find them useless after two years, reform them, find them useless again after five years and reform them, and so on. We will not arrive at a healthy, beneficial state sooner than we rise up to attack the practice at such a point as I have just pointed out. It is precisely this characteristic of the development of recent times that this development, in many ways for human thinking, for human habits of thinking, clings to the surface of things. And now, when we are confronted with world-shaking facts, we see in so many cases, unfortunately, unfortunately, the inadequacy of the old party judgments, which were supposed to build up and which in the building up often behave not like judgments that intervene in reality, but like mummies of judgment that have died under the party stiffness, under the party philistrosity of more recent times. Therefore, it can be said that in the present day, when things should be seen urgently and squarely and honestly and truthfully, the most important things are seen so crookedly. It is understandable that many who have seen modern capitalism in its development now hold the view that private capitalism as a whole must go and common ownership of all means of production must prevail. It is understandable that this judgment, which has been formed over decades, I would say out of bleeding souls, out of need and misery, is difficult to discard. Nevertheless, a deeper question must arise – after all, we cannot do without capital accumulation in the modern economy – the question: What must be associated with capital accumulation? The individual ability of people to use capital in the appropriate way, not in an egoistic but precisely in a social sense, must be associated with capital accumulation. We cannot do this if we do not cultivate human individual abilities, if we do not make the respective capital administrations of the enterprises accessible to these human individual abilities. Therefore, on the ground on which this call for social threefolding, which you have mentioned again today, originated, an idea had to be grasped that represents something completely different from what is still often understood today as the socialization of capital.

It is remarkable how, when thinking practically, one is led to making the administration of capital dependent on the third sphere, which must become independent in a healthy social organism, the emancipated spiritual organism. We have increasingly severed the link between intellectual work and the work of capital in the economic process. As a result, instead of developing an economic upswing that can be linked to an increase in the standard of living of the masses, we have increasingly developed a kind of economic overexploitation despite all technical advances. Particularly with regard to the impulses that play a major role in modern economic life, for example the impulse of credit, modern economic life has run itself into a strange cul-de-sac. Credit in the context of economic life today is something that can almost only be supported by existing economic factors. In the future, we need the possibility that credit will not only be born on the basis of economic life, we need the possibility that credit can be born into economic life from outside. Not true, a paradoxical assertion, a strange assertion; but what underlies it is even stranger as it is. As spiritual life becomes independent in the direction of the future, developing out of its own conditions, we shall emerge from that abstract spiritual life, from that luxurious spiritual life that cannot find any relation to practical life. Those who know me will not suppose that I want to belittle spiritual life in any way. But the intellectual life that will develop out of its own conditions, isolated from the other two social organisms, will not be an abstract intellectual life that merely preaches or remains on abstract intellectual heights. It will be an intellectual life that does not merely lead to abstract knowledge about this or that, but that leads to making people capable as people. In a future social order, we will no longer be able to use our grammar schools, which are alien to life. Nor anything similar.

But that which will live will be something that has spiritual impact, that the human soul is able to carry in all its most spiritual needs for life. It is precisely by developing that which so many people today regard as an outlandish spiritual life that we come to find that path which cannot be found by our education system, which is forged to the state, that path which educates the human being as a whole human being, educating the human being in such a way that any kind of intellectual culture will no longer be possible without at the same time being a skill for practical things, a way of looking at practical things. The materialism of modern times has made people impractical. A true spiritual life, which will not be the life of a state servant in the field of the spirit, will make people practical again. It will not produce people in the field of the highest culture who think they have worldviews but do not know what a bank, credit, mortgages and so on are, and how these work in economic life. It will not produce people who know about the forces of physics but who have never chopped wood in their lives. I am, of course, speaking comparatively here. There is a practical bridge between a genuine spiritual life, left to its own devices, and the management of economic life. Capitalism, in its damaging form, can only be overcome if the management of capitalism is closely linked to the recovery of spiritual life. Then there will emerge what may be called a healthy socialization of capital. Then those people will emerge from the spiritual life who can also bring credit, new credit, into economic life, who can constantly fertilize economic life. Then the cycle of capital will be possible, of which I speak in my book. Today I can only touch on these points. In the next lectures that I am allowed to give here, I will have to discuss individual specific questions of this kind, in particular the relationship between capital and human labor.

Thus we see how the three great impulses of human social development, which, as I mentioned the other day, have been shining maxims of human endeavor since the French Revolution, will be able to materialize through the three-part social organism. Freedom in the field of independent intellectual life, equality in all fields of state life, fraternity through the associations and cooperatives of the self-built economic life.

Now, in conclusion, I would just like to say this: I know that if one hears only the generalities, and not yet the specific practicalities that have been mentioned again today, one can have many objections to them, because one does not know how everything is really connected in practice in the thinking about this threefold social organism, from the founding of the university to the sale of a toothbrush. The practical nature of the proposal lies precisely in the fact that one can object in many ways when one only hears the general. But the practical value will emerge when people of all professions, of all human activities, participate in the realization of this idea in their social work in the individual concrete case. In the face of the objection that it is idealism or even utopian, in the face of this objection, more and more people will speak out about the serious facts of the time.

In July and early August 1914, world events reduced to absurdity in a strange way the ideas that many still consider practical today. In my pamphlet, 'The Crux of the Social Question', I pointed out at the end, where international relations are discussed, that people at home and abroad still have no idea of what really happened in Berlin on the last day of July and the first days of August 1914. The world will demand to know what happened there. When the truth is told about these things, it will be seen that a terrible light falls on the events of modern times, a light that will show that we do not just need a transformation of one or the other, that we need new thoughts, new habits of thought, that we not only have to transform institutions, but that we have to relearn and rethink in the thoughts of our heads.

Those who honestly and sincerely come to terms with this situation will not despondently recoil at the objections of those who say: You idealist, stick to your trade, stick to your ideals, don't talk us into practice! These practitioners will see what a pest this practice of life will reveal itself to be. But those who are the true practitioners, who think from the great impulses of human development, do not ascribe any special cleverness to themselves. For what compels us today to speak as I have done today, are the facts of the present itself. Oh, sometimes one feels so that one would like to compare oneself with that boy who once sat at the machine and had to operate the two taps, where the steam was let in through one and the condensed water through the other. The boy was truly not a genius inventor because of his age, but he stood before the machine, which revealed something to him through its facts. He saw how opening one of the valves coincided with the descent of the balance arm on one side, and opening the other valve with the descent of the balance rod on the other side. So, in his naivety, he took some ropes and tied the cocks to the balancing rod – and lo and behold, there he was at his steam engine, watching the balancer go up and down and open and close the cocks. But with that something important had been found. It was not the man who had been right at the time who now approached the boy and said: You good-for-nothing, get rid of those cords, just open the valves by hand; but it was the man who had found the self-control of the steam engine through the naive machinations of that boy.

Today, the facts speak so powerfully that one truly feels naive when trying to find how the self-control of the healthy social organism should be achieved. I could only hint at this today. It will be found when the following are allowed to function in full independence: spiritual life, economic life, and political or state life.

And so, I would like to conclude today by saying that I hope that humanity, and in particular Central European humanity, will recognize the significance of these impulses in the necessities of life in modern times before it is too late. For it must be recognized that we can only effectively move towards practical goals out of social need if we come up with ideas that contain the germ of action. It is thoughts that contain germs, thoughts that contain the germs of deeds, that we should seek, and we, who represent the tripartite social organism in its three impulses of independent spiritual, economic and legal life, believe that these impulses must be carried into the development of humanity before it is too late.

Closing remarks after the discussion

Dear attendees,

I do not want to keep you any longer with my closing remarks, not so much because there is not still much to be said about the remarks of the esteemed speakers, but above all because we are already too far ahead in time. Therefore, some of what I would like to say, but only in a vague way, has been said by some of the esteemed speakers, will have to be taken into account in the next two lectures to be given here. However, I would like to address some of them today, albeit very briefly. So please forgive the brevity of the answers to the direct questions that have been put to me.

The question has been raised as to why I myself – possibly through those on whom my word could have made some impression – have not raised the voice of peace earlier. Well, even though there were speakers in this discussion who again raised the accusation of idealism, I would like to emphasize quite strongly that I am and want to be a practitioner of life through and through, and that therefore it never occurs to me to merely propagate things that do not show their potential for realization in the facts of life. I would therefore also like to answer these questions with a few facts. What do you think would have been a truly practical way of promoting peace propaganda in real terms, say here in Stuttgart, well, let's say in the middle of the year or in the spring of 1916? By calling you together here and speaking fine words to you about the necessity of peace? Do you think that in the spring of 1916 a real practitioner of life could have achieved that so easily? Well, there were other ways. These ways, which came from the realization, from the full realization of the matter, were tried in order to do what was right at the time. In the not too distant future, it will be necessary to talk seriously about the history of the last four to five years, not in the way that people still talk about the history of these years in many circles. To mention just one of the facts: I fully advocated what I considered necessary as early as the spring of 1916, when it would have been possible to take practical action. I tried everything possible. Partly because of lack of time, because I would have to talk a lot about it, I will not elaborate further. It came to the point that on a certain day my task in the face of the terrible events should have begun. But then came the strange decree, I will call it that, from the highest instance, although those who had examined the matter considered it to be very promising. The decree came from the instance in which many people believe because they were ordered to believe: “He is an Austrian German, after all. Before we use Austrians for such services, we have to hire our capable German people for them. — That is the truth! That is how a truth can be! If I told you the whole context of the matter, no one would ask me why I did not stand up earlier for what I stand up for today. And another thing. At the beginning of this century and at the end of the last century, I was a teacher at a workers' training school founded by the old Wilhelm Liebknecht. At that workers' training school, I formed a very loyal following among the students. But perhaps the members of the Socialist Party present here know that there are also so-called bigwigs within this party. And so it came about that one fine day, because I did not want to teach a dogmatic, materialistic view of history, four people out of six hundred of my students – four people who had never heard me outnumbered six hundred of my students who had heard me for years – and managed to get me fired. This is also a small chapter as to why the things that are now being spoken of me have not been spoken of earlier. Those who know how and where I have spoken on these subjects do not ask. But it is one thing to speak and another to be listened to. I am firmly convinced that many of those who are listening to me today would not have listened at all before the great lessons of the terrible and dreadful events of recent years came. This is also something that must be taken into account.

If it has been said that a bone of contention should be thrown between the state and labor, then, please, I must also refer to one of the next lectures. It will show that the esteemed previous speaker has misunderstood me completely if he believes that I want to make the state an economic actor in just any old way. That will not be the case. Rather, the state will play no economic role at all, so it cannot be the payer of wages either. Instead, for the state it is a matter of the freedom of the labor force. In this sense, I have also been correctly understood by many.

Now I have only briefly responded to certain questions with individual facts. In the course of time, these very questions will be answered quite differently.

If one of the esteemed gentlemen who spoke before has pointed out that it has been said that I have not explained the things, then it must be said that it is precisely the case that these things can only be explained from the experience of life, that when they are expressed, they go out as an appeal to human thinking and human experience. One must really turn to life for a change, otherwise we will not make any progress. Here is something that approaches people in such a way that they are to give it their free understanding. Unfortunately, we have seen that much has been understood in recent times – well, what I have not understood are the things that certain gentlemen have had framed in quite beautiful frames in recent years, the proverbs from a certain quarter, I have not understood those. The difference between what is to be understood here and what has been so easily understood in the course of the last few years is that, of course, here, with understanding, an act of inner freedom should be present. There, understanding was commanded. Let us sit up straight for once, try to understand something without being ordered to understand it, and let us try to work out how much of what we think we understand we only think we understand because it has been instilled in us, drilled into us or ordered to be understood. Now, anyone who is a practitioner of life can finally understand when someone says: Don't be hard on the money bag carrier, have pity on this or that person. But such instructions are actually quite selfish instructions, really quite selfish instructions, because it does not matter whether someone realizes that money is dirt or continues to believe that money is a little god. That is not what matters to the socially minded, but rather what role money and a person who has it play in society.

We should not shut ourselves off from such feelings: we should feel sorry for the moneybag carrier – but we should open our minds to the circumstances, not just to what we would or would not want to feel sorry for based on our own tastes. It is a matter

about breaking the habit of idle preaching. This idle preaching is one of the things that has brought us to our present plight and misery. I have often said figuratively to my listeners: All the talk about love of one's neighbor, about brotherhood, is all very well, it does so much good for the inwardly egotistical soul when one talks about love of one's neighbor in a well-heated room, about loving all people without distinction of station and so on. But that is now compared to reality as if I stood in front of the stove, so I said, and said to the stove: You stove, it is your stove duty to heat the room. The way you look, you have a stove physiognomy, such an object has the categorical imperative to make the room warm. — But it does not get warm, I can preach as much as I want.

And so people preach in abstractions over and over again, it does not get warm, but outside it is now going haywire. The thing to do is to stop preaching, use my thoughts to consider how warmth can be created in a sensible way, and to get firewood and make a fire. In the matters that are now at hand, it is important that our thoughts contain the seeds of what can be done. I believe that anyone who really seeks will find this in the meaning of the call to action in my book 'The Crux of the Social Question in the Necessities of Present and Future Life'. There have been enough words that are just words, now we need action. But if these actions are to be reasonable, we must first come to an understanding about them. We need germinal thoughts for action, such germinal thoughts that lead to action as soon as possible, before it is too late.

Emil Molt: I have the honor of welcoming you this evening and thanking you for the large attendance, which shows us that our invitation has fallen on fertile ground. The “Federation for the Threefold Social Organism” has seen fit to invite a number of prominent figures here this evening to put all the questions that the individual members of the audience have on their minds - questions that have arisen, for example, from the lectures - so that these questions can be clarified by Dr. Steiner himself. We believe that the lectures that have been held here in Stuttgart for four to six weeks are not only given to bring something interesting to the listeners, but above all to allow something to mature in the listeners that can be turned into action. We also believe that in order to bring such a movement into being, it is not enough to have only a few people as the driving force; rather, we need collaborators from all walks of life.

Now I ask you to take the floor, and I ask Dr. Steiner to answer any questions that arise.

Dr. Schmucker: I would like to make it clear from the start that I am asking purely as a private person. The resolution that has been formulated from the various lectures calls upon the government to appoint Dr. Steiner to implement the threefold social order that he has been advocating as quickly as possible. Now I must honestly confess that I have not yet had enough time to delve into his book and follow all the lectures. So I apologize if my question reveals that I don't know whether Dr. Steiner has perhaps already commented on the matter that is close to my heart. My question is this: Let us assume that one day the government takes the position that we want to work together with Dr. Steiner. Let us assume that Dr. Steiner comes to some ministry, for example the Ministry of Labor. He is seated in a room that is full of government papers and commentaries. He finds all the codes of law that deal with the solution of the social question, for example the Workers' Protection Act, the Law on Employee Insurance and so on, but above all the many laws that were brought to light by the new government after the great upheaval, and which all point in the same direction, namely, to satisfy as much as possible the social aspirations of the workers and employees. How does Dr. Steiner envision this work – the transition from the current mode of governance to the future one? What should happen to the current popular representations, to the provincial assemblies, to the National Assembly?

Rudolf Steiner: You have approached the question from a certain perspective, from the government perspective. Therefore, I can only answer it from this perspective. And the answer is that, of course, at the first act of government, one would have to foresee a great deal that could happen as a result of this first act of government.

As a first act of government, I would have something to think about – isn't that right, we are of course talking quite openly here – which of course has little to do with the question of what I would do if, for my sake, I were placed in the Ministry of Labor, found law books and the like in there and now had to continue working there. I would just like to formally state in advance that I had absolutely nothing to do with the wording of the resolution you are talking about. I would not be able to accept this interpretation of the resolution, but only be able to characterize my position on this question.

For example, I would first have to state that I do not belong in a labor ministry at all, that I have nothing to do there, for the simple reason that there can be no labor ministry within the unified state community in the near future. That is why I recently said in a lecture that the first act of government should be to take the initiative on various matters, in order to create a basis for further action.

First of all, it must be understood that a present-day government is, to a certain extent, the continuation of what has emerged as a government from previous conditions. However, only part of this government lies in the straightforward continuation of previous conditions, namely that which would include the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of the Interior - for Internal Security - and the Ministry of Hygiene. These things would lie in the continuation of what has arisen from previous government maxims. In all other respects, such a government would have to take the initiative to become a liquidation ministry, that is, a ministry that takes the initiative to the right and to the left in order to create the conditions for a free spiritual life that would be based on its own administration and constitution and would have to organize itself once the transition from the present to the following conditions has been overcome. This administration would also have a corresponding representation, which of course could not be shaped like today's popular representations, but would have to grow out of the special conditions of intellectual life. This would have to be formed purely out of the self-administration of intellectual life; in this context, the system of education and culture is particularly important. On the one hand, it would have to be handed over to the self-administration of intellectual life.

On the other hand, a liquidation ministry would have to hand over to the autonomous economic life everything that is, for example, traffic and trade; the Ministry of Labor would also have to find its administration in organizations that would develop out of economic life. These would, of course, be very radical things, but from this point of view they can only be radical things. Only then would a basis be created for any kind of treatment of specific questions.

What I have dealt with now does not change anything with regard to what has been built from below. It only indicates the path by which something new can be created out of what already exists. Only when those organizations have been created out of economic life that would continue what is in the codes of law you mentioned, only then could [further] be tackled. That would only be a step that could come later. I am not thinking of a program, but of a sequence of steps, all of which are real actions, real processes. All I say in my books and lectures are not indications of how to do it, but how to create the conditions for people to enter into the possible interrelationships in order to do the things. Economic laws can only grow out of economic life itself, and only if all those corporations are expressed in their impulses in economic life that can contribute something to the shaping of this economic life from the individual concrete circumstances of economic life.

So, on the part of the government, I would consider that as the first step: to understand that it must be a liquidation government.

I am happy to go into further specific issues that arise from this.

Dr. Schmucker: Suppose you were to get some kind of self-government to regulate economic life. Could the works councils, which are now to be introduced for individual companies under the Reich bill, serve as a means of achieving this self-administration if – which is at least the intention – the works councils were expanded upwards, for example by combining the Württemberg works councils into a state workers' council or state works council and, at the highest level, into a Reich works council or Reich economic council? The bill uses the term “works council” for a representation that would become a pure workers' representation in which employers would not be included. Just as the works council works together with the employer, so too could employers and employees sit together at the higher state level, and then not only employees but also employers would be represented in a Reich Economic Council, so that here too there would be equal representation. Could Dr. Steiner see the possibility that such an organization would fulfill some of the wishes of economic life and that these economic self-governing corporations would be assigned all further tasks that Dr. Steiner believes should be performed by economic corporations as self-governing corporations?

Rudolf Steiner: I would ask you not to take the few introductory sentences I am about to say as abstractions, but as a summary of experiences. These can only be summarized in just such sentences.

The way in which the structure of economic life has developed means that this economic life suffers from the fact that harmonization of interests is not possible within the existing structure. I will only hint at some of it. For example, under the development of our economic life, the worker is not interested in production - I am ignoring the really foolish interest, for example, in profit sharing, which I consider impractical. The worker is interested in economic life, as things stand today, only as a consumer, while the capitalist, in turn, is basically only interested in economic life as a producer, and again only as a producer from the point of view of profit - that is his point of view, economically speaking, it cannot be otherwise. So today we have no way of organizing a real harmonization of consumer and producer interests; it is not part of our economic structure.

What we must achieve is that we actually make those people who are involved in shaping the economic structure equally interested in consumption and production, so that no one who intervenes in a formative way – not only through judgment but also through action – has a one-sided interest in production or consumption, but rather that through the organization itself there is an equal interest in both. This can only be achieved if we are able to gradually let people form small corporations out of economic life itself, and out of all forms of economic life, which then naturally continue to grow. They must be corporations because trust must be established. This is only possible if larger corporations are gradually built up uniformly from smaller ones, that is, only if we have personalities with their judgments and also with their influence based on the economic foundation, who work in all areas of social life through their aptitude for managing economic life as such. If we want to socialize, we cannot socialize economic life through institutions, but only by being able to interest people in the institutions in the way described and by having them participate in them continuously.

Therefore, I consider it most necessary today that we do not create laws by which works councils are established, but that we have the possibility to create works councils from all forms of economic life – so that they are initially there – and to let a works council emerge from these works councils, which only has a true meaning when it forms the mediation between the individual branches of production. A works council that only exists for individual branches is of little significance. It is only when the activities of the works councils unfold primarily between the branches of production that are in interaction that they have a meaning.

I therefore said: the individual works council actually only has a purpose in the company if it has an informational significance. What must be done with this idea of works councils in economic life can actually only be done by the works councils as a whole, because it can only result in a blessing for the individual companies in the future if the works councils emerge from the structure of the whole economic life. So I think that the real focus is on the works council as a whole, in other words, on what is negotiated between the works councils of the individual factories, and not on what happens only in the individual factories.

But then I can only expect this institution to be a blessing if these works councils – which, of course, have to be set up on the basis of existing conditions, which must not arise from blue-sky hopes but from what exists today – if they are elected, for example, from all those who are somehow involved in the company. I do not want to speak of “employers” and “employees”, but of people from the circle of all those who are really involved in the business, either intellectually or physically. So all those who participate in the business would form the basis for such councils to develop out of themselves. If the matter were approached from this economic angle, the reasonable employers to date would naturally be included in their capacity as spiritual leaders, and we would have a works council that would at least not initially have elected representatives from all [areas] – that would only be the case after some time – but which could represent the interests of the most diverse people involved in economic life. However, I could only imagine that such a workers' council would nevertheless focus its main attention on the conditions of production, so I actually cannot imagine that a mere workers' council would be anything meaningful. I can only imagine that in addition to the workers' council – not overlooking the objection that one might say: Where will work still be done if all this is to be done in practice? I can only imagine that the workers' councils will be supplemented by transport councils and economic councils, because the workers' council will primarily deal with production, but the economic council with consumption in the broadest sense. For example, consumption would also have to include everything that we consume from abroad, everything that is imported; everything that is imported would be subject to the economic council. I am not saying that everything is exemplary today, but these are the three most important [types of] workers' councils that must be established first: the workers' council, the transport council, and the economic council. To do this, only one wing of the government would have to take the initiative, but it would have no laws to create, but would only have to see to it that these workers' councils are set up. These councils would then have to begin to create their own constitution, that is, to create what flows from independent economic life, what they have experienced in it. The constitution of the three councils would arise entirely from the circumstances themselves. This is what I would consider the first step: the creation of workers' councils out of the circumstances. Only then would these have to give themselves their constitution. That, in practice, is what I would call breaking up the economy in a given area. As long as there is the idea that laws concerning workers' councils are issued by a central government, I consider that to be something that has nothing to do with what should happen. Taking the first step first – that is what the time demands of us.

Dr. Schmucker: In my opinion, this work, which the participants themselves should carry out in order to form and manage organizations, requires a highly developed workforce. However, the experiences we have had with the workforce during the war and with the labor force in recent months make me hesitant to assume that the majority of the workforce – or at least the vast majority – is up to this great task. When you have experiences like the ones we have had recently, where the workers of a company come and demand under threat of violence: You have made so much profit now. You may be doing badly now, but the state will take a large part of what you have earned if you do not share it. We are now demanding cost-of-living allowances! This whole process is well known to everyone, this continued increase in wages, food prices and so on, one thing becoming more expensive as a result of another. These experiences cast doubt on whether workers and employees are at this high level of development to fulfill the task that is required of them here.

Rudolf Steiner: If we start from the principle that we always want to do the best we can possibly imagine or that we can envision in any ideal way, then we will never carry out in practice what really needs to be done. I naturally admit that a great deal of what you have just said is absolutely right. But I would ask you to consider the following: in the last few weeks and months, I have had the opportunity to talk to a great many workers, and I have found that when you really speak to them in their language, they come up with things that really have a real basis. I have found that he then proves to be inwardly receptive and realizes that what is to be done can only be something that does not undermine economic life or cause it to die, but builds it up. It is extremely easy to make the worker understand what needs to be done if you address what he himself has experienced. And from there he will easily grasp certain interrelations in economic life. Of course, there is still a great deal that he cannot grasp, for the simple reason that the circumstances never allowed him to see into certain interrelations, into which one simply cannot see when one stands at the machine from morning till night. I already know that too.

But now, of course, there is the added factor that even our most experienced principals do not delve very deeply into the real conditions of economic life. I would like to quote Rathenau not as an economist [oriented towards the whole], but almost as a principal, because his writings actually reveal on every page that he really speaks from the standpoint of the principal, the industrial entrepreneur. Now, basically, from this point of view, there are no absolute objections to be made against these statements, because basically all the facts are correct. I would like to mention just one thing: Rathenau calculates the actual meaning of surplus value. Of course, today it is very easy to prove that the concept of surplus value as it existed some time ago is now obsolete. Rathenau also does this calculation very nicely in detail, and comes to the quite correct conclusion that basically none of the surplus value can be claimed. Because if the worker gets it, he would have to give it back, because the institutions make it necessary for it to be used as a reserve. This calculation is, of course, simply correct. The question is whether it is possible to escape the result of this calculation, whether it is economically possible to find a way to escape the result of this calculation. The point is that there is no way to escape Rathenau's calculation other than to realize what I have given as an answer in my book: that the moment any given sum of means of production is completed, it can no longer be sold, that is, it no longer has any purchase value. Then the whole calculation collapses, because the Rathenau calculation is only possible if the means of production can be sold again at any time for a very specific value. So the right prerequisite is missing for the actual conclusion, for which the principal is not yet available today. They would first have to understand that we will get nowhere because we are at an impasse if we do not make major changes. And it would be immediately apparent if we were to find common ground, but on ground where the only interest is in continuing economic life and not in serving the interests of the individual; we would see that the principals know something, but that they have one-sided knowledge that can be supplemented by the others.

I believe I can say, with reference to everything that an individual can produce intellectually in the way of beautiful ideals: “One is a human being, two are people, more than two are beasts.” As soon as we come to the kind of thinking that is supposed to be realized in the social order, the opposite principle applies: “One alone is nothing, several are a little something, and many are those who can then do it.” Because when twelve people from the most diverse party-political directions sit together with the goodwill to summarize their individual experiences as partial experiences, we not only have a sum of twelve different opinions, but by these opinions really taking action, a potentiation of these twelve impulses arises. Thus a quite tremendous sum of economic experience is formed simply by our socializing human opinion in this way. That is the important thing. Well, I must say, I believe that what you say is right, so long as you are dealing with a class of workers who demand simply from their standpoint as consumers. Because the fact that they have demands will of course not lead to anything that can lead to any kind of socialization. This is the only way to dismantle the economy. We must not imagine that we will achieve ideal conditions the day after tomorrow, but a condition that is possible to live in if we do things this way. At this point in particular, we should think: What is possible to live in? – and not: Are people smart enough? Let us take people as they are and do the best we can with them, and not speculate about whether people are highly developed, because ultimately something must always happen. We simply cannot do nothing; something must happen from some quarter. I do not see why, if we take people out of economic life, they should be less highly developed than, for example, the government people and the members of the former German Reichstag in all the years in which what happened then had terrible effects. There, too, only what was possible happened. The point is that we do what is possible with the majority of people who are there. I do not imagine that an ideal state could be created, but an organism that is possible to live in.

Dr. Riebensam: I would like to address the question of the works councils. What still gives us the opportunity to talk to the workers? The situation is now escalating to the point where we need to find a lightning rod. I want to get to the practical point and ask: Why do you want to put a car on the road without a steering wheel? In my opinion, such a machine is our workforce. I have spoken to many of them about this and expressed my view that I consider it impossible to come to any kind of cooperation with a large workforce in this way. For the moment a committee of workers makes itself the representative of a certain opinion, every member of the committee will be stoned by the workers. You assume goodwill on the part of the workers. I have tried everything, and not without success at first, because I have the trust of the workers, ever since I have been able to speak to them and they have been able to hear me. But the people who do not come are in the majority. I can perhaps talk to two thousand, the others do not have the good will. From experience, I know that the great multitude is capable of confusing those who are initially convinced. The wisest of the workers' committees, with whom I have spoken privately and who expressed positive views, are now back to the point where I ask myself: has all the work I have done for six months been in vain? I have made certain proposals to the government with the intention that they be implemented in such a way as to satisfy the workers. If these proposals are issued as decrees by the government, all this work will be in vain. But I think it is useless to establish works councils without any tax; the craziest things happen then. Since you yourself say that we have to start at some point, we would have to start in such a way that it could be implemented.

Rudolf Steiner: All that you have said actually amounts to the fact that it is basically not possible at present for the management of the companies to cope with the workforce. This has of course not come about without preconditions, it has of course only gradually become so. I believe that you misjudge the situation if you rely too much on the goodwill of the workforce. Because the workers will demand goodwill from you, for the reason that they have learned through agitation - to a certain extent justifiably - that nothing will come of it. The workers will say: We can have this goodwill, but the entrepreneur will not have it. This mistrust is already too great today. Therefore, there is no other way than to gain as much trust as possible. The moment someone is found who really knows something about social objectives that the workers can understand, and not just based on good will but on insight, even for two thousand workers – or for eight thousand, for that matter – the situation changes. Of course, if you talk to two thousand workers, they in turn may be confused by the other side, but the situation will still turn out like this: If you really talk to the workers about what they understand, you are not just talking to two thousand people who are confused by the people they last talked to, but these will in turn have an effect on the others.

But if we ask ourselves whether this path has even been taken yet, we have to say that basically it has not been taken at all. And everything is done to make this path unattractive over and over again. Naturally, when the worker sees that works councils are decreed from above by law, this is a complete denial of trust. So let something come from the central authorities today in a truly audible way, something that makes sense, so that the worker can see that it makes sense. But nothing like that is happening. And that is why the movement for the threefold social order actually exists, because something is to be created that really constitutes a conceivable goal. You will not reach the worker by just talking about concrete institutions, because he has been pushed out into a mere consumer position. This is not explained to the worker by anyone. Everything that is being done is moving in exactly the opposite direction. Let the institutions arise on their own initiative today. If this works council is really to be constituted, just let it come, perhaps only in the form of proposals - after all, many proposals can be put forward here -; not just one single type of bill. That is, of course, the best way to have the entire working class against the works councils. Today there is no way to make any headway in this way. Today we can only succeed if we want something other than to use force against force, namely to confront personalities with personalities, to gain personal trust. That is what the worker can do. The one who understands how to talk to the worker in his language in such a way that the worker realizes that nothing will come of it if he only ever pushes up the wage scale, and he also sees that there is a will to finally move in this [new] direction, then he will go along with it and work as well. He will not work with you if you just make legislative proposals, but he wants to see that the personalities in the government actually have the will to move in a certain direction.

This is what the current government is also being criticized for; people have the idea that they want to do something, but what is happening is all moving along the same tracks as before. There is nothing new in it anywhere. On the other hand, when people are involved, it is not a matter of somehow setting a car in motion and not giving it a steering wheel. It really must have a steering wheel if it is to be able to move. We cannot help but say: either we try to move forward and go as far as we can, or we are heading for chaos. There is no other way to do it.

Dr. Riebensam: I agree with all that. I go along with the idea that the worker should be shown this goal to begin with, but not be led down the same old paths. I think it's possible that today you will see that the workers in a factory are throwing a great deal together. But perhaps it would be possible to find a way for the workers to play a fruitful role. We are willing to take the workers into account, but they must also take our point of view into consideration if they do not want all faith in a possibility of understanding to disappear. Somehow we have to find a way. [But it's not that easy.] When the workers come to set up works councils and we tell them we want to sit down together and do the right thing, then that is basically an abstract template; they don't meet our advice at all. I was at a workers' meeting the other day when the workers demanded too much. They said that we should not approach the matter with narrow-minded thinking; it would no longer be useful to make any arrangements; they wanted to decide everything themselves in the future. This realization must be the basis for my future actions. However, I could imagine a works council that meets every eight days and with which I discuss everything before tensions arise. But we should also tell the workers: we cannot simply create a works council on our own.

Rudolf Steiner: You see, in these matters it is important to take systematic experiences, not unsystematic ones. We have had a whole series of workers' meetings, almost every day, because we had no other option. One thing emerged again and again in these workers' meetings. It was very noticeable that, as an extreme, the workers themselves said: Yes, if we are alone, how are we supposed to cope in the future? Of course we need those who can lead; we need the spiritual worker. This matter does not arise from dictating, but only from really working with people. That is why I considered the fact (Molt will be able to confirm this) that from the very beginning, when he came with other friends to put this matter into effect, I told him: the first requirement is that honest trust be acquired, but not in the usual way of: I am the principal and you are the worker, but rather from person to person, so that the worker is really initiated step by step into the management of the whole business and also gets an idea of when the business ceases to be economically viable. That is something that is indispensable, and I openly ask the question: where has it happened? Where is it being done? — Nowadays, a lot of things are done in government by individual commissions getting together and thinking about the best way of doing this or that. In this case, forgive the harsh word, the horse is being put before the cart. It is impossible to make progress with that. Today it is necessary to create a living link between those who work with their hands and those who can understand it. It is much more necessary than holding ministerial meetings for individual men to go among the people and talk from person to person. That is the ground on which one must begin first. One must not be put out if success does not come at the first attempt; it is bound to come by the fourth or fifth time. So, wouldn't it be true that if only some kind of beginning had been made in what is actually practical today, one would be able to see [that something is emerging]; but there is no beginning, people are opposed to it.

Emil Molt: A start has been made. May I point out to those gentlemen who are interested that we have been introducing this kind of works council for weeks. Even though I am well aware that the matter is still in its infancy, it has been shown that we have already gained the trust while we are negotiating here on how to gain that trust. This is essential because we set out to make fewer cigarettes and more people. We have used the factory to make people. Making cigarettes is only a means to an end. We set out to really get in touch with people and to do this during working hours. You just have to take that time. It's about realizing things from the bottom up. If things are like this elsewhere now - a lot has been missed in the last six to eight weeks. If we had started earlier, a lot could have been avoided.

The situation now is as follows: the people who are in the factory not only want to work, they also want to know. We must be clear about this: the more we give in to this urge and are not afraid to steer this power current into the right channels, the more this power can be utilized again. Therefore, we should not be afraid to tell every factory owner to lay out his business like an open book, because that is where trust begins to be put into practice. As long as we only talk about what we should do, we will not win the trust of the people. We must provide insight and show them: Today we have nothing more to hide. In the past, the factory owner had more to hide. Now the worker can see at most that nothing is being earned. Only if he comes to it himself will he believe it – he will not believe it from the factory owner. When people demand higher wages, they are driven only by a desire for knowledge; they want to gain insight. But if you yourself are the helmsman and provide insight into the production process, you will see that people will concern themselves with issues other than wages. I would ask you to bear in mind that we [from Waldorf-Astoria] are not speaking as theorists; we have experience, we have proof of this. Even if not all our ideals have been realized so far, we are on the way to doing so. And the difficulties that other companies are now facing – we will never have them.

Yesterday I spoke to a large workforce from another company. I saw the enthusiasm with which people received my report as soon as things were viewed from a comprehensive point of view. I heard from my workforce today that the news of this meeting is spreading like wildfire among the workforce. People see for themselves that if it were like this everywhere, the conditions would be quite different. For days we have had continuous visits from the workers' committees of all the major plants, and they say: Yes, if only we had that! There is a great failure on the part of the bourgeoisie; if you really talk to our colleagues, you will encounter blinkers and narrow-mindedness everywhere.

Dr. Schmucker: I had imagined the government's bill to be dreadful, but not so dreadful; it is a real monstrosity. If you study the matter, you can see that the law-makers in Berlin do not know the situation; they do not even know what it is about. Now they want to abolish the employee and worker committees and set up works councils of 40 to 80 people who are incapable of working.

Mr. Geyer: There is no one present who is not touched by Dr. Steiner's proposals. But I must openly admit that I deal with the question every day of why we always face new problems when I think we have overcome them. We are in the midst of a spiritual revolution. People are becoming more and more concerned with the spiritual side of the social structure than has been the case so far, when the interest of the individual in general was only directed towards an economic revolution. But I must say that this spiritual revolution, in my opinion, is not moving in the right direction. The worker and many employees are by no means aware of what is at stake today. Their consumer interests keep them so firmly in their grip that they do not allow other people who do not work with their hands to be considered alongside them. It is true when Dr. Steiner says that social policy cannot be driven from above. But we must come to a point where the human being enters into a closer relationship with other human beings. Unfortunately, however, we are already so one-sided in the culture and in the state organism and in the world organism that a return to the original culture, to the original state, is necessary – not in the spiritual sense, but in relation to the relationship between human beings. There is no longer any control that stands above the human being. All people should enter into relationship with each other, forming small circles, a kind of crystal, which combine to form larger units. This forming of crystals should then continue until we have reached the summit, where the liquidation of the state organism has come to its end. I believe that this is how Dr. Steiner imagines the process of developing threefolding until it is complete. But a considerable time will pass before that [and a problem will arise]: councils will be formed, but these councils will change very often, just as people now often change their jobs, so that chaos will ensue. There will not only be friction between the small organizations, but also collisions within the liquidation ministry. This can lead to the whole tower, which is to be built from below, collapsing. I believe that our general education of the people as a prerequisite [for this reform work] does not yet make it possible to hope for the development of genuine trust between people. I believe that a general education of the people should start first, although I readily admit that this general education of the people will also face obstacles from above and below. The one who is supposed to be educated, the worker, regards not only the employer as an enemy, but everyone who is intellectually superior, because he fears that he will have to persuade him to do something that is contrary to his interests. This is an experience that is made many times. I do not believe that even if Molt has had good experiences with the works councils in his company, it will always remain so. Man is man, and since I have known man in his ten-thousand-year development, I must say: Man is not a mere earthly creature, but a being that once reaches the point of culture where one can truly say that now man is culturally so educated that his earthly existence will be a happy one. To bring this about, however, a person would have to come along who has superhuman spiritual powers to capture the souls of people.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to say that all of this could actually be used to present a view of the value of the human being. But for those who are thinking practically about what can be done in these chaotic times, it is not at all a matter of whether a person is sufficiently culturally educated or can be educated, but only of making what can be made out of people. And above all, when we speak of the social organism, we should abandon the notion from the outset that we want to somehow establish happiness in the social organism or bring happiness to people through social institutions. The aim of social transformation is therefore not to create happy people, but to get to know the living conditions of the social organism, that is, to create a viable social organism. The fact that we cannot make progress with popular education as it is today has led to the demand for total emancipation from the other limbs for popular education, for the impulses of the threefold order.

Now, if you really want to know people, you cannot speak of tens or thousands of years, but of what is really manageable. If you consider the development of public education in the last few centuries – three to four centuries is all you need to take if you want to get to the bottom of today's problems – you can see that the ever-increasing nationalization of the entire education system has led to the public ignorance that we have today. We have gradually created an education in our leading circles that leads to nothing but false concepts. Consider that the leading circles have driven the worker into mere economic life. Because what you throw at him in the way of popular education, he does not understand. I was a teacher at the Workers' Education School and I know what the worker can understand and what is done incorrectly. I know that he can only understand something that is not taken from bourgeois education, but from the general human existence. You said that the worker regards everyone as an enemy who is spiritually superior. Of course, he regards everyone as an enemy who merely represents a spiritual life that is conditioned by the social structure of a small number of castes and classes. He senses this very well in his instinct. As soon as he is confronted with the spiritual life that is drawn from the whole human being, there is no question of him being an enemy of the spiritually superior; there can be no question of that; on the contrary, he realizes very well that this is his best friend. We must find a way to achieve a truly social education for the people through the emancipation of spiritual life. We must not be afraid of a certain radicalism. We must have an inkling of how concepts, ideas, the whole essence of what our education is today has rubbed off on people, to put it trivially. There has been much discussion about the grammar school system. What is this grammar school system? We have established it by staging a kind of paradox. The spiritual life is, after all, a whole. The Greeks absorbed the spiritual life from everything, because it was the spiritual life that adapted to the circumstances. We do not teach anything in school that is in the world, but rather what was in the world for the Greeks, that is imagined by our culture. From this paradox we now demand: We want to offer people enlightenment. We can only offer it to them if we go back to ourselves in this area, if we approach man as a human being. There should be no return to a speculative original state; only what the times demand can be considered. Today it is necessary that we really learn from such things. When I taught my students - and I can say that there were a great many of them - what I could not get from any branch of grammar school knowledge or education, but what had to be built up from scratch, they learned eagerly. Of course, because they also absorb the judgment of the educated, which [actually comes from high school knowledge], so they knew exactly that this is a cultural lie; of course they don't want to learn anything about that.

We will never have the opportunity to actually move forward if we are unable to make the radical initial decision to implement this threefold order, that is, to really wrest spiritual life and economic life from state life. I am convinced that today a great many people say that they do not understand this threefold order. They say this because it is too radical for them, because they have no courage to really study the matter in detail and carry it out. That is not the case, it is really a matter of the fact that we are not dealing with supermen, but with human beings as they really are, and doing what can be done with them. Then you can do a great deal if you do not want to start from this or that prejudice. You really ought to put the education system on its own basis and let those who are in it manage it. But people can hardly imagine what that is, while it is actually a thing that, if you want to imagine it, already exists.

So, the school system must first be thought of as completely separate from the state system. It is out of the question for us to make any progress if we do not embrace this radical thinking of bringing the school, indeed the whole education system, out of the state.

Dr. Riebensam: I want to get back to the real issue, to what we are trying to achieve. I would like to speak very personally and reply to Mr. Molt that I consider his view – although he experienced it in his factory – to be somewhat unrealistic. It is based on experiences in a small circle. Twenty years ago, I implemented principles in a small factory that no one else was thinking of at the time. I openly showed what I did in the factory. We had the Taylor system, which seems good. I then tried the same in a much larger factory – the people went with me. I then tried the same here – there was a lack of trust. Because of these circumstances, I have expressed my concerns, and I must stick to them. Let us return to what we want. The question was asked: How should we begin? I will assume that we call together the workers with the aim of founding works councils. How do we do that? It is possible that you, Dr. Steiner, will tell me that we could even give the workers self-management. I am not yet convinced that this is possible. I would like to see a concrete example of a works council being formed in a large factory.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to say in advance that everything that can be done in detail within a company today can really only be a preparation for what the works council means. I would just like to say, because Dr. Riebensam started from this point, that experiences such as those in the small group described by Mr. Molt should not be celebrated too soon as a victory. But let us not be deceived: what these experiences can prove in the first instance is that trust can be established within a certain group. And that is what Mr. Molt primarily meant. It cannot be a victory because, when a systematic socialization is considered, a victory cannot be achieved in a single company. The victory of a single company, even if it were to increase the standard of living of its workforce, could only be achieved at the expense of the general public if a single company were to achieve it unilaterally.

Dr. Riebensam: I did not want to speak in detail about the Taylor system.

Rudolf Steiner: I only meant that this Taylor system could lead to something positive under certain circumstances, if it were applied under different conditions; but under our present system it would only increase all the system's damage.

Regarding the specific question of how we deal with works councils, let us not forget that we only want to make demands. We must observe the demands and distinguish the essential from the inessential. The system of councils is actually a given reality today, that is, perhaps it only exists in embryo, but anyone who properly observes the social forces at work in our social organism will understand this. So it is with the idea of councils in this particular case: works councils, transport councils and economic councils will assert themselves of their own accord. Now, to begin with, we only have a presentiment of the working class. The real issue is that the social constitution of the works council is to emerge, that general principles cannot be established for it. In fact, the issue is that we finally get used to making initiatives possible, and such initiatives will arise the moment they are unleashed. They need do nothing at all except popularize the idea of works councils – and that is very important today. Then the question will surely have to be answered in the most diverse concrete enterprises in the most diverse ways: How do we do it? – It can be done in one enterprise in one way and in another way, depending on the goals and people. We must come to the possibility that a workers' council is constituted from within the enterprises, that a workers' council separates itself from the enterprises and acts between the enterprises. That is where the work of the council actually begins. The question of how to do it would have to be resolved by you in each individual case. We just have to understand the idea in general and implement it in each individual case.

The general tenor that we have heard here today, our experience, we are not gaining any trust -: I believe that if one were to examine each individual case, one would come to see that the matter would have to be approached differently after all. First of all, we would have to really embrace the full necessity of putting economic life on its own feet. Just think, if you do that, then it is only goods and the production of goods; you no longer have anything to do with wages. Of course, this cannot be done overnight. But the worker understands that when you tell him: you cannot abolish the wage system overnight. But if the tendency exists to abolish the wage system, to transfer the worker's labor power to the constitutional state, so that it is decided there - because it does not belong in economic life - then there is only a contract between management and workers regarding distribution. That is a concrete thing, that must first of all become real, it must be carried into every single company; then one can make progress with the people. Unfortunately, however, there is no will to do this. For example, there is no understanding [among employers] that the wage system can be replaced. This is regarded as a conditio sine qua non of economic life.

Dr. Riebensam: I say that the workers do have works councils in mind, but they do not take them into account in their [fundamental] goal. [This would have to be shown to them]. You do this here by giving lectures.

Rudolf Steiner: Not with the leaders [of the workers], who think in the old ways, who think in bourgeois terms.

Dr. Riebensam: Of course we have to tell the workers all these things, but first I have to be clear about them myself, I have to think about these thoughts. Then I can also try to talk to the workers and influence them. But I would like to ask you if you also know the works councils in the other factories?

Rudolf Steiner: I only know the Molt system, which was introduced on the basis of this idea [about the works council].

Emil Molt: One fine day, we saw that there was a need, we convened the people, discussed the aim and purpose and then said: the most capable can join the works council, but they must know that they still have to learn. Those who come in must learn from day one, but under supervision. They must learn what is necessary to run a business. Confidence comes, people then see that it is not as easy to run a business as people now realize that it is not so easy to govern. People then understand that the director is the first works councilor in his business because he is the only one who knows the business from the bottom up. Then you work through fundamental questions with the people so that they feel the imponderables.

Dr. Riebensam: How many people do you have in your company?

Emil Molt: Seven hundred.

Dr. Riebensam: Who should I sit down with?

Emil Molt: They will come to me.

Dr. Carl Unger: I could contribute some experiences, even if they are only specific ones, because my company has metalworkers who have a slightly different mentality than the other workers. My experiences go in the direction that we have set up a program that is not a program in and of itself, but it is only about working out the basic features for a works council before the government comes, because otherwise nothing will come of it. You said that you consider it essential for the works council to seek contact with the outside world and to get in touch with other works councils. The prerequisite was the call that appeared at the time and was circulated in our company. In all the possible questions that have now been discussed here, the point of view of threefolding was always sought. [In our company, however, we were forced] to do it the old way — but that doesn't really belong here. The whole matter of the workers' councils must be approached from the legal point of view. It is actually a good thing when people ask about the threefold order, because in this way they are instructed and pass on their knowledge in their circle, because the threefold order idea is something that must work from man to man.

Dr. Fritz Elsas: Dr. Schmucker first asked Dr. Steiner what he would do if he were now appointed to the government in accordance with the workers' resolution. I would like to speak purely personally, not politically, because from a political point of view, I do not consider this demand to be a good one, and that is because it would mean nothing less than asking the government to dismiss itself. Because such a government will not, without disavowing itself, appoint the representative of modern ideas without resigning. Since that would be irresponsible and since such a significant movement should not arise with something that has no chance of success, I have never hidden these concerns and regret that such a resolution was passed at all. However, that should not prevent us from extracting what is useful from this unreasonable demand. As far as I know, Dr. Schmucker is in the Ministry of Labor. We have had ministers during the war and afterwards who were not there before; these are signs that the old state of civil servants, the old state of lackeys, has not mastered this tremendous economy that has been emerging for 60 years and which must seek other forms, whether we like it or not, because these forms have now actually suffered a fiasco. The states themselves have shown that it is impossible for them to build themselves up into economic states in this way. That is the meaning of this catastrophe.

Now all the gentlemen, especially Dr. Riebensam, have rightly assumed that we are in an extremely difficult situation in which the whole building can collapse. We are in a transitional stage and must first remain in the area that is of current interest and that must be tackled immediately. These are not spiritual questions, but economic ones. Mr. Molt has earned the trust of his workers; but they are not from the metalworkers' structure. They have in fact, as we hear, already arrived at the point of nihilism, which will bring about the sharpest dangers for Württemberg. One of these dangers, Dr. Riebensam, lies in the fact that you view the matter too sharply from a purely industrial point of view, because you forget that the state of Württemberg does not only have 8,000 [Daimler] and 5,000 Bosch workers, but also farmers. And if they come, we will have a civil war. What will happen then, I do not know.

The question arises: if the workers demand the impossible without reason, not only the workers but also the bureaucracy, if they take the mere consumer point of view, [what happens then]? We would have to try and say to the workers in the sense of threefolding: You metalworkers – and that means all companies – get together, form a production cooperative – this is something completely new – you bring all the assets of your company, your labor, and a new organization will be created. I do not want to say that this is necessary, but I can imagine that the worker can be persuaded to advocate the abolition of wages as the equivalent of labor without having to make a final decision, because a single state can hardly abolish wages. If these enterprises, which are important in Württemberg, were to set up such a production cooperative and thereby reassure the workers, we would have gained time for the implementation of Dr. Steiner's ideas. This merger would be an organized merger that manifests itself in some legal form. This could be organized differently for you, Dr. Riebensam, than for small businesses.

And now the other question: Can a small or medium-sized state like Württemberg, which belongs to a closed economic area [with its own money], even form such a structure for itself? Will foreign countries supply raw materials to such cooperatives? The danger is that foreign countries, which are much larger and stronger “capital countries” than Germany at the moment, will decide not to enter into economic relations with such a structure. But we cannot feed ourselves. So the question must be considered: where do we start with these organizations?

Rudolf Steiner: It would perhaps be going too far if I were to go into the details of the previous summaries; I would rather go into the questions.

It would not yet be possible to regard it as a particular realization of what is meant by threefolding if, for my sake, all metalworkers in Württemberg were treated in the way you have described, although it could be formally implemented. But when I speak of the threefold social order, I must expressly emphasize that I regard a one-sided separation of economic life from state life, with the spiritual life remaining with the state life, as the opposite of what is sought, because I consider a two-way division to be just as harmful as a three-way division is necessary. If a single branch of the economy were to be separated out in this way, I would not regard it as being in line with the threefold order. However, it could formally take place in a social organism that is working towards threefold order. Well, it would also be a fundamental test of the principle if such things were to be considered.

As a detail, I would just like to note that the abolition of wages, consistently thought through, does not at all lead to the view that a single state cannot abolish wages because the relationship of the economy in such a state, which abolishes wages, to the entire economic outside world, does not need to change at all. Whether the worker receives his income internally in the sense of economic liberalism or whether he receives it in some other form, for example from the proceeds of what he produces, for which he is already a partner with the manager, does not change the other economic relations with the outside world. It is therefore not true that a single state cannot abolish wages. But it is equally untenable to claim that a small or large state cannot implement this on its own. On the contrary, in a small or large state you certainly cannot socialize in the sense that the old socialists had in mind. I believe, in fact, that socialization in the sense of the old socialists can lead to nothing more than the absolute strangulation and constriction of a single economic area. If you draw the ultimate consequences from the old socialization, then basically a single economic area is nothing more than what is dominated by a single ledger. You can never come to a positive trade balance with that, but only to a gradual, complete devaluation of the money. Then you can abolish the money. Then the possibility of an external connection ceases altogether.

So all these things have been the basis for thinking of this threefold order, because it is the only way that each individual area, the economic, the legal and the spiritual, can carry it out. The external relationships will not change in any other way than that it will no longer be possible, for example, for political measures to disrupt the economy. The economic sphere will have an external impact, and it will no longer be possible for things to happen, as in the case of the Baghdad Railway problem, where all three interests became entangled, with the result that the Baghdad Railway problem became one of the most important causes of the war. There you see these three things tied together.

I would like to point out once again that the tripartite division is intended for foreign policy, that is, it has been conceived to offer the possibility of conducting economic life according to purely economic aspects, beyond political boundaries, so that political life can never interfere with it. This means that in the areas where the threefold order is not implemented, the damage would be there, but there would be no real reason for the [separate] economic life not to get involved abroad if the economic situation is profitable for the foreign country. It will depend on this alone, even if an economic area is not independent, if it is entirely impulsed by the political; for all these things that affect other countries are not affected by the threefold social order.

Today there is great concern: let us take a specific case. Let us assume that Bavaria would now carry out its socialization, then with such a bureaucratically and centrally conceived socialization, a whole range of free connections between domestic companies and foreign industry would be made impossible and undermined. On the other hand, through the threefold social order, the labor force is removed from the economic sphere, which thus gives the worker the opportunity to face the work manager as a free partner. But this is how the worker comes to be able to really have the share that arises within the economic sphere when everything is no longer mixed up. Today, we no longer have objective prices, but rather the wage relationship in economic life. If you take this out, you have, on the one hand, eliminated the disquiet caused by the workers. And if you now take out the capital relationship, you have, on the other hand, the intellectual organism that always has to take care of the abilities of those who are supposed to be there to run the businesses. So you have removed the two main stumbling blocks from the economic body, and yet you have not touched on something that takes place in economic relations with foreign countries. Therefore, there is no reason for foreign countries to be hostile, because they lose nothing and can conduct economic life exactly as before.

This reorganization [through the works council] is intended precisely with economic life in mind. If we think of Germany, a whole host of fine threads that exist with foreign countries will organize themselves in one fell swoop, from all companies. There is really nothing else to be done but to reorganize social life in such a way that in the future, goods will actually regulate themselves through goods, so that there will be a precise index around which goods group in terms of their value. This will create the possibility that what the individual produces has the value that all products must have in order to meet his needs. In our organism, which is based on the division of labor, all socialization must ultimately result in what the individual person produces in the course of a year equaling what he needs to sustain his life. If we throw out the wage and capital relationship, then we get the pure commodity relationship. However, this is something that one must decide to think through completely. At that moment, one will find that it is quite easy.

Dr. Fritz Elsas: I am not opposed to the spiritual organism administering itself; I am just saying that it will take longer and is not urgent.

Rudolf Steiner: It is urgent because we have the necessity to create a basis for the education of spiritual workers, which we do not produce with our current state spiritual life. That is the terrible thing today, that our state-stamped spiritual life is very far removed from real practical life. Even at the universities, people are trained in such a way – they are not trained practically, but only theoretically – that they are not rooted in life. Isn't it true that I imagine, for example, this school system in the future in such a way that the practitioner, who works in the factory, will be particularly suited as a teacher, and possibly, I think, these [teachers] will continually change [between school and factory]?

Dr. Stadler: I came here today by chance, and I would like to take the liberty of expressing my opinion as a guest. What you are doing here is currently being done in a similar way in many parts of Germany. What I am currently experiencing in Berlin is an unprecedented intellectual struggle of the German people with the problems of the revolution. In Berlin, there are masses of circles, organizations, associations, loose groups, all of which meet in a similar way to you this evening and discuss these matters. For we are not only experiencing the political and economic collapse in Germany, but also the intellectual disintegration of the entire old system. And in this collapse, the German people are once again so far along that they are trying to go their own way. The practitioners are causing difficulties for the theorists and thwarting their goals with their practical questions. They are also right, because they live in practice. The difficulty lies in the fact that in the whole of Germany long-term goals are being set that would take one or two generations to achieve, while we are in the midst of an actual collapse. If, in contrast to Rudolf Steiner and others, I state that Dr. Steiner has actually thought up an idea that a large proportion of those present can emotionally agree with, but that pure practitioners cannot be satisfied with - I say practitioners because one of them is a government councilor [Dr. Schmucker] and the other a top entrepreneur [Dr. Riebensam] —, because they have to ask themselves: What is the way forward tomorrow, because we are not getting anywhere with this? The solution will not be found [so easily]; it is so extraordinarily complicated that with a system of thought one remains in the unreal and it is no longer suitable for solving real questions. All these action programs repeatedly encounter resistance from industrialists, politicians and lawyers. In Germany, we are fortunate that thought and research are being done at all, unlike in Russia, where there has been no real thought during the entire revolutionary period. Thus, Russia is indeed doomed - both as a state and economically. I suspect that the same thing will happen to us in Germany, despite all our intellectual efforts, because the way things are going it is impossible for us to arrive at a political synthesis in time. There are theorists who cling to some system or other, while there are practical people who put the brakes on; so it can only happen by force, because between the two extremes German politics is now only drifting and letting everything happen. Our party politicians have no idea about the spiritual. I have the honor of knowing leading statesmen personally. I leave with the sad belief that they have nothing of the spirit of the times in them, that they have no faith in the future and only think about how to hold on to the rudder from today to tomorrow.

But you should consider whether there are possibilities for quickly linking what you are trying to achieve here with similar efforts being made throughout Germany, so that you do not feel isolated. It would be right for you to be aware that Germany is not the small circle that is currently gathered here. If you do not succeed in forming a phalanx, this attempt is doomed to failure because it can only be a local one. You cannot shape something in Württemberg, carry out the threefold order, when the whole of Germany is going to the devil. You cannot introduce works councils if the entire political system does not go along with it. Either you join together in a spiritual renewal movement and refrain from engaging in the realpolitik of the day – in which case you have to accept ruin and chaos – or you not only want to strive for renewal, but also to work practically and realpolitically for today and tomorrow, then you have to form a phalanx with all the similarly minded forces of the German people and make concessions to the realities of life. That means, for example, you must begin to work out a very concrete system of workers' councils and make specific foreign policy proposals. Please excuse me for criticizing as an outsider, but I mean well by you and the German people, whose preservation is important to me.

Mr. Jaeger: I would like to be brief. I have gained the impression in the discussion that the question tends to be asked quite generally: How do we initially tread the path that leads to the goal that Dr. Steiner presents to us? This question concerns us all. If the creation of the works councils, as Dr. Steiner demands, is proving so difficult, we must not forget that this is only a very small beginning. To shape economic life, we need not only works councils for the factories, but a whole system of councils in general. But when we talk about it today, we must be clear about the fact that no council system exists at all yet, because what has been practiced by the councils in our country so far is not yet a system at all; it is a lack of system. We would first have to discuss individual questions and make an effort to get started and begin with these councils.

And now a specific question: the representative of Daimler-Werke spoke at length about the works council there and about the relationship with the workers. Dr. Riebensam asked how he should proceed in order to properly get in touch with the workers at Daimler and gain the trust of the workforce. I believe that if you want to achieve a big goal, you first have to look at the small things by taking a practical step like Mr. Molt. [So I would like to ask]: Is it not possible for Dr. Steiner, together with the gentlemen who want this suggestion, to work with the workers at the Daimler factory themselves, in order to inspire others by achieving this goal? We need not only the trust of the workers, but also the cooperation of the industrialists, the factory managers, who are opposed to [such things at first.

Rudolf Steiner: This question can only be answered if this practical experiment could actually be carried out – it could certainly be carried out – but I would like to think that one would first have to be inside the Daimler works.

A speaker: Once you are inside, the problem is a lack of trust. Leading personalities find it difficult to gain trust. Those who are elected by the workers are opposed when they come to an understanding with the management. The point is to explain to the workers: Through this threefold structure we can achieve practical goals; we only want to be the link to bring you together and show you the way.

Rudolf Steiner: The only way to do this is to win over the workers, for example, to an understanding of a common goal that can be achieved outside the walls of the company concerned. If one wanted to go further — and that is what would give it a purpose in the first place; it would have to be possible to lead the workers to this goal — one would have to try to achieve something oneself, somehow. That would only lead to the management of the Daimler-Werke throwing me out. I was told that it was highly peculiar that I had gained the trust of the workers, and that I would actually do things quite differently from the way they were usually done. This different way of doing things is based on the fact that I basically do not promise the workers anything, but only explain the processes to them and such like. That is the big difference: in fact, I don't promise anything – I can really do the same with the workers at the Daimler factory as I am doing now – I can't promise anything because I know for sure that if I make promises to the management I will be thrown out. We must not forget that today it is not about some nebulous abstractions such as “all of Germany” or “what is collapsing,” but rather that it is about actually bringing understanding to the individual point and working from that individual point. If a true understanding of the demands inherent in the really real conditions and their satisfaction were to be awakened in a single point, then the prejudice would not always arise again: This is some kind of general idealism that has nothing to do with practice. If people would take the trouble to study the actually practical impetus of this not thought- but life-principle, then we would make progress. What harms us today is that this so-called system, which is not a system at all, but really something else that is rooted in real life, is taken everywhere merely as a system of thoughts. I can only do what is based on real circumstances. But the right impetus to win over the entire workforce of the Daimler factory would be based on that today. The next step, however, would have to be to come to an agreement with the management. But that would get them fired. And that makes it impossible for someone on the outside to implement anything. It is important that we work on bringing these things to real understanding. Then it will move forward. But I don't think we will make progress with mere abstractions. It is also an abstraction to say that a practical attempt should be made when there is no basis for it.

Mr. Jaeger: I must insist that once the workers' understanding is won, the management would not throw the personality out, but once the personality has gained the trust, then these proposals would be taken up by both sides. It is not a matter of promises here, but only of the works council first reaching an agreement among the management and an understanding between the management and the workers.

Rudolf Steiner: The whole matter is hopeless if there is no understanding of the real threefold social order. This understanding is generally found today among the working class, because these people do not cling to anything that comes from old conditions, but own nothing but themselves and their labor. This understanding is still lacking, however, among the other [people] today; perhaps only when they come to grief will they be forced to let go of what consists only in clinging to the old conditions. Today, they actually find widespread support for the threefold order among the working class, even though the leaders of the working class are not at all able to think in terms of progressive thinking, but basically think much more bourgeois than the bourgeoisie.

When people say that these things cannot be understood because they are too outlandish, it is because they have forgotten how to understand things based on life. When it comes to things that arise in life, people must respond with experiences of life. Today, they only respond with what they have based on party judgments and concepts. But if someone has nothing of that, but only what comes from the whole breadth of life, then one says: that is impractical, that does not answer individual questions, one would have liked to have answered individual concrete questions. My “key points” were not written to steer [the social question] into the theoretical or philosophical, but to start somewhere. When you start, you will see that it continues.

Dr. Riebensam: I do not think that Dr. Steiner would be thrown out by me – I am the one who decides, but the commercial management also has something to say – but the current workers' committee would probably throw Dr. Steiner out. It appears as if I wanted to thwart Dr. Steiner's ideas with my real concerns. That was not the aim or the intention of my explanation. I just wanted to discuss the whole matter here. My view is that today we need some way to avoid a struggle with the workers if possible. Now it is a fact that Dr. Steiner has won the trust of a large number of workers today. And that should be enough in Stuttgart to take further steps. This could also pave the way for a way forward that might not require a fight for a while. The workforce is willing to go along with this, even with the plant managers. It would be a great mistake not to pursue such a path. That is my personal opinion.

Mr. Reitz: How can this be done?

Emil Molt: To answer that, we have come together. After Dr. Riebensam has said an important word, after the way is clearly laid out, how two classes come together to form one human race, after these clear ways are laid out here, it is now up to each individual to actually follow the way. The death in all these things is always that there is much more talk than action. Dr. Stadler is right when he says that if we only come together and talk without taking action, then time will rush by so quickly that events will sweep over us. We all agree that the great collapse will come in three to four weeks, when we must be ready to take action to realize the New. For this we need every single person, so that thoughts can be put into action hourly and every minute in daily life. Therefore, in the interest of the people, of humanity, we ask you not only to ask, what does Dr. Steiner think about it, but that each individual is very clear about the fact that the path lies within himself and he must tread it. The old Germany perished because of this non-treading and the present Germany will perish. I believe that when we go home today, we should do so with the firm resolution to move from mere deliberation to action, even if it cannot be perfect – imperfect action is still better than clever thinking, with which we only remain on the surface again and do not reshape things in reality, because reshaping things is what it is all about today.

Perhaps there is still a need to comment on the cultural side of the problems. We would like to create an opportunity for this soon; perhaps individual areas could be worked on separately or together. I would like to hear your opinion on this so that we can go home with a result.

Dr. Weiss: I am very much in favor of continuing the discussion along these lines. However, I think it would be better not to work on the individual areas separately; it is important for us, who are neither entrepreneurs nor tradesmen, to look at all the issues. The opportunity should be created to work on all the issues together, even at the risk of thinning out the ranks. We should not only speak, but also try to work through the press. We should have a very loosely organized press committee that comments in the various party organs, not to fuel polemics. There should also be a special organ of the federation for threefolding to check the manuscripts before sending them to the relevant editorial office, so that the subsequent procedure is not complicated. The Federation for Threefolding should not, of course, restrict freedom of expression, but we must organize ourselves in such a way that everyone uses their contacts with the press to comment on the issues in question, but the articles should be sent in beforehand so that we can proceed in a concentrated manner.

Emil Molt: That is precisely what we are aiming for; we should actually be commenting every day.

A speaker: We came here today for a discussion. It would be desirable if a number of industrialists, as representatives of the owners, and plant managers, and employees, as representatives of the employee committees, came together to talk.

Emil Molt: In my opinion, this should really be attempted; it would be the first step in preparing a functioning works council.

Dr. Riebensam: I think the approach should be somewhat different; your works councils should invite our workers' committees.

Emil Molt: You can do both; the workers would have to see that the initiative comes from the factory owners.

Dr. Riebensam: It should come from the workers' committees, not from the factory owners.

Emil Molt: But otherwise the factory owners would not come; but it would be best to discuss this afterwards.

A speaker: Couldn't we, so to speak, issue certain guidelines to give the factory owners something to work on? That way, the management of the large companies could process the matter and discuss it with the workers' committees. Perhaps this would be a way to shorten the whole thing.

In response to the question of whether they would like to meet again next Thursday, it was decided to meet again at 7 p.m. that day.

With reference to my presentations I would like to ask you to take these four lectures as a unit. This means the content of one lecture is not to be taken as independent and judged this way. The relative theme is so comprehensive that it can only be manageable by doing a number of lectures.

In today's lecture I would like to make a provisional outline for possible solving techniques distilled from actual knowledge of the being of the social organism, of such solution possibilities for the social question which do not come out of some one-sided remark about some or other class, some or other state, but coming from appropriate reality, coming from the properly observed evolutionary forces of humanity and in particular those evolutionary forces which are the most pronounced at present and valid for the near future of humanity. If one tries to find a solution for the social question through the aspirations or the demands of a state, of a class, out of some part of the social organism, then one does nothing other than undermine the other elements of the social organism by calling on yet another class which in some way or other restrict development or healthy living conditions.

For our time here, it is relevant to reveal and substantiate my indications of truths in the following lectures. In modern life, or it could be called the modern social organism, quite a particular form is experienced through expressions characteristic of modern life, through technology, through the technical operation of economic life and its relationships and through the capitalistic process which organises this economic enterprise. Not necessarily only those with a conscious focus observe this modern technology and modern capitalism as they were introduced into life, but their focus was on the more or less conscious or the more or less instinctive, actively organised forces within the social structure of the human community.

The characteristic, particular form of the social question coming to the fore in modern times can be expressed as follows: economic life supported by technology and modern capitalism have worked in a natural self-evident way and brought order into the modern community. Besides this claim for human awareness towards technology and capitalism, the awareness was deflected by other branches, other spheres of the social organism, where awareness should have become as necessary as the health of the social organism as it was with the economic field.

Perhaps I may use a comparison to clearly communicate what I could call the nerve of a comprehensive, many-sided observation of the social question. Please consider that with a comparison I don't mean anything other than a support of human understanding in order to orientate it towards the healing of the social question. Whoever wants to consider what we know as the most complicated organism—that of the human being—needs to pay attention to the existence of three operative systems working side by side in the human form. These three cooperative systems can be characterised in the following way. One could say in the human, natural organism a system works incorporating the nerves and senses. One could call the most important member of this system where the nerves and senses are centralized, the head organisation.

As to the second member of the human organism, in order to develop a real understanding of this organism it is necessary to consider what I would like to call the rhythmic system, in relationship with breathing, blood circulation and everything expressed as rhythmic processes. As a third system, one can recognise all the organs whose actions relate to metabolism. In these three systems are the combined effects, when they interact in a healthy way, of all that is contained in the human organism. I have tried, in full agreement with all the research science has claimed, to characterise this threefold aspect of the human being as an outline in my book Riddles of the Soul I am clear about all the aspects to be introduced in the future by biology, physiology and science regarding the human organism which will see how this threefold head-, circulation-, (or chest system) and digestive systems are maintained—that these members each work in a particular independent way which indicates it is not an complete centralisation of the organism. These three systems each have a particular relationship to the outer world; the head system through the senses, the circulation or rhythmic system through breathing and the digestive system through the nutritional organs. In relation to scientific methods we have not progressed as far as these ideas I'm indicating here, out of spiritual scientific foundations for natural science as I've tried to use, in order to present it in scientific circles as a general statement and in a way, make it desirable for the evolution of knowledge. This means however that our thinking habits, the entire way we imagine the world to be has not completely been adjusted to the example of the human organism as it is presented in its natural processes. In a way one could say yes, science can wait, they may gradually rush to their ideals, they will soon come to the view that such observations are their own. However, regarding the examination and especially the processes of the social organism, one can't wait. Not with some or other expert but for every human soul—because every human soul shares in the work of the social organism—at least must take part in the work of the social organism—at least by an instinctive knowledge of the necessities of this social organism. Healthy thought and experience, a healthy will and desire in relation to the expression of the social order can only develop when people—whether more or less instinctive—can understand that this social organism, if it is to be healthy, must be a natural threefold organism.

Now I am at the point where I need to be very careful not to be misunderstood. Since Schäffle wrote a book about the social organism, there have been repeated attempts at establishing an analogy between a natural organization, let's say an organisation of people, and on the other side, a human community as such. So many efforts have been made to determine the cell of the social organism, where the cell structure exists, what the tissues could be and so on! Recently a book appeared by Aleray, Weltmutation (mutation of the world), in which certain scientific facts and scientific laws are simply transferred on to, what they call, the social organization. With all these analogy games, nothing relates to what we are considering here. Those who at the end of this lecture could say: ‘Oh, here we have yet again such a game of analogy between the natural organism and the social organism’—would prove that the real spirit within the meaning has not been penetrated by the listener. This I don't want—some or other scientific facts adjusted as truth and transplanted on to the social organisation. What I want is for human thinking, human feeling to learn through observation of the natural organism that this method, this way of sensing can in turn be applied to the social organization. When you simply take the belief you learnt about natural organisms and apply that to social organism, like Schäffle has done, like others have done too, likewise with Weltmutation then it shows you are unwilling to develop a capability to consider the social organism as independent, to examine it as such, to research it according to its own laws, just as you do with natural organisms. In order for you to understand me I have made this comparison with a natural organism. The very moment you continue, like the researcher in nature, objectively meeting the natural organism, as you would place yourself before the independence of the social organism in order to learn about its laws, in that moment the game of analogy regarding the earnestness of your observation, will stop.

I want to call your attention now to how this play of analogies must come to an end. The examination of the social organism—here it involves something becoming, something which must come into existence first—in as far as it must be healthy, leads to the three members of this social organism, but they both can only be recognised as independent as such, when considered objectively. On the one side, you can distinguish three members of the human organism, on the other side the objective, independent members of the social organism. If you look for analogies, then you most likely will experience the following. You would say that this human head- or nerve-system relates to human spiritual life with its spiritual abilities; the circulatory system rules the relation with this spiritual system with the crudest system, and the materialistic system with the digestive system. The digestive system could be considered through certain fundamental experiences as the crudest of systems in the human organism. What then, if you continued the game of analogy, would be the next thing? The next thing would be to say the social organism divides into three branches.

Spiritual life develops within a person. That is one member. Within a person his actual political life develops too—we will speak about this division of branches afterwards—and also his economic or business life develops within. You could, if you wanted to play the analogy game, believe that spiritual life as in spiritual culture in the social organism is subject to the same kind of laws which allow a comparison with the laws in the nervous and sense systems. The system considered as unrefined, the most materialistic, the digestive system, can in the game of analogy probably be compared with what one calls the crude system of material business life. Whoever can consider things for themselves and stay far away from the mere game of analogy will know that in reality, things are actually reversed in comparison with what comes out of mere analogy. See, the social organism lies opposite the economic production and consumption, opposite the economic circulation of goods at the basis of life's rules, just like the natural human organism's laws are at the foundation of the nerves- and sense-life, which is its spiritual system. Certainly the life of public law, the actual political life, life which is often too all-encompassing, which can be described as the actual civil life, allows itself to be between the two systems of the digestive and the nerve-sense systems where the rhythmic system lies, the regulating system of the breathing and heart. Only by comparing how the human organism has, between its digestive and nerve-systems the central circulation or rhythmic systems, so between the public rights and the economic system stand the actual life of spiritual culture. This life of spiritual culture, this spiritual life of the social organism has no laws which can be thought of as analogous to laws of human talents, laws of human sense and nerve existence but the spiritual life in the social organism has laws which can only be compared with laws in the crudest system, the metabolic system.

This leads to an objective observation of the social organism. Regarding this particular point the assumption must be clear in order for no misunderstanding to arise in a belief that the physiological or biological elements are simply transferred on to the social organism. The social organism must be considered as an independent organism throughout for its success towards recovery to take place. In various areas in central and eastern Europe the word “socializing” is heard. This socializing will not become a healing process but a fake process in the social organism, perhaps even a disturbing process if the human heart, the soul does not have insight with instinctive knowledge of the necessity for a threefoldness in the social organism. This social organism has in every case, if it is to work in a healthy way, three members. The first member, to begin with from the one side—one could understandably also start on the side of the spiritual life but for now we will start on the economic side as this obviously controls the rest of life through modern technology in modern capitalism—therefore, the first member of the social organism as business life, or economic life, will be looked at. This economic life, we will partly today and partly in the course of these lectures see it has to be an independent member within the social organism just as in comparison, the nerve- sense system is relatively independent in the human organism. Our economic life is connected to all that takes place in the production, circulation and consumption of goods. With everything connected to these three things, economy is linked. We will soon consider its characteristics in order to understand it more closely.

As a second member of the social organism we observe the life of public law, the actual political life, for the purposes of the old constitutional state it could be called the actual life of the state. Meanwhile economic life involves the business of everything which the human being brings out of nature as his own production, because the economic life involves the circulation and consumption of goods, so this second member of the social organism is involved with everything with a human foundation with its relationships of people with people. This I ask you to consider comprehensively, because it is important for knowledge of the members of the social organism to know the difference between public laws which relate to the foundation of one human being to another, while in the economic system it involves the production, circulation and consumption of goods. One must be able to distinguish between the natural human system in relation to the lungs and outer air, the processing of this outer air, how this differs from the manner and way nourishment is transformed in the third natural system within the human being.

As a third member which must be placed independently from the others, there has to be a distinction from everything in the social order which involved spiritual life. More precisely the name ‘spiritual culture’ does not cover everything connected to spiritual life; it should be everything flowing into the social organism which depends on the natural gift of individuals, the natural spiritual and physical talents coming from single individuals. Similar to the first system, the economic system which needs to exist for humanity to relates and regulates the outer world, the second system which must exist in the social organism, relates to everything happening between one person and another; there we have the third system. In order for this third system to have a name it will be called the spiritual system, involved with everything which is created out of the single human individuality and needing to be incorporated into the social organism.

Even as true as it is that modern technology and modern capitalism have given a stamp to our modern community life, it actually is so necessary for the wounds of humanity beaten from this side to be healed and thus enable people and communities to develop the right relationship to the threefold social order I am characterizing here.

Economic life has in our modern time taken on particular forms. It has so to speak penetrated human life with its own rules. Both the other members of the social organism are in the position to bring their own independent laws in the right way into this social organism. For them it is necessary that people out of independence and from a point of awareness carry out the social membership, each in its place, where it is positioned. For the purpose of finding solutions to the social question which we are considering, every single person has a social task in the present and near future. The first member of the social organism, the economic life, rests primarily on a natural background. Just as each individual depends for his learning and his education on the talents of his spiritual and physical organs, on those gifts and talents given to him, likewise economic life depends on certain natural foundations. This natural basis gives economic life—and through this the totality of the social organism—its character. However, these natural foundations are there without having to be discovered through some social organisation, some or other socializing of its original form. This needs consideration. Just as with the education of humanity the various gifts they have need consideration, in natural bodily and spiritual abilities, so every attempt at socializing community living by giving it an economic form as well, need consideration out of its natural foundations. All circulation of goods and also all human labour and any spiritual cultural life lie at the foundation of the first elementary origins chained by human beings to a particular part of nature. Here one needs to really think about the social organism's relationship with the natural foundation, for instance as in individuals in regard to learning and education, in relation to their gifts in thinking. This can be made clear by taking extreme examples.

For instance, you can imagine how in various parts on earth, locally produced bananas present a source of nourishment, how bananas qualify in the community to be displaced from their point of origin and be made into a consumable product at a specific destination. Compare the human labour involved in making bananas into consumables for the community with the work of making wheat into a consumable product in the vicinity of Central Europe, it is clear the work needed for the bananas, modestly calculated, is three hundred times less. The work necessary to make the wheat consumable is, lightly calculated, three hundred times bigger.

This is indeed an extreme example. Such differences regarding the measure of work necessary in relation to its natural origin exist in our production line also, under the production line which is represented in some or other social organism in Europe. Not as radical a difference as between bananas and wheat, but the differences are there. Just as the economic organism is founded on the relationship between human beings and their consumption of nature, the measure of the work talents in reality dependent on the natural origin, so the being of a person is dependent on his natural physical or spiritual gifts. One can make a comparison. In Germany, in the region of middle profit abilities, the sowing of wheat has a crop return of seven to eight times at the harvest. In Chile this becomes twelve times, in north Mexico seventeen times and in Peru twenty times, south Mexico twenty-five times up to thirty-five times. For different regions of the earth the return in wheat productivity is in relation to the earth, to the yield of the earth. This actually affects the measure of labour needed to bring the wheat in an appropriate manner into the economic life.

Just as one can make such data for the measure of labour needed to process the wheat into a consumable item in different regions, so comparisons can be made for the labour needed in the most varied production lines, raw materials with different production lines made consumable within the economic sphere of a social organism.

This whole interconnected being found in the preliminary processes at the beginning of the relation of people to nature, which continue in every human action by transforming products of nature into consumables for the community, all these processes which are involved as a whole from the natural foundations up to consumables, all these processes, and only these, are included in a healthy social organism as a pure economic member of the social organization. This economic member of the social organisation must be—I will in the course of the lectures give more details with proof—with just such an independence be positioned in the whole social organism as the human head organisation stands in relation to the entire human organism.

Independently standing beside the economic system another system must exist and that is the relationship between one person and another. Living within the purely economic system is the relationship which needs to be established between people and objective goods. A healthy social life needs to develop as a second member of the social organism which regulates everything in relationships between one person and another.

People have neglected achieving the correct difference between the two members of the social organism through the hypnotic belief that modern technology and ancient thinking habits in modern times are the economic forces and processes necessary, either for single regions or in the radical social sense, which can be transformed into the totality of economic life, applied to what I have here as the second member, as the actual state region in a narrower sense, as the region of public law, as the area of relationships between one person to the other.

This region of the state can only then develop in a healthy way when the conflicting streams of development cut in, which are considered by some as correct. Many people believe that healing the social organism is only achievable through nationalization as much as possible; with the greatest degree of association with nationalism—but it involves far more the necessity for complete autonomy, acknowledged and applied to all the separate branches of life, which must step in between economic life—with all its laws on the one side—and the narrower life of the state on the other side—again with its own laws.

I can well imagine how many people there are who say: ‘For Heavens' sake, these things are becoming so complicated! Things which are brought together out of necessities for new developments are now to be separated from one another by various systems!’ Whoever speaks in this way, unable to consider origins developing in a natural way, would even refuse to understand that the human organism can only be alive as a result of the relative autonomy of the rhythmic life, the vital breathing and hart in the breast, concentrated, centralized in the breathing and in the heart system. The entire human organism is dependent on such systems being closed in and yet working together. The health of the social organism depends on the economic life having its own laws, that the legal life, the life of public law and public security, everything fitting the narrower description of political, has its own laws and its own proficiencies. Only then will both these spheres work in the right way, in the social organism. May it come about with some, who believe certain requirements have finally been accomplished, while others may well raise a shoulder, that it can eventually be said: no healing in the central management of the social organism, as within a party, can happen without cooperation between economic life and political life. If this does happen we will see it is valid for the third member as well. It is necessary nonetheless, that just as the circulatory system has its own lungs, just as the nerve-sense system has its own brain system, so in a single management system its own management, an autonomous replacement system or party or other representation is there for the economic and political or public legal systems, and then again for the third domain, an autonomous area for spiritual life.

These three spheres have a valid autonomy in a healthy organism and relate to one another through their independent representative, enabling this mutual relationship between the three members of the social organism. This corresponds to them in the same way as the independent relationship is produced by the three members of the natural human organism. It turns out that essentially those representations and administrations produced out of the economic members of the organism, that these essentially work towards the economic organism building an associated foundation for itself, a cooperative, trade unionism, but in a higher form. This cooperative trade unionism will only work with the laws of production, work with the circulation and consumption of goods. This is what creates the foundation, builds the content for the economic member of the social organism. It will depend on the vitality of association. It will depend on those who have given the necessary inequality produced from natural foundations, to balance it out. I have pointed out how many variations exist in the amount of human labour needed according to different relationship of the natural source of a member's production. All this enters into an unnatural social organization, when such cooperation is achieved as it has been up to now, of nature, human labour and capital. In a most chaotic way nature, human labour and capital are infused into a unified state or remain outside lawlessly, outside this unitary state. Even though the life of spiritual culture which is dependent on people's physical and spiritual talents for their expression, so also the chosen public and political laws of life must be acknowledged for their need to develop an independent life for themselves, such as the economic system.

I could, to make myself better understood as far as it is needed today, include the following. Besides other foundations out of which we live today, there is also a surfacing out of mankind's deep, natural foundations for a renewal of the social organism, in which can be heard the three words: brotherhood, equality, freedom. Whoever is unprejudiced towards a healthy human experience for all that is really human, will not feel anything but the deepest sympathy and deepest understanding for the meaning in the words, brotherhood, equality, and freedom. Nevertheless, I know of extraordinary thinkers, deep astute thinkers who repeatedly in the course of the 19th Century took the trouble to show how impossible it is to make a united social organism comprising brotherhood, equality and freedom, a reality. An astute Hungarian searched for proof that these three things, but when they are realized, when they penetrate human social structure, they will contradict themselves. Shrewdly he referred to the example of how impossible it is to instil equality into social life because every human being also wants the necessity for freedom to be valid. He found these three ideals to be contradictory. Interestingly, one can't but agree that there is a contradiction and one can't but sympathise out of a general human experience regarding these three ideals. Why these?

Because as soon as the true sense of these three ideals become clear, it will be recognised as necessarily a threefold social organism. The three members should not be an abstract, theoretical parliament or some unit assembled and centralized, they should be living reality and through their lively activity side by side be brought together in a unit. When these three members are independent they contradict one another in a certain way, just like the metabolic system is at variance with the head and rhythmic systems. However, in life, contradictions are just what work together in a unit. Through an understanding of life one is able to figure out the real gesture of the social organism. A realization will arise that brotherliness must be active in order for cooperation within economic life, where rules are needed among one another regarding particulars, are to be created in this first social member. In the second member of public law where it deals with the relationship of one person to another, only in as far as a human being is a person, it works with the activation of the idea of equality. In the spiritual sphere, where again it has to exist independently in the social organism, it deals with the idea of freedom. Now suddenly the three golden ideals gain their real value when it is known that they may not reach success through an inter-scrambled mixture but that they are orientated according to laws within the threefold organism in which each single one of the three members can achieve its applicable ideal of freedom, equality and brotherhood.

Today I can only propose the structure of the social organism in the form of a sketch. In the following lectures, I will substantiate and prove each one individually. Adding to what has been said is a third member of a healthy social organism with everything arising out of the human individuality, on the foundation of freedom and based on the physical and spiritual gifts of individuals. Here again an area is touched which causes quiet shudders when things are truthfully defined. To continue with this healthy organism, a third area is added which encompasses everything which relates to the religious life of humanity, everything related to schools and education in the widest sense which includes spiritual life, the practice of art and so on. While I only want to mention this today, in the next lectures I will create an extensive foundation regarding everything which belongs to this third sphere—which is not related to public law which belongs in the second sphere—but which is related to private law and criminal law. I found with those to whom I've explained this threefold social organism and who have understood some of it, that they could not grasp the idea that public law, the law which relates to the security and equality of people, should be separated from the right towards law breaking, or towards the private relationships between people; that this could be regarded as separate, and private law and criminal law must be included in the third, in the spiritual member of the social organism.

Modern life has unfortunately turned away from considering these three members of the social organism. Just like the body of economics with its concerns have penetrated into the government, into actual political life, penetrated its concerns into the representative body of political life, the result has clouded the possibility for the second member of the organism to be formed in which human equality can be realized, so too the economic and public life have absorbed the possibility which can only develop itself in a freer form. Out of a certain instinct, out of an erroneous instinct however, modern social democracy has tried to separate religious life from the life of the public state: “Religion is a private affair”; unfortunately, not out of particular care for religion, not out of a special evaluation accessible through the religious life, but out of disregard, out of complacency towards religious life linked to the content I presented in my previous lecture, the day before yesterday. This progression is right for the separation of religious life from the other spheres, from the formation of the economic life and from the formation of political life. Just as necessary as the separation of the lower and higher educational systems are, so too is the spiritual life actually from the two other members. A really healthy social organism can only develop when within these entities they ensure equality of all people before the law, when only out of these entities it is ensured that free human individualities develop schools, religious and spiritual life, when it is ensured that life is developed in freedom and no claim is made according to economic or state rules placed on school, educational and spiritual life.

That sounds radical today. Such radicalism must be expressed as soon as it is detected. Spiritual life, inclusive of education, inclusive of jurisdiction in public and criminal matters, actually underlies the complete freedom flowing out of single individuals which both the other members of the social organism can have no influence upon in its configuration, upon its forms.

Yesterday I only offered a sketch towards the direction thinking can move in the search for solutions of the social question, attempts at solutions based on necessities of life, not based on abstract demands of a single party, of a single class, but based on the powers actually developing in modern people.

I wish to say I can understand every objection raised but ask you to wait with objections until my sketch has been carried to completion in my coming lectures. Particularly today I can understand objections being raised as I'm just trying to characterise; the evidence of the World Trade Organization is not yet clear. I must say I can understand every objection coming out of various experiences which I want to represent here with ideas which I believe I can recognise in frequently misjudged spiritual science as the actual foundations of life which I have related to these things.

Behind us lie a time containing the most terrible human catastrophe. Within the life we had to lead within this catastrophic time, we have not had the human heart in the right place if our vision did not contain the power and ability to say: ‘Where can we find help out of this terrible chaos into which we have been driven?’—I told you the day before yesterday I would speak about the particular relationships of these wars to their causes and their unfolding in relation to the social question in both my following lectures. Today I would like to say it is clear to me, as we are going to be within these events for a long time to come, events now having entered a crisis which some short-sighted thinkers believe are soon at an end, that out of these things, out of chaos, out of the terrible catastrophe in some or other area of the civilized world it is possible to find the correct thoughts, the correct picture of more truthful, more realistic impulses for the human social organism. Towards various personalities who have been active and advisory during the last years within these terrible events, I have proposed what is also the vein of my various presentations here: I have tried to make it clear to these personalities who are involved, how different events would have been if from an authoritative place in the world it was said: ‘We want to head towards a healthy social goal.’—The entire interrelationship of states would have been different if, instead of mere laws and state programs being introduced, a comprehensive program for people in the way indicated here, had been introduced.

One can say that these things have been understood in a certain theoretical way. The content of my lectures has appeared to some in a really sympathetic way. The bridge which needs to be established between understanding such content and the will to actually do something to make it a reality in actual life, each in its own place, this bridge is quite another matter. This would mostly have an uncomfortable effect. For this reason, they compose themselves and say: ‘It all sounds a bit like a dream to me, quite impractical.’—They remain calm only because they don't have the will forces to really involve themselves with the course of events. Not a revolutionary course of events is meant here, not something which should happen from one day to the next, but a direction in which all single measures of public and private life should be brought for healing, to form a healthy social organism. The content of my lecture the day before yesterday, I have brought in another form to some people on whom one wanted to depend during these difficult times, addressed in the following way: Today, I would say for example, we are in the most terrible time of the war. Expressing the social necessity in this, the most terrible time of The War, it would be to say: People who are committed to this or that state into giving humanity a worthy self-realization which will become a reality for humanity, will enable this terrible course of events to take on quite a different, healing direction than merely the sword, the cannons and such like, or offer nothing through existing regional politics. I say they have the choice to either acknowledge what is offered here out of the developmental conditions and developmental forces within humanity, or to stand alone.

Today we stand, because during the last decade humanity has somehow missed acknowledging the essence of these things, today we stand in front of the most terrible catastrophe which has broken out like a plague, an illness attacking an organism which has failed to live according to its natural laws. This war catastrophe should now clearly reveal what is necessary for the healing of the social organism of humanity. This indication could have been perceived before the war but then it was not so clear, not even recognised. To some I have said: You have been given these indications regarding human evolution in the social sphere which will be brought into a reality in the next twenty to thirty years in the civilized world. I'm not talking about a program or ideal but it is the result of observation of those who want to make a reality of the seed towards an inclination already in humanity today, towards the next ten, twenty or thirty years. You have only to choose, I say, either to work through to its realization with reason, or to face revolutions of social cataclysms, terrible social upheavals. No third choice is possible. The war will probably be the time—so I say to some—where reason is acceptable. After that it could be too late. It is not a program which can be implemented or left undone, but involves recognising something which needs implementation through people, because in it lie their necessary historical growth forces for the future.

Another particular obstacle towards understanding is some or other belief that these things only relate to an inner structure of some state or some human territory. No, such social thoughts are at the same time the basis for the real necessary transformation of outer politics of states under one another. Just like the human organism turns each of its particular organs to the outside world, so also can a state only accomplish it when—if I might use this whole expression—such a social organism can shift its three members into outer activity. Relationships between one individual state and another appear quite different when a centralized government and administrations no longer remain in connection with one another but when one socially educated representative with a spiritual life relate to another representative with a spiritual life in another social state; whether it be an economic or a political representative, corresponding to the representative in the other state. When there is an intermixing, a confused mess due to the three members working outwardly in such a way to create an ensuing conflict at its boundary through the chaos of this intermixing of the three members, then, when across the boundary an independent state with threefold representatives working independently, the process of one member in the international relationship will not only be disrupted by the other, but by contrast, will balance out and be corrected.

This is what I wanted to sketch for you today to support the idea that it doesn't merely involve an assertion of inner social structure of one state but involves the international and social life of humanity. I have already tried to make all these things clear while we are in the middle of these horrific catastrophic events. At the moment, terrible misfortune has broken out over many people in central and eastern Europe, terrible misfortune for every individual, for every perceptive person the rest of the world indicates threatening misfortune. This must take place in relation to the real understanding of humanity for their tasks in the present and future: whoever wants to bring about a healing of life out of the actual evolutionary elements in humanity must take this up, not as an impractical ideal but as an actual practical application in life.

The obvious form modern life has taken on through technology and capitalism has to stand in opposition to the most inner human initiative forms of the spiritual, independent spiritual culture and independent state culture, which bring about in actual fact an equality between one person to another and which also, as we will soon see, could regulate labour and wage relations in a desirable way for the Proletariat.

The question about the form or human labour, about the liberation of labour from goods will only become detachable when threefoldness enters the social organism. The desire of the modern socialist is certainly legitimate as a desire; what they consider a remedy would work the least effectively as a remedy when it transforms outer reality in the way they want it to be.

This I need to stress yet again: I am not trying to come from some one-sided class or party position but from the side of the observation of human developmental forces in order to speak about what some call social integration and others call the healing of social life and others the reawakening of a healthy political sense, and so on.

What we are dealing with here is not some random program but the deepest true impulses coming to the fore in the next decades in humanity's evolution, it is actually the very foundation of the entire meaning and intention which I want to make into a reality with these lectures; it doesn't relate to the opinion of a person from this standpoint, but it relates to the expression of the deepest wishes in mankind for the next decades. This I would like to found and implement and prove in my lectures during the week ahead.

Counterstatement in: Threefolding of the Social Organism, vol. 1, no. 27

A large part of the German press is reporting that Dr. Rudolf Steiner and the Federation for Threefolding are associated with Bolshevism and Communism. At the same time, “he is ascertaining the names of all officers allegedly active in a reactionary sense and collecting material against them regarding actions that violate international law on the basis of witness statements, which is then to be sent to the Entente for extradition.”

In response to this, we note that this message contains a slanderous untruth in every sentence and that the accusation of association with Bolshevism is a real absurdity that is easily recognized by anyone who is impartial as a transparent machination. The alleged letter from Dr. Steiner or the Bund is also included as evidence.

The Federation was brought into being in April 1919 in response to Dr. Rudolf Steiner's public appeal 'To the German People and to the Cultural World'. Since its inception, it has been concerned exclusively with the public dissemination of the ideas set forth in Rudolf Steiner's fundamental book “The Core Points of the Social Question”, and works without the support of any party, solely in the interests of healthy social development.

Stuttgart, January 6, 1920. Dr. Rudolf Steiner. Federation for the Threefold Social Organism. Prof. Dr. v. Blume, Kühn, Leinhas, Kommerzien-Rat Molt, Dr. Unger.

Today I should like to introduce as a sort of parenthesis a deeper, Spiritual-Scientific consideration of the subject of our preceding lecture, the threefolding of the social organism. Naturally much of the thought underlying what I want to say, you will yourselves discover gradually from the general world-conception of Spiritual Science. One can hardly present the whole foundation of the Threefold Commonwealth in each single lecture. But today, in order to obtain a deeper view, will consider from the inside, as it were, that which confronts us outwardly as the necessity of threefolding the social organism.

It is really not difficult for one who has lived to some extent with spiritual-scientific conceptions to call up in himself a feeling for the profound differences between those three spheres of life into which it is our intention that the social organism should be divided. As soon as one realizes that the Threefold Commonwealth is something to be taken very seriously, there develops in one's feelings the possibility of strongly differentiating among the three spheres. They are already fairly well known to you. First, that sphere of life which we call the spiritual life, in so far as it manifests itself or has form in what we call the physical world—thus, the entire field of the so-called (I must use a paradox) physical-spiritual life. You know of course what we have to understand by that. It embraces everything that is connected with men's individual faculties and talents. As we shall see directly the spiritual life is much more comprehensive for us than for a person of materialistic mind. We think of the spiritual life as much more material than the materialistic person does, in so far as we speak of the physical-spiritual life. That fact is ingrained already in my lectures. One can only understand the spiritual life if one starts with the realization that all material life is really concretely saturated by the spiritual: so that for us there is never a purely material something; that which reveals itself through the medium of matter is always according to its inner being also—I say also—a spiritual something. Art, science, conceptions of right, the ethical impulses of mankind—all these things, roughly speaking, come within the boundaries or the spiritual life. Above all, It includes everything that belongs to the cultivation of individual talents, thus the whole field of education and individual training.

Next, it is important to distinguish something which is connected in a certain way with the physical-spiritual life but which nevertheless is fundamentally different. That is, everything that one can described as rights-life, political life, state life. Naturally one must employ all one's powers of perception hare to see the important distinction, otherwise one will make the mistake of thinking that the rights-life is practically the same as the sense of right. But we who are accustomed, to careful discrimination must distinguish between phases of ideas of right, between—if I may so express myself—the being-inspired with ideas of right, and right as it is applied in the outer world. We will speak more fully about all these things directly.

The third sphere is the one you can most easily distinguish from the other two, the economic life.

Now, as we have said, man stands in an entirely different relation to each one of these three spheres of life. If you try with a healthy feeling to understand what the physical-spiritual life is, you will feel (try to lead your soul-faculties of perception in the direction I have indicated) that anything rooted in any degree in man's individual talents, individual faculties, leads into the innermost part of human nature, springs from the very depths of human nature. Now if one proceeds quite scientifically in the work of perceiving, then one experiences everything that comes to expression in art and science, in the impulses of education, as a psychic-spiritual something that lives and works in us, when we surrender to its activity, in such a way that we can only experience it properly if we withdraw somewhat from the outer world. Certainly we must give expression to it in the outer world; but that is different from experiencing it inwardly: we cannot as men get a true conception of that something that manifests itself in art and science, in educational impulses, we cannot grasp it inwardly, unless we are able to withdraw a little from life. One does not need, of course, to withdraw to a hermit's cell: One can be taking a walk, as far as that matters; but one must withdraw into one's self, into one's soul-life, one must live in oneself. That fact becomes apparent to the human soul as soon as it cultivates the most simple feeling for the physical- spiritual Spiritual Science must express it in these words: the physical-spiritual life is lived in such a way by our human soul that in unfolding it we do not entirely depend upon our body. In this respect, Spiritual Science—as you can gather from everything that Spiritual Science has already disclosed—takes the very opposite stand to the materialistic analysis of the human being, which nurses the delusion that when one creates within oneself something that belongs to the physical-spiritual life, one accomplishes this creation entirely through the instrument of the brain, the nervous system, etc.. We know that is not true. We know that an independent inner life must be present in man in order that manifestations of this physical-spiritual life may be possible. Something is present in man in this physical-spiritual life without there being any corresponding physical manifestation in the physical body; something transpires solely within the spiritual-psychic being of man.

It is different when we manifest those life impulses which we desire to place on a democratic basis in our Threefold Commonwealth, to which every man rives expression in relation to all other men. They appear when men allow themselves to be instruments of their bodily nature, in order to unite with each other. Not theoretical ideas of right, but impulses of right for life; not inner ethical ideas, but ethical impulses for life, that are active among men, and that are manifested in the way men meet one another, work with one another, in the way men exchange their experiences with one another. Those Rights-impulses are only present when men do business with one another, when men turn their bodily outer nature to one another, when they communicate with one another, see and live with one another in mutual experiences—in short, they can only be cultivated amid the vicissitudes of human intercourse. With respect to everything that is cultivated on the basis of our individual talents, that is, with respect to what in the sense of the above is independent of our body, we live as individual men, each one a separate personality, an entity. Except for slight distinctions that arise through differences in race and people, but which are a small matter as compared with the differences in men caused by individual talents and abilities (if one has any perceptive organ one must know that)—with that exception, we are equal as men with respect to our outer physical humanness, through which we meet men as men; through which we express ethical impulses, impulses of right. We are equal here as men in the physical world precisely through the sameness of our human body, simply through the fact that we all have a human face. This fact makes us develop for ourselves as outer physical man impulses of right, ethical impulses, on a democratic basis,—it makes us equal in this sphere. We are different one another in our individual talents, which belong to our inner nature.

With respect to the third, the economic sphere: truly one does not need to adopt a false asceticism (it is certainly contrary to the prevailing tendency of our day, that is, in the West) in order to perceive how the economic life allows men to be submerged, as it were, here in the physical world, in a stream of life in which to a certain degree they are lost as men. Do you not feel, my dear friends, that in economic life you are immersed in something that does not allow you to be so fully man as in the rights- or state-life? And it is so in still greater contrast to the life that flows out of your individual talents, out of the individual talents of all mankind. Without, as I said, adopting a false ascetic attitude, one feels with respect to the economic life that we cease to be complete men when we engage in economic activity. We are obliged to pay tribute to that part of us which is sub-human when we concern ourselves with economic life. (We have the same processes of economic life, that is, production, circulation, and consumption of commodities in spiritual production that grows out of economic life and has the same character as the circulation of commodities—and we have all of that life because, so to say, we are men and not animals. When its economic aspect comes into consideration, spiritual production has the same character as any economic activity concerned with material goods. The material goods are necessary to satisfy our bodily needs; also, spiritual,activity within the economic life—dentistry, for instance, and the like—in the end leads to this, that through an exchange of commodities the dentist, etc., is able to live physically within the economic life.) At all events, economic life is always connected with physical life, and that brings us into a certain relation with animal life, even though it is on the human plane. It submerges us in experiences which we have instinctively together with the animals. There you have as a beginning a simple healthy feeling for the different relations an individual man has to these three spheres of life.

Now let us approach the subject in a more deeply spiritual-scientific way. Spiritual Science must first of all observe the periods of human life, the evolution of human life between birth, or conception, and death. Whoever allows himself the possibility of perceiving the course of human life will be strongly impressed by the way in which everything that partakes of the nature of a man's individual faculties is unmistakably announced during the early days of childhood. To one who has a spiritual eye for it and who acknowledges his life experience, the special form of the child soul is easily perceptible. In what develops during the first three life-periods, from the 1st to the 7th year, the 7th to the 14th, and the 14th to the 21st year, there lies the prophecy as from an inner elementary force, of the man's future individual gifts. And not only what we are accustomed to think of as a man's individual gifts, but connected with that, whether he will be able to do much or little muscular work. That is where we are obliged to extend the spiritual further into the material than materialistic thinkers do. Through spiritual vision we see a strong connection between the nature of a man's muscular system and his individual talents. For one who can observe the human being, everything is connected with the development of the human head. Even a man's outer form, whether he has strong less or weak legs, whether he can run much: all that is seen by one who has developed his spiritual vision, from the man's head, precisely from his head. Whether a man is skillful or clumsy, one sees from his head. These so-called physical abilities of man, which are closely connected with his fitness for outer physical , manual work, are connected with the form or his head. Now you know what I have often told you about the shape of the head, basing my remarks on the most varied fundamental facts: everything that comes into shape in the human head, that gives the human head its conformation, its form, points to something before birth, to that which man brings through birth into physical life from out of the spiritual worlds—from the spiritual world itself or from previous incarnations on the earth. And so, when one sees the connection between all human individual talents, either spiritual or manual, and the formation of the human head: then one is led further in one's seeing, and one is able to trace back everything that comes from man's individual talents to his life before birth. That, you see, is what gives the spiritual-scientist such important enlightenment as to physical-spiritual life is. Physical-spiritual life, my dear friends, is here in the physical world because we as men bring something with us at birth. Physical-spiritual life, in the sense in which I have spoken of it today, does not arise out or this physical world: all of it arises out of impulses which we bring from the spiritual world through birth into physical existence. Inasmuch as we bring into physical existence echoes of a supersense existence, we create in human society here in the physical world that which comprises the physical-spiritual life. There would be no art, no science—at the most, in science, a recording of experiments—there would be no impulse for education, no education of children at all, if we did not bring impulses through birth into physical life out of our life previous to birth. That, then, is one thing.

Now let take everything in my book Theosophy, or in Occult Science, that describes the supersense world. Take especially what is said in those books about the relation that exists between human souls when they are disembodied, when they are living between death and a new birth. You know that we have to speak of quite other relations existing between souls there than those which exist here in tae physical world. You remember how I described what is experienced there from soul to soul as being reflected here in shadowy images. You remember the description in Theosophy of life in the soul-world: when I wanted to describe the disembodied life of the supersensible world between death and a new birth I had to speak of certain reciprocal influences, of soul forces and astral forces, that do not exist in the physical world. There, souls have an inner relation to one another, a relation of soul to soul which is called out by the inner force of the soul itself. Now if one is thoroughly imbued with the idea of what relation exists in the supersensible world between souls, if one fixes one's vision upon the relation quite objectively, then one makes a remarkable discovery if one draws a comparison to it in the right way. You know it depends very much on the tendency to such inner activity as this, whether one is led to knowledge of the supersense world, or even to knowledge of the connections between the supersensible world and the sense world. If one turns directly to the Rights-, State-, or political life, one finds that there is no greater contrast to the particular form of supersense life than the political or Rights-life here on the physical plane. They are the two great opposites, my dear friends, that one experiences when one ready learns to know the supersense life. Supersense life has nothing at all that can be regulated bylaws of right or outer ethical impulses; there, everything is regulated through inner soul impulses. It is just the opposite here in the physical world where everywhere state-life has to be established because through birth into the physical world we lose those deep impulses that are alive in the soul in the supersense world and that make the relations there between souls. Here, we make laws of right that will create what must be created: relations of Right—because man has lost that which in the supersense world makes the relation between souls. Those are the two opposite poles: supersense relation of soul to soul, and state-relation here on the physical plane.

In the physical-spiritual cultural life we carry from man to man something that stays with us after birth as a reflection from the supersense world. We spread, as it were, a lustre over life here by letting in the light from the supersense world, and seeking to reflect it here in art, science, and education. It is quite different with the Rights life: we have to establish that on the physical earth as a substitute for what we lose of supersense relations when we enter through birth into physical existence. That gives you an idea, too, of what certain religious documents mean (and you know how far religious documents are always penetrated by this or that absolute truth) when they speak of the authorized “Kingdom of this world”. They mean by that, that the state should not presume to any right to control that which man brings with him as a reflection of the supersense world when he comes through birth into the physical world. It should confine itself to ruling the kingdom of Rights, which is the life we need here because by our physical birth we have lost the impulses of the spiritual world. The task of the state life is to create what is necessary for human intercourse in the physical world. It has meaning only for our life between birth and death.

Let us look at the third, the economic life. Something must be said about it that is quite paradoxical: expressing it crudely, we are submerged in a sub-humanness, in engaging in an economic life. At the same time, however, something is going on in our soul when we concern ourselves with the subhuman. And that, you can experience. Think how very actively you must struggle within yourselves when you give yourselves up to spiritual culture; and on the other hand, how thoughtless men can be in purely economic life, often following mere impulses and instincts. Economic activity proceeds, on the whole, without much truly active inner thought. And in that case, we sink into a subhumanness. Our soul stays hidden in the background. Spiritual Science would say that our body is more exerted when we are engaged in a material activity than one ordinarily believes. Consider the end members of the economic process, eating and drinking: we can realize that there is not a complete balance there between bodily and spiritual activity, that the body outweighs the spiritual-psychic in activity. But then this spiritual-psychic carries on a strong unconscious activity. And within this unconscious activity a seed is hidden. We carry this seed through the gate of death. The soul can rest, as it were, when we are busy with economic life; but in what appears to outer consciousness as rest, a seed is developing which we carry through the gate of death. And if we cultivate brotherliness in economic life, as I always describe it, then we carry a good seed through the gate of death—precisely by virtue of what we cultivate in our relations with men in the economic life. It may seem materialistic to you when I say: Precisely in the brotherliness of economic life man is planting the seed in his soul for his life after death; in his spiritual culture, he is spending his inheritance from his life before birth. It may appear materialistic to you, but it is true, simply true to the spiritual-scientific investigator. However materialistic this may seem to you it is true when I say: when you are submerged in animalness take care of your humanness, for you are planting supersensible seeds for time after death.

Man is a threefold being. He has in the first place an inheritance from time before birth; then, he evolves something here that has value only for the time between birth and death; finally, he develops here in the physical world something by which he links his physical life here with lire after death. That which is manifested here as the lustre of life and the promise and interest of life, in the physical-spiritual culture, is an inheritance from the spiritual world that we bring with us into this physical world. In possessing this spiritual wealth we show ourselves as belonging to the spiritual world; we bring into the physical world a reflection of the supersense world through which we passed before our conception and birth.

You see, abstract science, even abstract philosophy, talks—naturally—always in abstractions. They talk about proving the eternity of substance, how the human substance present at birth remains and then lasts on through death. Such proofs can never be gained out of mere thinking. The philosophers have always sought them, but no proof has ever held against inner logical knowing, because the thing simply is not so. Something much more spiritual is connected with immortality. Nothing at all material, much less anything substantial, is present in any such way. What is present after death is consciousness: consciousness that looks back into this world. That is what we have to consider when we are considering immortality. We must be much less materialistic than the abstract philosophers themselves when we talk of these higher things. It is like this: we use up what I have characterized as a reflection of the supersense world , which we reveal as the ornament, the polished surface of life here—we use that up, and must make here, during our life, a new link for the chain of our eternal existence, to carry through death. Anyone who only thinks of what goes forward in this life, must conclude, if he is consistent, that the thread wears out; only when he knows that he makes here a new part of the chain that goes out beyond death, only then has he come to immortality.

And so man is this threefold being. He cultivates talents in himself that bring a reflection of the supersense world into this life. He develops a life that forms the bridge between life before death and life after death, that expresses itself in all that which has its roots only in the time between birth and death, the outward Rights, or State-impulses, etc. And in that he is submerged in economic life and is able to plant something moral in this economic life—brotherliness—he develops the seed for his life after death. That is the threefold man.

Now think of this threefold man in such a phase of evolution ever since the 15th century that he must now cultivate consciously everything that formerly was instinctive. For that reason it is necessary today that his outer social life should afford him the opportunity of standing with his threefold human nature in a threefold organism. We unite in ourselves three very distinct members of one being, the pre-birthly, the one that is active on the earth, and the after-death member; therefore, we can only stand in the social organism properly in three parts. Otherwise we come as conscious men into disharmony with the rest of the world; and we will come into more and more disharmony unless we will consider shaping this world that lies around us into a threefold social organism.

There, you see, you have the question from the inside. I am trying to show how spiritual-scientific research points out the way to the threefold social organism: how it must be wrested out of human nature itself.

Many persons nave thoughts about what I have evolved. But in open lectures and also on other occasions I have always warned you that these thoughts to which I give expression should not be confused with the thoughts of the elder Schäffle in his book On the Structure of the Social Organism, or with the dilettantism of Merey's most recent book Concerning World-mutations, and similar works. The spiritual scientist cannot be concerned with mere play of analogy, such as these books offer; it is at most unfruitful. What I should like when speaking about the social organism is that men should train their thinking.

The general training of thought today is not even adequate for natural science to be able to grasp facts that I investigated at 35, and that I presented in my book Riddles of the Soul, showing that a human being consists of three members: nerve-sense-life, rhythmic life, and metabolic life. The nerve-sense-life can also be called the head life; the rhythmic life can be called the breathing life, or blood life; and the metabolic life includes all the rest of the organism as a kind of structure. Just as this human organism consists of three members, each centred in itself, so in the social organism each of the three members works for the whole because of the very fact that it is centred in itself. The physiology and biology of today believe that man is a centralized, unified being. That is not true. Even in regard to his communication with the outer world man is a threefold being: the head life is in independent connection with the outer world through the senses; the breathing life is connected with the outer world through the air; the metabolic life is in connection with the outer world through independent outlets. The social organism also must be threefold, with each part centred in itself. Just as the head cannot breathe but nevertheless receives what is communicated by the breathing through the rhythmic system, so the social organism should not itself develop a Rights-life, but should receive bights from its State-member.
However, I said that one must not mistake what is presented here for a mere play of analogy, such as arises when one works from all kinds of hypotheses. Spiritual Science is real investigation, and does not stop short at appearances. People believe that a Spiritual Scientist just thinks something out. Before one is a real spiritual investigator one has to learn to observe the spiritual world. One has to give up thinking; that has value only for the physical world. Naturally one does not give it up for the whole of life, only for spiritual research.

I have told you one usually comes to things upside down if one sets out to describe the spiritual world by using analogies from the sense world. Spiritual research shows, for instance, that the earth is really an organism; that what geology and mineralogy find is only a bone system; that the earth is living, it sleeps and wakes like man. But one cannot go farther in the analogy. If ordinarily you ask a man: When is the earth awake and when is it asleep? he will undoubtedly answer: The earth is awake in summer and asleep in winter. And that is the opposite of what is actually the truth. The truth is, the earth is asleep in summer and awake in winter. Naturally one only finds that out if one actually investigates in the spiritual world. That is the puzzle that makes spiritual research so liable to error, the fact that when one goes with some inquiry from the physical into the spiritual world one gets perhaps the very opposite of the physical fact, or perhaps quarter-truths. One has to investigate every single case.

So it is also with the surface analogy that people draw between the three members or the human, and the three members of the social, organism. that will a man say, using this analogy? He has to say: On the outside is a spiritual life, art, science. He will draw a parallel between that and the human head system, the nerve-sense-life. How could he do otherwise? Then, when he establishes that, he will compare the metabolic life , to which I have referred in my Riddles of the Soul as the most material, with economic life. Nothing could be more upside down than that. And nothing whatever is accomplished by looking at it in that way. One must give up toying with analogies if one wants to reach the truth. People outside of Spiritual Science believe that these ideas have been obtained by a thought game of analogies. That is the greatest illusion. It is to no purpose to parallel outer physical-spiritual life with the head system. It is to no purpose to relate economic life to the metabolic system. All that is of no avail if one wants to fathom the question.

When one makes a real investigation one gets a very paradoxical result. Comparing the social organism to the human organism one comes to the truth only if one stands upside down in the social organism. One must compare economic life with the nerve-sense-life, state-life with the rhythmic system,and physical-spiritual life with the metabolic system for the laws obtaining in them are similar. That which is present in economic life as natural conditions is of exactly the same significance for the social organism as are for man the individual talents that ne brings with him at birth. As man in his individual life is dependent upon what he brings into life with him, so the economic organism is dependent upon what Nature bequeaths it in the way of existing conditions. The preliminary natural conditions of economic life—land, etc.,—are the same as the individual talents that man brings into individual life. How much coal, now much metal is in the earth, whether land is fertile or not, are as it were the talents of the social organism. And as man's metabolic system is related to the human organism and its functions, human spiritual production is related to the social organism. The social organism eats and drinks what we give it in the form of art, science, technical ideas, etc. That is its nourishment. That is its metabolism. A country that has unfavorable natural conditions for its economic life is like a man who is poorly gifted. And a country in which the people produce nothing in the way of art, science, or technical ideas, is like a man who must go hungry because he has nothing to eat. That is the reality, the truth! The social organism is our angry spiritual child. And the natural conditions of the social organism are its capacities, its talents. A comparison of the spiritual life with the human head system has meaning perhaps for one who is playing with analogies; out one reaches the correct and helpful truth only if one knows that the laws stand as I have presented them. One can know that these are the laws of human metabolism; but one must direct the same thinking to them as one directs to the social organism and then one easily gets a larger result. To tamper with spiritual things without such guiding threads is extraordinarily difficult and wearisome. Because of the fact that today analogies are often merely toyed with, on account of which there is a prejudice against this drawing of parallels between the social and the human organism, I have only just touched upon it in my book, but I tried at least to indicate it because it can be a great help to those who think healthily about it.

And so you see that today men are in a peculiar position. Natural science which has made this great progress, which has so influenced men's minds that at bottom-even though it is not conscious of social thinking orientates itself in the direction of natural science,—this Natural Science is not capable of analyzing man correctly. For instance; it says the greatest nonsense about feeling being transmitted through the nervous system. That is pure nonsense. Feeling is transmitted directly through the breathing system, the rhythmic system, and thought through the nerve-sense-system. And the will is made possible through the metabolic system, not through the nervous system in any elementary way. The thought or willing is transmitted through the nervous system. Only when you have as men a real consciousness or willing does the nervous system take any part. When you think along with your willing then the nervous system is concerned in it. It is because this is not known that the physiology and anatomy of today have made that frightful error of distinguishing between sensory nerves and motor nerves. There is no greater falsity than this differentiation of sensory and motor nerves in the human body. The anatomists are always in a dilemma when they get to their chanter on nerves and they don't get out of it. They are in a frightful dilemma because there is no difference anatomically between these two kinds of nerves. It is pure speculation. And everything that is deduced by examining the nerves is absolutely without support. The reason that the motor nerves are not distinguishable from the sensory nerves is that there aren't any motor nerves there. The muscles are set in motion by the metabolic system. And as you perceive the outer world through the senses with the so-called sensory nerves, with other nerves you perceive your own movements, your muscular movements. The Physiology of today is wrong when it calls them motor nerves. Frightful mistakes such as this exist in science, and corrupt what goes into the popular consciousness—and they have a much more, corrupt influence than one would ordinarily think.

Thus Natural Science is not so far advanced as to perceive this threefold man. We can wait for theoretical views of Natural Science to become popular; a year sooner or later will not affect men's happiness. But the thinking does not exist for comprehending this threefold man. The same quality of thinking must however exist to comprehend the threefold nature of the social organism. And there the thing is serious. We are today at the point of time when it must be comprehended. Therefore a change of thought, a new method of thinking, is essential not only for the simple man, but, truly, most of all for the learned man. Simple men at least know nothing about all those things that have been advanced in natural science in order unconsciously to conceal man's threefold nature. But the learned men are stuck full of all those concepts that today make this threefolding seem like nonsense. To the physiologist of today it is pure folderol. If one tells him that there are no motor nerves and that feelings are not transmitted in the same way as thoughts—through the nervous system—but only the thought connected with a feeling, in other words the consciousness of it—not the feeling as such as he will object strenuously. His objections are well known. Men can naturally say: Now look, you perceive music; you perceive that through your senses. No, experience of music is much more complicated than that. It is like this: The breathing rhythm meets with the sense perception in our brain, and in the contact of the breathing rhythm with the outer sense perception arises the musical-aesthetic experience. Even there, the fundamental thing is in the rhythmic system. And what brings this fundamental thing to consciousness is in the nervous system.

However, this all shows you, my dear friends, that in regard to many things we are living in a time of transitions. Every period is indeed a transition from the past to the future. That is so if one speaks abstractly and one can see that every period is more or less a time of transition. I want rather to say in what particular respect our time is a transition. it is a time of very important inner transition, in regard to important inner human impulses. To men capable of perception this shows itself clearly in a certain way. Men today are not very apt to consider incidental symptoms with sufficient earnestness.

I want to tell you of a purely spiritual-scientific perception. Naturally I can as little prove this perception to you as the man who has seen a wallfish can prove to you that it exists. He can only tell you about it. Then one has developed one's power of spiritual vision so far as to be able to have communication with human souls that are evolving between death and a new birth, then one makes indeed very surprising discoveries. This communication can only be had in thought; and when we think here in the physical body some element of speech is always present in our thoughts. Something of speech always vibrates with the thoughts. We think in words. I had the experience once of declaring energetically: “I am fully conscious of the fact that I can think without words resounding simultaneously”, and of having Hartmann answer: “That is nonsense! That is not possible; man cannot think unless he thinks in words”. Thus there are very spiritual philosophers who do not believe that one can think without an inner forming of words. One can. But in ordinary everyday thinking man thinks in words, especially when he would develop some spiritual intercourse with the dead. For you know intercourse with the dead cannot be carried on in abstractions—any more than we can think in blue. It has to be concrete, this intercourse with the dead. That is why I have said: definite pictures that are formed very concretely reach the dead, but not abstract thoughts. Because this is so we are especially apt to let speech sound innerly in our thought communication with the dead. Then we make the most peculiar discovery ( you may believe it or not, but it is a fact) that, for instance, the dead do not hear substantives. Substantives are like holes in our sentences when we communicate with the dead.

Adjectives are better, but still very weak; but verbs, words of activity, is what their understanding grasps. One learns that slowly at first. One cannot think why so much of the communication goes badly; and one gradually realizes that it is the nouns. One cannot use many nouns. And you see one comes to realize this: that in using words of activity, verbs, one cannot help but be within the words oneself. There is something personal in verbs—one lives in the activity; while a noun always becomes something quite abstract.

Therein lies the basis of the symptom of which I wanted to speak. You see that speech is something that unites us with the super-sense world only in a very limited measure; and the fact that the whole tendency of speech is more and more toward substantives brings about the possibility of our separating ourselves from the spiritual world. The more we think in substantives the more we break our connection with the spiritual world. I only wanted this fact to indicate to you that speech has a great significance for our supersense life, a fundamental significance. But speech evolves within human evolution itself. And the characteristic of the evolution of speech is that it brings men more and more to abstractions, that it takes them farther and farther away from living inner thought-life. You can become aware of this outwardly by asking yourselves, How are the Western languages formed as compared to the Eastern? Take the language that outwardly on the physical plane has progressed the furthest, the English language: it almost spends itself in words, it has least thought content. That is the progress of speech from East to West. That is an important distinction to make in connection with social folk-life.

Now there is a man of our time who has developed great acuteness in his observation of human speech. This man is so clever that already he is stupid again. There is, in other words, a degree of cleverness where one begins again to be a bit stupid in the face of colossal cleverness. It is true. One may have a great respect for this cleverness but one should not value it too highly in face of the corresponding truth. This man is Fritz Mauthner, who has out-Kanted Kant in his Critique of Speech, and also in his Dictionary: observations, however, made undeniably out of the impulses of the time. Mauthner has reached something quite definite that must especially strike the spiritual-scientist: it is this, that in reality human inner soul-activity has, as it were, three stages. The first is ordinary sense perception as it is reflected in art. Mauthner believes in this as something that is real, something that is a reality. Now through sense perception one can arouse inner experiences, that lead over into the supersensible; Fritz Mauthner allows such inner experience. He calls it “Mystic experience,” “religious experience.” Beautiful; but he says:•;When man has this mystic experience he can only be dreaming. One is permitted to dream, out one is outside of reality them. Mauthner altogether doubts the possibility or reaching reality then; the only reality to him is sense perception—at most, art can reach it. As soon as one gets so far away from sense perception as to be experiencing something in mystic religious life, then one is merely dreaming about reality; one has already let reality go by. And then one can go still further, according to Mauthner.

He comes to all these convictions through a consideration of speech. He makes an analysis, a criticism of speech, especially in his philosophical Dictionary. It makes terrible reading. I have already on another occasion drawn your attention to the torture one undergoes reading these articles—and they go all the way from A to Z. One begins to read one or another of the articles; something is said. Then another sentence in which what has just been said is just a little bit qualified. Then a third sentence, and that which was just qualified is again qualified, so that one comes back a little to the first sentence again. One hedges around and around and around, and in the end—one has got nothing, even though one has read the whole article to the end. The article entitled “Christianity” is awful. A frightful torture. But it is proper, in Mauthner's sense, that it should be so. Mauthner thinks that, and he really condemns his reader to the torture; he has gone through it himself. He does not believe that man is capable, when he wants to know something, of getting anything else than just such hedging. He is an absolute skeptic. He finds nowhere in speech any other content than the speech itself. It has only an incidental value to him.

And so to him, inner mystic experience is only a dream. As soon as one gets out of speech one is inwardly dreaming. But according to Mauthner there is a third stage: one can believe that one is thinking but one is only speaking inwardly. Whether one uses this or that language, the language, the words, originated once in outer sense things. I have spoken to you before of the various opinions of learned men of how speech originated. You know that their opinions can be divided into two main classes: the Bimbam theory and the Wan-wan theory (those are the technical terms). Now Mauthner finds that everything has evolved from outer sense perception; real thoughts do not exist for man. In science he strives for real thoughts, when ne reaches the third stage. But he does not succeed there in knowing anything real. In mysticism he is still dreaming; when he in search of thought reality, for instance to natural laws, then ne is no longer dreaming, then he is fast asleep. Therefore for Mauthner all science is Docta ignorantia (learned ignorance). Those are his three stages.

Now my dear friends, as I told you, one can have a certain respect for such observation for it is not altogether incorrect—that, is, not incorrect for today. Something to which mankind tends today has been felt correctly by Mauthner. It is this: when the man of today wants to come to mysticism it is something quite different than with men formerly. The man of earlier times was still inwardly pound up with reality. The man of today has not that possibility; as a mystic he really is dreaming. And the natural laws that man finds today—well, one cannot quite endorse such crude points of view as those of certain theorizers who have analyzed the matter similarly to Mauthner, as for example the French thinker Boutroux, or Ernst Mach. But nevertheless one must say: if one sounds the content of the so-called natural laws today there are fundamentally no thoughts there; one only believes they ate thoughts; they are only combinations of facts. They are really only records. These things have been noticed by individuals, Mach, for example. Mauthner has observed thoroughly—therefore he speaks of Docta ignorantia, of a learned unknowing, of an ignorant learnedness. Yes, as human evolution is today, that is quite true. Today, in mysticism and in science alike, man has become sterile. Only, in his pride, he is not yet aware of it as having any significance. But that is not generally characteristic of humanity. Mauthner and the others believe that it is, because in reality they do not consider human evolution; they think: as the soul is today, so it was always. But really, it is only a characteristic of the present time. Their observation only has significance for the soul life of today; we do come to dreaming and to learned ignorance today, when we want to rise in these stages.,

But one must not conclude that human nature is such that it is obliged to sink either into mystic dreaming or into learned ignorance (as those do who think as Mauthner does). One must come to this conclusion: what the ancients reached in old ways must therefore be found now in new ways. That means, we must seek a new mysticism, we must not get into old mysticism. This new mysticism is sought in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. must rise to this new Imagination, to a new Inspiration, but we must rise of new methods. I have elaborated that in my book "Riddles of Humanity". Because we dream in mysticism and sleep in science the necessity is before us today of waking up. Therefore I have described the phenomenon of present day knowledge in this book as an "awakening". We must put in the place of mystic dreams a wide-awake Imagination; in the place of Docta ignorantia, Inspiration; in the sense in which I have talked of it in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. We live today in a transition period in respect to the human soul; we must evolve out of the deepest foundation of this human soul active power that leads to the spiritual. We will not find our way through the chaos of the present age unless we develop the will to evolve active inner soul powers. The spiritualists do the opposite. They perceive that nothing springs up unconsciously from within, and so they allow themselves to project spirits in outer manifestation, outer sense vision.

And a tragic phenomenon makes its appearance in the present day. We have the experience today of seeing men who a short time ago still believed that materialism could satisfy their souls become alarmed in their advancing years about materialism. That is nothing else than what the healthy soul should feel, in spite of the biology of today, or the sociology: a smell of decay, a smell of the corpse of one's soul, that one only prevents by an inner soul activity. Many do not want that activity today. And therefore the tragedy of men growing old who will not have anything to do with spiritual scientific research and who go back to Catholicism. That allows the soul to remain passive, and gives it something that it can believe is a spiritual content. It is a great danger.

That points from another angle to the transition-humanity is making in the present age. Quite secretly the human soul is going through an important stage of development. And with this transition through an important stage of development is intimately connected the necessity of learning to think anew in many other respects concerning man. Read how the individual man, when entering the supersense world, begins to divide into three parts. Read it in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. Thinking, feeling, and willing that here in the sense world are fused as the natural condition for man—read the chapter on the “Guardian of the Threshold”: thinking, feeling, and willing become separate from one another when one gets into the supersense world. Mankind is going through that process today secretly in the subconscious. A threshold is being crossed there. Man divides inwardly into a threefold man in a different way than was formerly the case. Observation of this passing of men over a certain threshold teaches one that the threefolding of the social organism is dictated to us out of the spiritual foundations of existence itself. If in the future we want to find a picture of ourselves in the outside world so that we shall agree with it, then we shall have had to threefold the social organism.

You see the signs that spiritual science gives for the Threefold Commonwealth. But I again emphasize the point: once the Threefold Commonwealth is found it can, like all occult truths, be comprehended by a healthy human understanding. To find it, spiritual scientific research is necessary; but once it is found, healthy human, understanding proclaims its truth. That is also something that we must recall at every opportunity.

I have tried today to give you a deeper consideration of what in service to our time must be said today about the Threefold Commonwealth. Next Sunday we will extend this consideration and conclude it, and perhaps bring it to full inner completeness.

[ 1 ] The characteristic element which has given the social question its particular form in modern times may be described as follows: The economy, along with technology and modern capitalism, has, as a matter of course, brought a certain inner order to modern society. While the attention of humanity has focused on what technology and capitalism have brought, it has been diverted from other branches, other areas of the social organism. It is equally necessary to attain efficacy through human consciousness in these areas if the social organism is to become healthy.

[ 2 ] In order to clearly characterize certain driving forces by means of a comprehensive, universal observation of the social organism, I would like to start with a comparison. It should be borne in mind, however, that nothing more than a comparison is intended. Human understanding can be assisted by such a comparison to form mental pictures about the social organism's restoration to health. To consider the most complicated of all natural organisms, the human organism, from the point of view presented here, it is necessary to direct one's attention to the fact that the total essence of this human organism exhibits three complementary systems, each of which functions with a certain autonomy. These three complementary systems can be characterized as follows. The system consisting of the nerve and sense faculties functions as one area in the natural human organism. It could also be designated, after the most important member of the organism in which the nerve and sense faculties are to a certain extent centralized, the head organism.

[ 3 ] A clear understanding of the human organization will result in recognizing as the second member, what [ I ] would like to call the rhythmic system. It consists of respiration, blood circulation and everything which expresses itself in the rhythmic processes of the human organism.

[ 4 ] The third system is to be recognized in everything which, in the form of organs and functions, is connected with metabolism as such. [ 5 ] These three systems contain everything which, when properly co-ordinated, maintains the entire functioning of the human organism in a healthy manner.²

[ 6 ] In my book “Von Seelenrätseln”^* I have attempted to characterize, at least in outline, this triformation of the human natural organism. It is clear to me that biology, physiology, natural science as a whole will, in the very near future, tend toward a consideration of the human organism which perceives how these three members—the head-system, the circulatory system or breast-system and the metabolic system maintain the total processes in the human organism, how they function with a certain autonomy, how no absolute centralization of the human organism exists and how each of these systems has its own particular relation to the outer world. The head-system through the senses, the circulatory or rhythmic system through respiration and the metabolic system through the organs of nourishment and movement.

[ 7 ] Natural scientific methods are not yet sufficiently advanced for scientific circles to be able to grant recognition, sufficient for an advance in knowledge, to what I have indicated here—which is an attempt to utilize knowledge based on spiritual science for natural scientific purposes.

This means, however, that our habit of thought, the whole way in which we conceive of the world, is not yet completely in accordance with how, for example, the inner essence of nature's functions manifests itself in the human organism. One could very well say: Yes, but natural science can wait, its ideals will develop gradually and it will come to a point where viewpoints such as yours will be recognized. It is not possible, however, to wait where these things are concerned. In every human mind—for every human mind takes part in the functioning of the social organism—and not only in the minds of a few specialists, must be present at least an instinctive knowledge of what this social organism needs. Healthy thinking and feeling, healthy will and aspirations with regard to the formation of the social organism, can only develop when it is clear, albeit more or less instinctively, that in order for the social organism to be healthy it must, like the natural organism, have a threefold organization.

[ 8 ] Ever since Schäffle wrote his book about the structure of the social organism, attempts have been made to encounter analogies between the organization of a natural being—the human being, for example—and human society as such. The cell of the social organism has been sought, the cell structure, tissues and so forth! A short while ago a book by Meray appeared, Weltmutation (World Mutation), in which certain scientific facts and laws were simply transferred to a supposed human society-organism. What is meant here has absolutely nothing to do with all these things, with all these analogy games. To assume that in these considerations such an analogy game between the natural and the social organism is being played is to reveal a failure to enter into the spirit of what is here meant. No attempt is being made to transplant some scientific fact to the social organism; quite the contrary, it is intended that human thinking and feeling learn to sense the vital potentialities in contemplating the natural organism and then to be capable of applying this sensibility to the social organism. When what has supposedly been learned about the natural organism is simply transferred to the social organism, this only indicates an unwillingness to acquire the capacity to contemplate and investigate the social organism just as independently as is necessary for an understanding of the natural organism. If, in order to perceive its laws, one considers the social organism as an independent entity in the same manner as a scientific investigator considers the natural organism, in that instant the seriousness of the contemplation excludes playing with analogies.

[ 9 ] It may also be imagined that what is presented here is based on the belief that the social organism should be ‘constructed’ as an imitation of some bleak scientific theory. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It is my intention to point out something quite different. The present historical human crisis requires that certain sensibilities arise in every individual, that these sensibilities be stimulated by education, i.e., the school system, as is the learning of arithmetical functions. What has hitherto resulted from the old forms of the social organism, without being consciously absorbed by the inner life of the mind, will cease to have effect in the future. A characteristic of the evolutionary impulses which are attempting to manifest themselves in human life at the present time is that such sensibilities are necessary, just as schooling has long been a necessity. From now on mankind should acquire a healthy sense of how the social organism should function in order for it to be viable. A feeling must be acquired that it is unhealthy and anti-social to want to participate in this organism without such sensibilities.

[ 10 ] It is often said that ‘socialization’ is needed for these times. This socialization will not be a curative process for the social organism, but a quack remedy, perhaps even a destructive process, as long as at least an instinctive knowledge of the necessity for the triformation of the social organism has not been absorbed by human hearts, by human souls. If this social organism is to function in a healthy way it must methodically cultivate three constituent members.

[ 11 ] One of these members is the economy. It will be considered first because it has so evidently been able to dominate human society through modern technology and capitalism. This economic life must constitute an autonomous member within the social organism, as relatively autonomous as is the nervous-sensory system in the human organism. The economy is concerned with all aspects of the production, circulation and consumption of commodities.

[ 12 ] The second member of the social organism is that of civil rights, of political life as such. What can be designated as the state, in the sense of the old rights-state, pertains to this member. Whereas the economy is concerned with all aspects of man's natural needs and the production, circulation and consumption of commodities, this second member of the social organism can only concern itself with all aspects of the relations between human beings which derive from purely human sources. It is essential for knowledge about the members of the social organism to be able to differentiate between the legal rights system, which can only concern itself with relations between human beings that derive from human sources, and the economic system, which can only be concerned with the production, circulation and consumption of commodities. It is necessary to sense this difference in life in order that, as a consequence of this sensibility, the economy be separate from the rights member, as in the human natural organism the activity of the lungs in processing the outside air is separate from the processes of the nervous-sensory system.

[ 13 ] The third member, standing autonomous alongside the other two, is to be apprehended in the social organism as that which pertains to spiritual life. To be more precise, because the designations ‘spiritual culture’ or ‘everything which pertains to spiritual life’, are perhaps not sufficiently precise, one could say: everything which is based on the natural aptitudes of each human individual; what must enter into the social organism based on the natural aptitudes, spiritual as well as physical, of each individual. The first system, the economic, is concerned with what must be present in order for man to determine his relation to the outer world. The second system is concerned with what must be present in the social organism in respect to human inter-relationships. The third system is concerned with everything which must blossom forth from each human individuality and be integrated into the social organism.

[ 14 ] Just as it is true that modern technology and capitalism have moulded our society in recent times, it is also imperative that the wounds necessarily inflicted on human society by them be thoroughly healed by correctly relating man and the human community to the three members of the social organism. The economy has, of itself, taken on quite definite forms in recent times. Through one-sided efficiency it has exerted an especially powerful influence on human life. Until now the other two members of society have not been in a position to properly integrate themselves in the social organism with the same certitude and according to their own laws. It is therefore necessary that each individual, in the place where he happens to be, undertakes to work for social formation based on the sensibilities described above. It is inherent in these attempts at solving the social questions that in the present and in the immediate future each individual has his social task.

[ 15 ] The first member of the social organism, the economy, depends primarily on nature, just as the individual, in respect to what he can make of himself through education and experience, depends on the aptitudes of his spiritual and physical organisms. This natural base simply impresses itself on the economy, and thereby on the entire social organism. It is there and cannot be affected essentially by any social organization, by any socialization. It must constitute the foundation of the social organism, as the human being's aptitudes in various areas, his natural physical and spiritual abilities, must constitute the foundation of his education. Every attempt at socialization, at giving human society an economic structure, must take the natural base into account. This elementary, primitive element which binds the human being to a certain piece of nature constitutes the foundation for the circulation of goods, all human labour and every form of cultural-spiritual life. It is necessary to take the relationship of the social organism to its natural base into consideration, just as it is necessary to take the relationship of the individual to his aptitudes into consideration where the learning process is concerned. This can be made clear by citing extreme cases. In certain regions of the earth, where the banana is an easily accessible food, what is taken into consideration is the labour which must be expended in order to transfer the bananas from their place of origin to a certain destination and convert them into items of consumption. If the human labour which must be expended in order to make the bananas consumer items for society is compared with the labour which must be expended in Central Europe to do the same with wheat, it will be seen that the labour necessary for the bananas is at least three hundred times less than for the wheat. [ 16 ] Of course that is an extreme case. Nevertheless, such differences in the required amount of labour in relation to the natural base are also present in the branches of production which are represented in any European society,- not as radically as with the bananas and wheat, but the differences do exist. It is thereby substantiated that the amount of labour power which men must bring to the economic process is conditioned by the natural base of their economy. In Germany, for example, in regions of average fertility, the wheat yield is approximately seven to eight times the amount sown; in Chile the yield is twelvefold, in northern Mexico seventeenfold, and in Peru twentyfold.^*

[ 17 ] The entire homogeneous entity consisting of processes which begin with man's relation to nature and continue through his activities in transforming the products of nature into consumable goods, all these processes, and only these, comprise the economic member of a healthy social organism. This member is comparable to the head system of the human organism which conditions individual aptitudes and, just as this head-system is dependent on the lung-heart system, the economic system is dependent on human labour. But the head cannot independently regulate breathing; nor should the human labour system be regulated by the same forces which activate the economy.

[ 18 ] The human being is engaged in economic activity in his own interests. These are based on his spiritual needs and on the needs of his soul. How these interests can be most suitably approached within a social organism so that the individual can best satisfy his interests through the social organism and also be economically active to the best advantage, is a question which must be resolved in practice within the various economic facilities. This can only happen if the interests are able to freely assert themselves, and if the will and possibility arise to do what is necessary to satisfy them. The origin of the interests lies beyond the circle which circumscribes economic affairs. They develop together with the development of the human soul and body. The task of economic life is to establish facilities in order to satisfy them. These facilities should be exclusively concerned with the production and interchange of commodities, that is, of goods which acquire value through human need. The commodity has value through the person who consumes it. Due to the fact that the commodity acquires its value through the consumer, its position in the social organism is completely different from the other things which the human being, as a member of this organism, values. The economy, within the circumference of which the production, inter-change and consumption of commodities belong, should be considered without preconceptions. The essential difference between the person-to-person relationship in which one produces commodities for the other, and the rights relationship as such will be evident. Careful consideration will lead to the conviction and the practical requirement that in the social organism legal rights must be completely separated from the economic sector. The activities which are to be carried out in the facilities which serve the production and interchange of commodities are not conducive to the best possible influence on the area of human rights. In the economy one individual turns to another individual because one serves the interests of the other, but the relation of one person to another is fundamentally different in the area of human rights.

[ 19 ] It might seem that the required distinction would be sufficiently realized if the legal element, which must also exist in the relations between the persons engaged in the economy, be provided for in it. Such a belief has no foundation in reality. The individual can only correctly experience the legal relation which must exist between himself and others when he does not experience this relation in the economic area, but in an area which is completely separate from it. Therefore, an area must develop in the social organism alongside the economy and independent of it, in which the rights element is cultivated and administered. The rights element is, moreover, that of the political domain, of the state. If men carry over their economic interests into the legislation and administration of the rights-state, then the resulting rights will only be the expression of these economic interests. When the rights-state manages the economy it loses the ability to regulate human rights. Its acts and facilities must serve the human need for commodities; they are therefore diverted from the impulses which correspond to human rights.

[ 20 ] The healthy social organism requires an autonomous political state as the second member alongside the economic sector. In the autonomous economic sector, through the forces of economic life, people will develop facilities which will best serve the production and interchange of commodities. In the political state facilities will develop which will orient the mutual relations between persons and groups in a way which corresponds to human rights-awareness.

[ 21 ] This viewpoint, which advocates the complete separation of rights-state and economy, is one which corresponds to the realities of life. The same cannot be said for the viewpoint which would merge the economic and rights functions. Those who are active in the economic sector do, of course, possess a rights-awareness; but their participation in legislative and administrative processes will derive exclusively from this rights-awareness only if their judgement in this area occurs within the framework of a rights-state which does not occupy itself with economic matters. Such a rights-state has its own legislative and administrative bodies, both structured according to the principles which derive from the modern rights awareness. It will be structured according to the impulses in human consciousness nowadays referred to as democratic. The economic area will form its legislative and administrative bodies in accordance with economic impulses. The necessary contact between the responsible persons of the legal and economic bodies will ensue in a manner similar to that at present practised by the governments of sovereign states. Through this formation the developments in one body will be able to have the necessary effect on developments in the other. As things are now this effect is hindered by one area trying to develop in itself what should flow toward it from the other.

[ 22 ] The economy is subject, on the one hand, to the conditions of the natural base (climate, regional geography, mineral wealth and so forth) and, on the other hand, it is dependent upon the legal conditions which the state imposes between the persons or groups engaged in economic activity. The boundaries of what economic activity can and should encompass are therefore laid out. Just as nature imposes prerequisites from the outside on the economic process which those engaged in economic activity take for granted as something upon which they must build this economy, so should everything which underlies the legal relationship between persons be regulated, in a healthy social organism, by a rights-state which, like the natural base, is autonomous in its relation to the economy.

[ 23 ] In the social organism that has evolved through the history of mankind and which, by means of the machine age and the modern capitalistic economic form, has given the social movement its characteristic stamp, economic activity encompasses more than is good for a healthy social organism. In today's economic system, in which only commodities should circulate, human labour-power and rights circulate as well. In the economic process of today, which is based on the division of labour, not only are commodities exchanged for commodities, but commodities are exchanged for both labour and for rights. (I call commodity everything which has been prepared by human activity for consumption and brought to a certain locality for this purpose. Although this description may be objectionable or seem insufficient to some economists, it can nevertheless be useful for an understanding of just what should belong to economic activity.^t3 ) When someone acquires a piece of land through purchase, the process must be considered an exchange of the land for commodities, represented by the purchase money. The land itself, however, does not act as a commodity in economic life. Its position is based on the right of a person to use it. This right is essentially different from the relationship in which the producer of a commodity finds himself. This relationship, by its very nature, does not overlap with the completely different type of person-to-person relationship which results from the fact that someone has the exclusive use of a piece of land. The owner puts those persons who earn their living on the land as his employees, or those who must live on it, in a position of dependence on him. The exchange of real commodities which are produced or consumed does not cause a dependence which has the same effect as this personal kind of relationship.

[ 24 ] Looking at this fact of life impartially, one sees clearly that it must find expression in the institutions of the entire social organism. As long as commodities are exchanged for other commodities in the economic sphere, the value of these commodities is determined independently of the legal relations between persons or groups. As soon as commodities are exchanged for rights, however, the legal relations themselves are affected. It is not a question of the exchange itself. This is a necessary, vital element of the contemporary social organism based on its division of labour; the problem is that through the exchange of rights for commodities the rights become commodities when they originate within the economic sphere. This can only be avoided by the existence of facilities in the social organism which, on the one hand, have the exclusive function of activating the circulation of commodities in the most expedient manner, and, on the other hand, facilities which regulate the rights, inherent in the commodity exchange process, of those individuals who produce, trade and consume. These rights are essentially no different from other rights of a personal nature which exist independently of the commodity exchange process. If I injure or benefit my fellow-man through the sale of a commodity, this belongs in the same social category as an injury or benefit through an act or omission not directly related to commodity exchange.

[ 25 ] The individual's way of life is influenced by rights institutions acting together with economic interests. In a healthy social organism these influences must come from two different directions. In the economic organization formal training, together with experience, is to provide management with the necessary insights. Through law and administration in the rights organization the necessary rights-awareness, in respect to the relations of individuals, or groups of individuals, to each other will be realized. The economic organization will allow persons with similar professional or consumer interests, or with similar needs of other kinds, to unite in cooperative associations which, through reciprocal activities, will underlie the entire economy. This organization will structure itself on an associative foundation and on the interrelations between associations. The associations will engage in purely economic activities. The legal basis for their work is provided by the rights organization. When such economic associations are able to make their economic interests felt in the representative and administrative bodies of the economic organization, they will not feel the need to pressure the legislative or administrative leadership of the rights-state (for example, farmers' and industrialists' lobbies, economically orientated social democrats) in order to attain there what is not attainable within the economic sector. If the rights state is not active in any economic field, then it will only establish facilities which derive from the rights awareness of the persons involved. Even if the same individuals who are active in the economic area also participate in the representation of the rights-state, which would of course be the case, no economic influence can be exerted on the rights sector, due to the formation of separate economic and legal systems. Such influence undermines the health of the social organism, as it can also be undermined when the state organization itself manages branches of the economic sector and when representatives of economic interests determine laws in accordance with those interests.

[ 26 ] Austria offered a typical example of the fusion of the economic and rights sectors with the constitution it adopted in the eighteen-sixties. The representatives of the imperial assembly of this territorial union were elected from the ranks of the four economic branches: The land owners, the chamber of commerce, the cities, markets and industrial areas, and the rural communities. It is clear from this composition of the representative assembly that they thought a rights system would ensue by allowing economic interests to exert themselves. Certainly the divergent forces of its many nationalities contributed a great deal to Austria's disintegration. It is equally certain, however, that a rights organization functioning alongside the economy would have enabled the development of a form of society in which the co-existence of the various nationalities would have been possible.

[ 27 ] Nowadays people interested in public life usually direct their attention to matters of secondary importance. They do this because their thinking habits induce them to consider the social organism as a uniform entity. A suitable elective process for such an entity is not to be found. Regardless of the elective process employed, economic interests and the impulses emanating from the rights sector will conflict with each other in the representative bodies. This conflict must result in extreme social agitation. Priority must be given today to the all-important objective of working toward a drastic separation of the economy from the rights-organization. As this separation becomes a reality, the separating organizations will, each according to their own principles, find the best means of choosing their legislators and administrators. This question of how to choose such representatives, although as such of fundamental significance, is secondary compared to the other pressing decisions which must be made today. Where old conditions still exist, these new forms could be developed from them. Where the old has already disintegrated, or is in the process of doing so, individuals or groups of individuals should take the initiative in attempting to reorganize society in the indicated direction. To expect an overnight transformation is seen even by reasonable socialists as unrealistic. They expect the healing process which they desire to be gradual and relevant. However, that the historical human evolutionary forces of today make a rational desire for a new social structure necessary is perfectly obvious to every objective person who observes current events.

[ 28 ] He who considers ‘practical’ only what he has become accustomed to within the limits of his own horizons, will consider what is presented here as ‘impractical’. If he is not able to change his attitude however, and has influence in some area, his actions will not contribute to the healing, but to the continued degeneration of the social organism, just as the deeds of people of like mind have contributed to present conditions.

[ 29 ] The endeavours which have already begun to be realized by those in authority to turn certain economic functions (post office, railroads, etc.) over to the state must be reversed; the state must be relieved of all economic functions. Thinkers who like to believe that they are on the road to a healthy social organism carry these efforts at nationalization to their logically extreme conclusions. They desire the socialization of all economic means, insofar as they are means of production. Healthy development, however, requires that the economy be autonomous and the political state be able, through the process of law, to affect economic organizations in such a way that the individual does not feel that his integration in the social organism is in conflict with his rights-awareness.

[ 30 ] It is possible to see how the ideas presented here are based on the realities of the human situation by directing one's attention to the physical labour which the human being performs for the social organism. Within the capitalistic economic form, this labour has been incorporated into the social organism in such a way that it is bought like a commodity from the worker by his employer. An exchange takes place between money (representing commodities) and labour. But such an exchange cannot, in reality, take place. It only appears to do so.^t4 In reality, the employer receives commodities from the worker, which can only come into existence by the worker devoting his labour-power to their creation. The worker receives one part of the equivalent value of these commodities and the employer the other. The production of commodities results from the cooperation of the employer and the employed. Only the product of their joint action passes into economic circulation. A legal relationship between worker and entrepreneur is necessary for the production of the commodity. Capitalism, however, is capable of converting this relationship into one which is determined by the economic supremacy of the employer over the worker. In the healthy social organism it will be apparent that labour cannot be paid for. It cannot attain an economic value through equivalence with a commodity. These, produced by labour, acquire value through equivalence with other commodities. The kind and amount of work as well as the way in which the individual performs it for the maintenance of the social organism, must be determined by his own abilities as well as the requisites for a decent human existence. This is only possible if the determination is carried out by the political state independently of economic management.

[ 31 ] Through this determination the commodity will acquire a value basis which is comparable to that which exists in the conditions imposed by nature. As the value of a commodity increases in relation to another commodity due to the acquisition of the raw materials necessary for its production becoming more difficult, so must its value also be dependent upon the kind and amount of labour which may be expended for its production in accordance with rights legislation.^t5 [ 32 ] In this way the economy becomes subject to two essential conditions: that of the natural base, which humanity must take as it is given, and that of the rights base, which should be created through a rights-awareness with roots in a political state independent of economic interests.

[ 33 ] It is evident that by managing the social organism in this way, economic prosperity will increase and decrease according to the amount of labour rights-awareness decides to expend. In a healthy social organism it is necessary that economic prosperity be dependent in this way, for only such dependence can prevent man from being so consumed by economic life that he can no longer consider his existence worthy of human dignity. And, in truth, all the turmoil in the social organism results from the feeling that existence is unworthy of human dignity.

[ 34 ] A comparison with the means employed to improve the natural base can be used to find possible means of avoiding steep declines in prosperity as an effect of the rights sector's measures.

A low yield soil can be made more productive through the use of technical means; similarly, if prosperity declines excessively the type and amount of labour can be modified. This modification should not emanate directly from economic circles, but from the insight which can develop in a rights organisation which is independent of economic life.

[ 35 ] Everything which occurs in the social organization due to economic activity and rights-awareness is influenced by what emanates from a third source: the individual abilities of each human being. This includes the greatest spiritual accomplishments as well as superior or inferior physical aptitudes. What derives from this source must be introduced into the healthy social organism in quite a different manner than the exchange of commodities or what emanates from the state. This introduction can only be effected in a sound manner if it is left to man's free receptivity and the impulses which come from individual abilities. The human efforts and achievements which result from such abilities are, to a great extent, deprived of the true essence of their being if they are influenced by economic interests or the state organization. This essence can only exist in the forces which human effort and achievement must develop of and by themselves. Free receptivity, the only suitable means, is paralysed when the social integration of these efforts and achievements is directly conditioned by economic life or organized by the state. There is only one possible healthy form of development for spiritual life: what it produces shall be the result of its own impulses and a relationship of mutual understanding shall exist between itself and the recipients of its achievements. (The development of the individual abilities present in society is connected to the development of spiritual life by countless fine threads.)

[ 36 ] The conditions described here for the healthy development of spiritual-cultural life are not recognized today because powers of observation have been clouded by the fusion of a large part of this life with the political state. This fusion has come about in the course of the past centuries and we have grown accustomed to it. There is talk, of course, of ‘scientific and educational freedom’. It is taken for granted however, that the political state should administer the ‘free science’ and the ‘free education’.

It is not understood that in this way the state makes spiritual life dependent on state requirements. People think that the state can provide the educational facilities and that the teachers who occupy them can develop culture and spiritual life ‘freely’ in them. This opinion ignores how closely related the content of spiritual life is to the innermost essence of the human being in which it is developing, and how this development can only be free when it is introduced into the social organism through the impulses which originate in spiritual life itself, and through no others. Through fusion with the state, not only the administration of science and the part of spiritual life connected with it has been determined, but the content as well. Of course what mathematics or physics produce cannot be directly influenced by the state. But the history of the cultural sciences shows that they have become reflections of their representatives' relations to the state and of state requirements. Due to this phenomenon, the contemporary scientifically oriented concepts which dominate spiritual life affect the proletarian as ideology. He has noticed how certain aspects of human thought are determined by state requirements which correspond to the interests of the ruling classes. The thinking proletarian saw therein a reflection of material interests as well as a battle of conflicting interests. This created the feeling that all spiritual life is ideology, a reflection of economic organization.

[ 37 ] This desolating view of human spiritual life ceases when the feeling can arise that in the spiritual sphere a self-containing reality, transcending the material, is at work. It is impossible for such a feeling to arise when spiritual life is not freely self-developing and administering within the social organism. Only those persons who are active in the development and administration of spiritual life have the strength to secure its appropriate place in the social organism. Art, science, philosophical world-views, and all that goes with them, need just such an independent position in human society, for in spiritual life everything is interrelated. The freedom of one cannot flourish without the freedom of the other. Although the content of mathematics and physics cannot be directly influenced by state requirements, what develops from them, what people think of their value, what effects their cultivation can have on the rest of spiritual life, and much more, is conditioned by these requirements when the state administers branches of spiritual life. It is very different if a teacher of the lowest school grades follows the impulses of the state or if he receives these impulses from a spiritual life which is self-contained. The Social Democrats have merely inherited the habits of thought and the customs of the ruling classes in this respect. Their ideal is to include spiritual life in social institutions which are built upon economic principles. If they succeed in reaching their goal, they will only have continued along the path of spiritual depreciation. They were correct, although one-sided, in their demand that religion be a private affair. In a healthy social organism all spiritual life must be, in respect to the state and the economy, a ‘private affair’. But the social democrats' motive in wanting to transfer religion to the private sector is not a desire to create a position within the social organism where a spiritual institution would develop in a more desirable, worthier manner than it can under state influence. They are of the opinion that the social organism should only cultivate with its own means its own necessities of life. And religious values do not belong to this category. A branch of spiritual life cannot flourish when it is unilaterally removed from the public sector in this way, if the other spiritual branches remain fettered. Modern humanity's religious life will only develop its soul-sustaining strength together with all the other liberated branches of spiritual life.

[ 38 ] Not only the creation but also the reception by humanity of this spiritual life must be freely determined in accordance with the soul's necessities. Teachers, artists and such whose only direct connection with a legislature or an administration is with those which have their origin in spiritual life itself, will be able, through their actions, to inspire the development of a receptivity for their efforts and achievements amongst individuals who are protected by a self-reliant, independent political state from being forced to exist only for work, and which guarantees their right to a leisure that can awaken in them an appreciation of spiritual values. Those persons who imagine themselves to be ‘practical’ may object that people would pass their leisure time drinking and that illiteracy would result if the state occupied itself with the right to leisure and if school attendance were left to free human common sense. Let these ‘pessimists’ wait and see what will happen when the world is no longer under their influence all too often determined by a certain feeling which, whispering in their ear, softly reminds them of how they use their leisure time, what they needed to acquire a little ‘learning’. They cannot imagine the power of enthusiasm which a really self-contained spiritual life can have in the social organism, because the fettered one they know cannot exert such an enthusiastic influence over them.

[ 39 ] Both the political state and the economy will receive the spiritual performance they require from a self-administered spiritual organism. Furthermore, practical economic training will reach full effectiveness through free cooperation with this organism. People who have received the appropriate training will be able to vitalize their economic experience through the strength which will come to them from liberated spiritual values. Those with economic experience will also work for the spiritual organization, where their abilities are most needed.

[ 40 ] In the political area, the necessary insights will be formed through the activation of spiritual values. The worker will acquire, through the influence of such spiritual values, a feeling of satisfaction in respect to the function his labour performs in the social organism. He will realize that without management organizing labour in a meaningful way the social organism could not support him. He will sense the need for cooperation between his work and the organizing abilities which derive from the development of individual human abilities. Within the framework of the political state he will acquire the rights which insure him his share of the commodities he produces; and he will freely grant an appropriate share of the proceeds for the formation of the spiritual values which flow toward him. In the field of spiritual-cultural life, it will become possible for those engaged in creative activities to live from the proceeds of their efforts. What someone practices in the field of spiritual life is his own affair. What he is able to contribute to the social organism however, will be recompensed by those who have need of his spiritual contribution. Whoever is not able to support himself within the spiritual organization from such compensation will have to transfer his activities to the political or economic sphere of activity.

[ 41 ] The technical ideas that derive from spiritual life flow into the economic sector. They derive from spiritual life even when they come directly from members of the state or economic sectors. All organizational ideas and forces which fecundate the economic and state sectors originate in spiritual life. Compensation for this input to both social sectors will come either through the free appreciation of the beneficiaries, or through laws determined by the political state. Tax laws will provide this political state with what it needs to maintain itself. These will be devised through a harmonization of ‘rights awareness’ and economic requirements.

[ 42 ] In a healthy social organism the autonomous spiritual sector must function alongside the political and economic sectors. The evolutionary forces in modern mankind point toward a triformation of this organism. As long as society was essentially governed by instinctive forces, the urge for this formation did not arise. What actually derived from three sources functioned somewhat torpidly together in society. Modern times demand the individual's conscious participation in this organism. This consciousness can only give the individual's behaviour and whole life a healthy form if it is oriented from three sides. Modern man, in the unconscious depths of his soul, strives toward this orientation; and what manifests itself in the social movement is only the dim reflection of this striving.

[ 43 ] Toward the end of the eighteenth century, under different circumstances than those under which we at present live, a call for a new formation of the human social organism arose from the depths of human nature. The motto of this reorganization consisted of three words: fraternity, equality, liberty. Anyone with an objective mind, who considers the realities of human social development with healthy sensibilities, cannot help but be sympathetic to the meaning behind these words. However, during the course of the nineteenth century, some very clever thinkers took pains to point out the impossibility of realizing these ideals of fraternity, equality and liberty in a uniform social organism. They felt certain that these three impulses would be contradictory if practised in society. It was clearly demonstrated, for example, that individual freedom would not be possible if the equality principle were practised. One is obliged to agree with those who observed these contradictions; nevertheless, one must at the same time feel sympathy for each of these ideals.

[ 44 ] These contradictions exist because the true social meaning of these three ideals only becomes evident through an understanding of the necessary triformation of the social organism. The three members are not to be united and centralized in some abstract, theoretical parliamentary body. Each of the three members is to be centralized within itself, and then, through their mutual cooperation, the unity of the overall social organism can come about. In real life, the apparent contradictions act as a unifying element. An apprehension of the living social organism can be attained when one is able to observe the true formation of this organism with respect to fraternity, equality and liberty. It will then be evident that human cooperation in economic life must be based on the fraternity which is inherent in associations. In the second member, the civil rights system, which is concerned with purely human, person-to-person relations, it is necessary to strive for the realization of the idea of equality. And in the relatively independent spiritual sector of the social organism it is necessary to strive for the realization of the idea of freedom. Seen in this light, the real worth of these three ideals becomes clear. They cannot be realized in a chaotic society, but only in a healthy, threefold social organism. No abstract, centralized social structure is able to realize the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity in such disarrangement; but each of the three sectors of the social organism can draw strength from one of these impulses and cooperate in a positive manner with the other sectors.

[ 45 ] Those individuals who demanded and worked for the realization of the three ideas—liberty, equality and fraternity—as well as those who later followed in their footsteps, were able to dimly discern in which direction modern humanity's forces of evolution are pointing. But they have not been able to overcome their belief in the uniform state, so their ideas contain a contradictory element. Nevertheless, they remained faithful to the contradictory, for in the subconscious depths of their souls the impulse toward the triformation of the social organism, in which the triplicity of their ideas can attain to a higher unity, continued to exert itself. The clearly discernible social facts of contemporary life demand that the forces of evolution, which in modern mankind strive toward this triformation, be turned into conscious will.

• 2. The arrangement meant here is not a spatial delimitation of the bodily members, but is according to the activities (functions) of the organism. The term ‘head-organism’ is only to be used in that one is aware that the nerve-sense faculty is principally centralized in the head. Of course the rhythmic and metabolic functions are also present in the head, as is the nerve-sense faculty in the other bodily members. Nevertheless, the three functional types are, according to their natures, sharply separated.
• *. Page 54 Von Seelenrätseln. Extracts from this book have been published by the Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1970, under the title The Case for Anthroposophy, selected, translated, arranged and with an introduction by Owen Barfield.
• *. Page 61 Carl Jentsch Volkswirtschaftslehre (Economics) published 1895.
• t3. It is not the task of a work which intends to serve life to give definitions which originate in a theory, but to contribute ideas which illustrate the processes taking place in reality. ‘Commodity’ in this sense indicates something which the human being experiences; any other concept of ‘commodity’ omits or adds something, so that the concept does not correspond to the living process of reality.
• t4. It is not only possible for processes in life to be explained falsely, they can also occur falsely. Money and labour are not inter-changeable values as are money and the products of labour. Therefore, if I give money for labour I do something false. I create a deception. In reality, I can only give money for the products of labour.
• t5. Such a relationship of labour to rights legislation will compel the economic associations to accept what is ‘just’ as a precondition. Thereby a condition will be attained in which the economic organization is dependent on people, and not vice-versa.

We have been speaking of what hinders modern man from coming to recognition of the spiritual world, as it must be understood through the spiritual knowledge of Anthroposophy, and two things have been indicated as having been the cause of this hindrance. These two things are leak of courage, lack of strength where recognition of the spirit is concerned, and lack of interest about the actual form of the spiritual life. Now today I should like to go into these things from a point of view from which I have touched on them still more lightly. When such things are spoken of it must always be borne in mind that man's ordinary sound intelligence, as I have often said, suffices for understanding and receiving open-mindedly all things concerning Spiritual Science. If I may say so, through the fact that sound human intelligence; when rightly directed, is sufficient for the understanding of the things of the spiritual world today, in a certain sense through merely understanding, through open-minded acceptance, everyone may have all that the investigating Anthroposophist receives from the spiritual world. And with the courage and interest to receive these things with sound human intelligence, man has himself the possibility of rising slowly and gradually, in accordance with what his own karma permits, into the spiritual world. Already today it is necessary, and will become increasingly so for all men, to learn to understand the spiritual world, to learn to understand it with sound human intelligence in the way the spiritual world is spoken of in Spiritual Science. How far man can become ripe to look into the spiritual world himself is quite another question, a question that can be settled only by each individual in his own inmost soul, a question to which each one will settle in the right way in his inmost soul when he seeks to understand the things of the spiritual world simply through his sound human intelligence, and not through intelligence prejudiced by natural science or any thing else.

Now the next question that arises above all about this is why so many people today avoid making their sound human intelligence active so that it may understand, or be prepared to accept, what is derived from Spiritual Science? And something can be learnt about this question by hearing what the things and beings of the spiritual world actually look like when this world is entered by the spiritual investigator. In former times the Initiates were allowed to speak of a great deal about the spiritual world that was different from what has to be given out today. But naturally in those olden days much also could be said of a similar nature to what can still be said now. Thus, for example, it was always given out in a way that today is still right, what actually happens when a man seeks to enter the spiritual world before his soul is ripe to do so. Today this can indeed so happen that the man says to himself: What! Sound human Intelligence?—that is the last thing to bother about if one wants to understand the spiritual world! People are not fond of the effort entailed; they would much rather accept some particular thing through belief in authority. There is really far less liking today for sound human understanding than people imagine, and they would like to get round this need for sound human understanding by penetrating directly to the spiritual world in a way that they imagine to be easier, even though this is an unconscious opinion, namely, through all manner of brooding and things of that kind, which they call meditation. This preference for actually penetrating into the spiritual world without the help of sound human intelligence is indeed very common. Those initiated into such things however were already saying what is right concerning this in past times, and it continues to be repeated by Initiates today. When an attempt is made to penetrate into the spiritual world by anyone who is insufficiently mature in his whole attitude of soul, it happens all too easily that after some time he ruins his whole endeavour, brings it so near complete disaster, that he is left with a feeling like someone who, grasping a red hot piece of coal, is undecided whether to burn himself or let the coal drop. This is an experience arising very often in those who meditate. They do not seek to let their sound human intelligence prevail in the same measure as their zeal for the so-called exercises, which indeed in themselves naturally have their justification. It is always emphasised, however, that sound human understanding may not be excluded, it must be actively, diligently, applied. If for sometime it is sought to make a practice of excluding sound human intelligence and also of excluding the accompanying moral self-discipline that up until then has actually not been acquired, this characteristic feature will appear—that all this will be experienced as if someone were to touch a piece of glowing coal with his fingers, not only touched it but jumped back, thus men would jump away from the spiritual world. As I have said this is always emphasised. It is emphasised because it is an experience made in earlier ages by countless teachers of Spiritual Science in the form this took in atavistic times; it is an experience that can also be very prevalent today. This is emphasised; but today we must find out the reason why there should arise this sensation of touching and recoiling as if from glowing coals.

Now if we seek to understand this fact, we may be able to recall a basic truth of our Spiritual Science perfectly well known to us, namely, how we as men behave when we bear in mind our entire life in its alternating states of sleeping and waking. With the help of the old mode of expression, we might say that while we sleep we leave the physical body and the etheric body lying in the bed whereas with the Ego and the astral body we fly out, if I can put it thus, into the world that otherwise surrounds us; we do not inhabit our body when asleep, we are poured out into the surrounding cosmos. In this way when we are sleeping our consciousness as a man is slight. When the sleeping condition is unbroken by dreams which implies a certain increase in the intensity of consciousness, but when we keep in mind dreamless sleep, then our consciousness is so inconsiderable that we do not become aware of the infinite and important number of experiences gone through in the state between going to sleep and re-awakening. This is just that we really should keep in mind, and not the abstract words: In sleep, with our ego and astral body we are outside the physical body—no, we should bear in mind that our body is tremendously rich between going to sleep and waking up again: (Compare Z-233) we do not know it, however, because our consciousness is then weakened, because our sleep-consciousness is not yet as strong as the consciousness that is able to be united with the instrument of the physical body. In actual fact a tremendously intense experience takes place in ego and astral body within the world where we also are the rest of the time—an intense experience. Man, however, during his ordinary state on earth is protected from the immediate perception of this life, this life developed when we as ego and astral body force ourselves—if I may express it thus—through the same things to begin with in which we are when making use of our physical body and its organs. The life during the state of sleep is one of tremendous richness. But this life does not cease when we wake and plunge down into our physical body and etheric body. We are still connected through our ego and astral body with the world surrounding us in a way that the ordinary consciousness has no inkling of; only this remains quite unnoticed. We can now look at this precise relation more closely. It may be asked what actually comes to expression in this relation of our soul and spirit to our physical and etheric?

You see, for our present state of experience it would be a very bad thing were we henceforth always to have to perceive what in sleep we experience with the things outside in space and in time. We do not indeed do this, but were we to do it we should always have to go on doing it and could not do otherwise. Our body, that is to say, has a certain characteristic where these experiences are concerned. It may be said to weaken these experiences. Our body weakens all that in actual truth we experience with the surrounding world; we perceive only what has been weakened by our body and not our real experiences. Our real experiences are related to what we perceive of our environment through our body—and this is a very pertinent picture indeed because not only is it actually a picture but it corresponds to an occult reality—our body or the experiences of our body are related to our real experiences in the same way as the sunlight, that shines on a stone and is reflected back so that we can see the stone, is related to the actual sunlight streaming towards us from the sun overhead. Look at the stone the sunlight falls upon; you are able to look at the stone, your eyes can bear the reflected, thrown back light. When you turn from the stone to the sun and gaze straight into the sun you are blinded. It is approximately the same with the relation between our real experiences in connection with the world around us, and What we experience through the organs of our body. What we experience in reality with our environment has the strength of the sunlight, and what we experience through the organs of our body has of this strength only the weakened form which the weakened light of an object reflected back to us has of the strength of the real sunlight. In our innermost man we are sun beings, but so far we cannot endure what it entails to be sun beings. Therefore as with our external physical eyes we have to look at the softened down light of the sun because direct sunlight blinds us, we must also perceive our environment through what results in a softened down form from our body and its organs, because we should be unable directly to face what in reality we experience of our environment. As men we are actually as if we were blinded by a sunbeam and what we know of the world and of ourselves has not our real being in it, not as things would be experienced in streaming sunlight but in light thrown back from objects, light that no longer blinds the eyes. You can gather from this that when you wake up in the world that ordinary consciousness cannot endure, you have the feeling you are in sunlight as if you really would live with the sunlight. And in the actual experience, in the actual practical experience there is indeed a very concentrated sunlight.

There you have the facts about what is often said—that people throw away the experience of Spiritual Science as if it were a red hot coal. You come to a region of experience where you have experiences like that of the soul when your finger is burnt. You jump back and do not want to burn it. Naturally you need not twist round what I say. Nobody can come to spiritual experience by having his finger burnt. On that account I say like the soul experience when one burns a finger, for in Spiritual Science things must always be expressed with exactitude.

The real state of affairs is that entrance into the spiritual world is certainly not at first anything providing man with an empty kind of happiness; entrance into the spiritual world is such that it has to be bought with that inner, one might say, unhappiness, experienced when one is burnt by fire. (Naturally there are many other experiences of the same kind). To begin with man experiences spiritually with the things, beings and events of the spiritual world, exactly the same as, for example, when he burns himself. The real experiences of the spiritual world have to be acquired through these painful experiences. What gives happiness from these experiences of the spiritual world, what gives satisfaction to life, is the afterglow in thought. Those who have these experiences imparted to them and grasp them through their sound human intelligence, can have this just as well as anyone who enters the spiritual world. Certain individuals, however, must naturally enter the spiritual world, otherwise it would not be possible for anything at all to be experienced of the spiritual world.

These feats to which I have referred must be borne in mind. Fundamentally it is not very difficult just from the external facts to gather what I have been speaking of. You will find everywhere the spiritual world is spoken of seriously—not in the way of charlatanism but seriously—that the passing over is spoken of not as being made through pleasant but through painful experiences. And you know how often I have said that whoever in life has acquired a little real knowledge of the spiritual world looks back, but not resentfully, on the sorrow, on the suffering of his life. For he says to himself: The joys, the exhilarating moments of life I accept thankfully as a divine gift and I rejoice over the destiny that has brought me these exhilarating moments of joy. But all that I know comes from my pain, my knowledge comes from my suffering. Everyone who has gained actual knowledge of the spiritual world will see this. Only in this way are we allowed to acquire knowledge of the spiritual world while here on the physical earth.

And now you will be able to realise why people Shrink from understanding the spiritual world in spite of the fact that this understanding is to be acquired simply with sound human intelligence. Usually the only thing they do not recoil from in their understanding is what they would not recoil from in external life. Now you would naturally be most stupid and unreasonable if you wilfully burnt your finger just to find out what it was like. Added to which, if you burn your finger you pay so little heed to what your soul is experiencing that you do not gain any real experience of what it is like to burn your finger. Us, there is indeed a psychological fact rightly grasped only when seen in the light flowing from this knowledge. Now in that I am going to say I am not speaking here to you individually, for naturally I am not expecting each of you to do this, I only believe, of Course, that each of you will have heard of such things, you will have heard of them from others and remarked them in others. You will perhaps have remarked that people cry out when they burn their fingers. Now, my dear friends, why do many people cry out on burning their fingers? They cry out for the simple reason that by thus crying out the soul experience may be drowned. People cry out and make a noise at any kind of pain to make things easier for themselves. Ay crying out you will not be able to experience in full consciousness the whole extent of the pain; it is really drowning the suffering, sending it outside. In short, in ordinary life man has not much experience of the things that will be experienced in the spiritual world; nevertheless it is clear that these things can be understood with sound human intelligence because everywhere in the external physical world they have analogies through which we gather our experiences. It is certainly not the case that things of the spiritual world are incomprehensible; we must, however, make up our minds to strengthen certain qualities of our soul, for example, courage. We must have the courage not usually possessed when we do something and then recoil because it is painful. We must have this courage, for penetrating to the spiritual world always means pain. Therefore we have to strengthen certain forces of the soul, this is necessary. But many people today do not,want to strengthen their qualities of soul in the systematic way that is recommended, for example, in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. They have no wish to do this; they have no wish to enhance certain attributes of their soul. Were they to enhance them then in their capacity for forming concepts , in their sound human intelligence, there would easily prevail what is needful for understanding through this human intelligence he experience of the fingers in the spiritual world that, in the sense in which I have described it, is a painful experience. We are actually living in an age in which this strengthening of the human attitude of soul is a necessity, for otherwise mankind cannot reach their goal, and because catastrophe on catastrophe will have to arise bringing us finally to chaos.

Now, however, while discussing these things just at a time when it is particularly necessary, I have placed strong emphasis on something else. This is, that with the weakening of the attitude of soul existing among men today, there can be excellent scientists in the modern sense of the word. For even with the intelligence, that is not sound human intelligence but human intelligence carried to a high pitch through the authority of science, the external part of our physical environment can be particularly well understood. It cannot be understood inwardly, spiritually, but directly understood in its external aspect. What is not possible for people with the concepts given by science, with just what people today are accustomed to when applying their thought, is however to bring order into the social structure of man's cooperative life which is gradually becoming chaotic. To put it differently: Present social demands, and social demands for the near future, will never find their solution through what may be referred to as the thinking about nature and natural phenomena. It is on this very point that our contemporaries have terribly much to learn; in this very point again our contemporaries do not fall in with what must be told them by Spiritual Science out of its most intimate understanding of the being of our universe. Indeed, in spite of all the opposition which today will be forthcoming more and more, Spiritual Science must say just on this point that even with any amount of bungling around and doctoring up in the sphere of social questions no bungling around or doctoring up will lead to anything better; it will lead on the contrary to still greater social confusion than is already present in individual spheres of world existence unless it is recognised that insight into social questions can come only from the spiritual understanding of world existence. Social questions must be solved with knowledge of Anthroposophy—anything else in this sphere is dilettantism.

Thus we must turn to something else if we are to speak about things from a certain point of view. What largely holds men back from pressing forward to Spiritual Science is lack of interest in the spiritual life. This lack of interest in spiritual life is prevalent among modern scientists. They are indifferent about the spiritual life. They deny it or give laws to everything they can observe through the physical senses, everything that allows of investigation by means of microscope or telescope; but they take no interest in what is revealed every time there is real deep observation of nature, namely. that the spiritual holds sway behind all-phenomena of nature, all facts of nature. This lack of interest in the spirit is particularly noticeable today in those who would meddle in social affairs. And again there is a particular reason for this.

Now, my dear friends, from all kinds of things that I have spoken about lately, you will have gathered that when confronting each other as man to man we are in a very special inner life of soul. I have gone quite deeply into what kind of mood of soul we are in when as man we are face to face with another man. I told you that actually standing face to face with another man always has a soporific effect on us. Where the innermost qualities of our human nature are concerned we actually go to sleep in the presence of another man. It is not to be wondered at that outward behaviour deceives us as to this falling asleep. For we certainly see the other man with our eyes, offer him indeed our hand and touch him, do all kinds of things; but still this does not alter the fact that the other man causes us to fall asleep in the depths of our human being. Just as we are asleep to nature at night, something is sent to sleep in us by the presence of another man. When this goes to sleep, however, it does not cease to be active. Thus in social life there are always taking place between men activities about which, just because they are together with their fellows, people are unable to have any clear consciousness. People fail to notice in ordinary consciousness exactly what is of most importance in the social life, because their actual capacity for conceiving the most important things in social life has fallen asleep and they act out of instinct. It is no wonder that as in the forming of conceptions the intellect is most easily lulled to sleep, the most chaotic instincts should be taken as perfectly justified in modern social life because clear thinking about these things is sent to sleep simply by men being together. The moment a man enters the spiritual world, however, what was sent to sleep wakes up, and it becomes clear what is holding sway between man and man. For this reason the solutions can also be found of the so-called social questions and social demands. Thus, as I have already said here, it is possible to find these solutions only beyond the threshold of physical consciousness.

And what mankind will want to have in future through the so-called solving of social problems, if it is to be a real solution, can be found only on the path of Spiritual Science, that is to say, the science of the superphysical, since all the most intimate foundations of human life in co-operation are of a superphysical nature. (cf. Z-234)

But then, if we wish to experience spiritually the things that have to do with man, mankind, and also with the human social structure, into our whole capacity for conception, into everything we experience, we must bring something which you will realise at once is hardly present today in ordinary consciousness. There is just one thing here in the physical world in the way of sensations, of feelings, that each of us must have if he does not want to investigate the social laws, the social impulses, in an unreal but in a fundamental way. This is only found in a limited form here in the physical world, only indeed when an absolutely healthy, absolutely right, relation exists between a father, mother and child, in the interest between father, mother and child. It is not to be found in anything that can be experienced between men anywhere else in the whole round world, Certainly not in ordinary consciousness.

Now while you are getting clear in your mind about, let us say, the mother's love (you can do it too in this fundamental way) about the love developed in the mother immediately she bears a child—this love of the mother for her child which obviously springs from the very sources of nature—try to become clear about this mother love, and then ask whether this mother love is dominant in any scientific investigations ordinarily carried out by the well-informed, even by those who are doing research work in social science. This mother love must be there in the thoughts developed about the social structure if these thoughts are to have reality in them and not unreality. The only form of thought in human life that could be right socially is what is thought out socially and with mother love.

And now take the various social reformers and social thinkers. Try for once to let work upon you such writings, for example, as those of Carl Marx, or people of his ilk, Schmoller or Reacher or anyone else you like, and ask yourself whether these, while thinking out their so-called social and political laws, in this devising of social and political laws, let themselves be influenced by what is there in the mother's love for her child when this love takes a healthy course. This must have attention drawn to it, my dear friends! A sound solution of the so-called social problem is possible only if this solution is forthcoming from thinkers able to develop mother love in solving their problems; you will understand what I mean by this. The solving of present-day social demands depends on this very human matter. It is not a matter of sagacity nor ordinary cleverness nor of belief in what is learned; it is a question of enhancing the capacity for love to the degree to which mother love can be developed, or we might also say the direct, intimate love in the common life of father, mother and child.

Here you will be right in making an objection. You will say: Yes, on earth matters are so arranged that the social structure has in a certain sense the family as its unit, and on earth the family as such is undoubtedly fully justified, yet the whole of mankind cannot be one family! This is an objection that naturally will be forthcoming at once. If we are to think out social laws with mother love, however, the consequence would actually have to be the whole of mankind becoming one family. Naturally that cannot be, Whoever knows what a real thought is, a real thought with nothing of the charlatan or abstract about it, will have to admit that of course nobody is immediately capable of behaving to every child as though it were his own, that every child cannot behave to all other women, all other men, as it would to its mother or father. Thus all mankind cannot become one family. That is perfectly right, my dear friends, but just because that is right another necessity arises for us. As we live here as physical men on the physical earth we should by no means be able to succeed in making all mankind into one family; whoever wanted this would naturally be wanting an absurdity. But we could arrive at it another way and in another way indeed it must happen. As physical men we should not be able to stand in the relation of father, mother and child. But when there takes root in mankind the knowledge that spirit and soul live in every human being, that a divine spiritual being shines forth from the eyes of everyone, and the message of a divine spiritual being rings in his words, when in other words man's immortal soul is no longer recognised simply in the abstract, then, my dear friends, the moment will have arrived, not indeed where physical man is concerned but with regard to what man hides intimately within him as his baling of soul and spirit, when we shall be able to behave to one another as if all mankind were one big family. But this will not happen until people meet each other with immediate feeling and it is recognised: When I look people in the eye the infinite shines towards me; when I hear them speak it is not only physical sound speaking but the divine spiritual being of their soul—if this becomes direct experience, just as we experience any blue or red surface, then we shall feel that man when expressing himself is of a divine spiritual nature, and shall learn not to recognise simply with blind faith that a man has an immortal soul, but we shall directly perceive this immortal soul in what he utters. For in this way we shall be able to enter into connection with the soul and spirit of each human being. This is something that will alone make the solution of the so-called social question possible, the one and only thing. Therefore we find this solution of the social question in the recognition of man's divine spiritual nature, in the recognition that what goes around on the earth as the human physical body, is only the outward expression of what lights up in every man out of the eternal. We can have the same relation to what lights up in every man out of the eternal, as we can have in the right relation of the smallest family unit. This is possible, possible in every sense. When recognising this we can capture that love for all men which is as great as the love of family.

There is naturally no point in the objection, which would be superficial too, if we remarked about things in the following way: Yes, but there are also bad people. There are also bad children, my dear friends, whom we even have to punish, but there is love in our punishment. The moment we see the divine spiritual light up in human beings, when we see it is necessary we shall punish, but punish lovingly; above all we shall learn one thing which might be said to be practised only instinctively, that is, to meet other men as if we both belonged to the same family. When we meet another man in this way we punish but we do not hate the man; even when we punish him we do not hate the human being who is our son, but we hate his wrong doing. We love the man, we hate his misdeeds and his faulty training, and we know how to distinguish in him between the man and what has overcome him. When people have once understood the great, the infinite, difference existing between human love, and hatred of the misdeeds that assail mankind, a right relationship can be established among men. When we fellow our inmost human nature there is never any possibility for our hating anyone. Naturally we have much cause to hate human crimes, misdeeds, human weakness of character, human lack of character. Where we largely go wrong in our social behaviour is as a rule in bringing against the man what should be brought against the misdeed, the crime. We do this today instinctively, but must become conscious that the development of mankind today lies in the direction of distinguishing between hatred for the misdoing and the love that all the some can be felt for the man.

Oh, my dear friends, more would be done to solve the burning social demands of today by recognising truths of this kind than by much else going around the world as social quackery or social theory. In face of the materialism that everywhere employs what is grossly material, it is difficult to make any impression when speaking of such things as these, for the simple reason that people today are largely materialistic in their instincts, which is a more harmful matter than their holding materialist theories. Crime, lack of character, cannot be seen and do not exist materially. But because people want to hate what is material, they associate the material man with their hate and there arise countless misunderstandings.

What arises from this as a bad misunderstanding is that sometimes from some kind of misunderstood sensations and feelings, man is confused with what he does in another direction also. There is carelessness in judging what a man does when it is said: Oh, we do not want to hurt the man, now and then one has to overlook things for sheer love of one's fellows. If a verdict is given in the matter by turning ones's eyes towards the wrong doing and not confounding the man in his inmost life of soul with his misdeed, then indeed the right judgment will be arrived at. It is less trouble on the one hand, if you dislike someone, to mete out so-called justice to him; it is also easy because it suits us to excuse failings which may cause harm in the external world. In the common life of mankind a very great deal hangs on the way we are able to separate what ought to arouse our antipathy from the immediate being of man as man.

My dear friends, I have often emphasised that what is spoken here about these connections is not meant as a criticism of the culture and conditions of the times; it is simply a description of them. Therefore you will also understand when I say that mankind of so-called western civilisation, the people of Europe with their American cousins, for a time must go through the stage not only of taking things materialistically in accordance with science, but also of taking life itself materialistically confounding men with their deeds in the way referred to. This has to do with the education; for the right development of other qualities to be possible, men, must in this sphere, too, pass through the stage of materialism. Men, however, who have remained behind at earlier stages of culture have preserved a great deal of these former cultural stages in which there was still atavistic clairvoyance. And atavistic clairvoyance has since resulted in quite definite trends of feeling and attitudes of soul. We people of Europe can only be a match for what assails us from certain directions, if we reflect upon the arguments put forward today. For let us not forget this—that thinkers looked upon as very enlightened as, for example, Immanuel Kant, speak—not indeed out of a certain basis of Christianity but of the church—a thinker of this ilk speaks of human nature being fundamentally evil. And how widespread is this error—for it may indeed be called so—that human nature in its actual depths is evil: In the civilised world of Europe and its American sister country it is said that if human nature is not under control it is evil. This is actually a European opinion, an opinion of the European Church.

There is a race of men who do not hold this view, who have preserved another view from former times, for example the Chinese people. In the Chinese world-conception, as such, there rules the proposition, there rules the principle, that man is by nature good. Here is a mighty difference which would play a much greater part than is thought in the conflict that will develop between men. To be sure, speaking of these things today, people believe one as little as they would have done had the war we are now engaged in been spoken of in 1900. Yet it is true all the same that a struggle is also being prepared between the Asiatic and European peoples. And then quite other things will play a part than have been played, are played even now or will be played later, in the catastrophic struggle we are in the midst of today.

There is really a great difference in the whole way of experiencing whether the Chinese have the conviction that man is by nature good, or the European holds that human nature is fundamentally weighed down by evil—from the standpoint of the world-conception of the people there is a great difference in which way a man thinks. How a man thinks is expressed in the whole of life's temperament, in the entire attitude of the life of soul. For the most part men have their attention riveted on the outer features of life's conflict and they generally pay little heed to what is lying in the depths of the inner nature.

There is just one thing I should like to mention. You see, the fact that the European, although he may not generally admit it, is always at heart convinced that man is actually bad and has to be made good only through education and restraint, restraint by the State or any other kind, this outlook, from historic necessity, is closely connected with something else. It is connected with—not with the fact itself but with the qualities of feeling underlying the fact—connected with European people having developed through this a certain life of soul in the form we call logic and science. From this you will find it comprehensible that those who really know the Chinese—I don't mean Europeans who know them but those who, Chinese themselves, (cf. The Karma of Vocation) have got to know Europe too, as for example, Ku Hung Ming, often mentioned by me here—that these Chinamen lay stress on there being no equivalent in the Chinese language for logic and science. Thus for what we Europeans call science, for what we call logic, the Chinese have no word at all, since they do not have the thing, because, what Europeans believe to be Chinese Science is something quite different from what we call science and what we call logic, something entirely different from what we Europeans think to be logic in the Chinese soul. So different are men on earth! Attention must be paid to this unless attention is focused on this no discussion of the social problem can bear any fruit. But when heed is paid to such a matter the spiritual horizon becomes wider. And this widening of the spiritual horizon is particularly necessary for the sound understanding of Spiritual Science.

And when many different questions are asked concerning all these things—we have already touched on two today and could still touch on a third—when it is asked why today people in accordance with custom still keep their distance from the truths of Spiritual Science this reason is found among others, that the horizon, the spiritual horizon, of modern man is a very narrow one. However much man may boast of his spiritual horizon today, however greatly, the fact remains that this spiritual horizon is very narrow. Its narrowness is shown in particular by the extraordinary difficulty modern man generally has in getting out of himself where certain things are concerned. And this not only has an effect on his understanding, it influences also his whole life of sympathy and antipathy.

I should like to refer to a fact, a fact well known to quite a number of you, that is to say, the effect of this fact is well known to a number of you; this fact I have already mentioned to you once and should like to mention it again. Now you know that a certain relation existed some years ago between the so-called Theosophical Society and those who today form the Anthroposophical Society. I experienced something remarkable in connection with just those members of the Theosophical Society who were prominent. Already by the beginning of this century, as you know, I had published communications from the so-called Akashic Record, information which I venture to say rested upon personal experience, as does all the rest of what I impart out of the spiritual world. (see Atlantis and Lemuria) When these communications were read by a prominent member of the Theosophical Society people could hardly understand how it arose. I was asked how these communications were received? And it was really impossible to come to any kind of understanding, for the actual methods of anthroposophical research suitable for the present age were totally unknown in that circle. There, more mediumistic methods were used for investigation. Really what was wanted was the name of the medium or medium-like person responsible for these Akashic Record communications. That they were actually the result of the direct observation of a certain human attitude of soul projected into the supersensible, was considered an impossibility! The narrowness of man's horizon speaks in things of this kind. Even in so momentous a sphere, people consider possible only what they are accustomed to, only what is easily understood.

Now I have quoted this instance just because if one is narrow-minded it is really quite im possible to press on to Spiritual Science. In everyday life, however, this narrow-mindedness is the common thing today, always to relate everything back to just the personal, accustomed standpoint. This is what must above all be considered by those very people who are attached to our Movement for Spiritual Science. My dear Friends, I am now going to say something that perhaps there would be no need to say in this way were the things to be said intimately, systematically, but which it is necessary to say when it comes to the external conditions of life. You see, those who take a more particular, active interest in our Movement know indeed how many attacks are made on the sources of this Movement, how bitterly it is persecuted, how many come to hate it who were formerly keen adherents, and so on. Last time indeed I spoke about these things from various points of view. Now it will not be superfluous, from certain aspects, to make clear the reasons for such hostility, such antagonism. I talked to you about the reasons for the antagonism seen here and there last time. Such hostility very frequently becomes particularly strong, however, when appearing among people who also belong, let us say, to some occult society. The hatred that develops in many adherents of one or another society against what is seen here as Spiritual Science, sometimes is really strikingly conspicuous, at times even taking grotesque forms. And it is not superfluous, my deer friends, to pay attention to these things, for we should pay attention to everything that makes us take our membership of this Movement very seriously. It is very true that nowhere is there more charlatanism in the world than where spiritual matters are represented in all kinds of societies. It is easy, therefore, because of so much charlatanism in the world to be suspicious of what arises as a Movement for Spiritual Science. Then those who want to, can easily find support if they say: Yes, once a Society appeared which maintained that it spread abroad all the wisdom of the world—then it was shown up as mere charlatanism! And now another has arisen, again it has proved to be charlatanism'! This must be admitted; there is infinitely much of this charlatanism in the world. Here the capacity for discrimination must come in to distinguish the true from the false.

But another case can arise; something, for example, in the nature of uncertainty may enter the soul. This uncertainty can consist in the following. A man of this kind may come to know what goes on here. Now if he has not an open mind, if he pursues what is personal, he may arrive at the following divided mood of soul. It is possible for him to foresee all manner of danger and to say: Dear me, how is this? I have so often heard of these societies, occult or whatever else they may be; I have never come across in them any knowledge, any real knowledge. It is true, every possible thing is talked of, it is in their books and given out in their ritual, but there is no stream of living knowledge. Now is this Anthroposophy of the same kind or is it something different? And he can find himself in a divided mood of soul. You see, in common parlance, when it is not possible for anyone to go deeply into what is actually living here, it may be said: Is this the kind of swindle that I really find more pleasant since it does not ask so much of one?

My dear friends, the things I give out here are not so unreal as that! Above all they are spoken because I want to point to the necessity for earnestness, dignity, and the capacity for discrimination. I have said this repeatedly, so that the unpleasantness should not arise which very often arises, namely, that the real life of spirit is all around, whereas because it is less trouble people actually prefer to hear it talked about. What calls forth so much antagonism is just the fact of what I have emphasised in my book Theosophy being true here—that only spiritual experiences are spoken of. The antagonism of the Theosophical Society also actually first arose when they noticed our claim to speak of real spiritual experiences. That could not be borne. People are preferred who repeat what has been given in their lectures and repeat it with a certain zeal, but independent spiritual investigation was, fundamentally, the great sin against the Holy Ghost of the Theosophical Society. And this independent spiritual investigation is not as yet to be so easily found in the world today. Once again I have wanted to intimate this at the end of what we have been considering. And it will indeed be necessary for you, my dear friends, really to my heed to these things with a sound mind but also with all earnestness. The times are grave and the remedy for the times that we wish to receive from the spiritual world must also be grave.

We should like to go on speaking of these things tomorrow.