The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The great catastrophe of the War (World War I) reveals how inadequate was men's thinking concerning the social problem. They imagined that they understood what the worker really wants. The demands of the workers, formerly suppressed, are coming to the surface as the powers instrumental in their suppression are now in part destroyed. In many parts of the world, leaders have failed completely to understand the indestructible nature of these human impulses.

The greatest illusions existed among certain key people who, in 1914, could have checked the rush into this war. These persons actually believed that a military victory for their side would hush the mutterings of impending social storm. They have since recognized that it was their own attitude and its consequences that first brought these tendencies to life. During these last fateful years, these leading individuals and the leading classes have been obliged to attune their behavior to the demands of the Socialists. If they could have disregarded this group, they would often have been glad to act differently. The effects of all this are seen in the form events are taking today.

The facts are now before us, fully ripe, and yet the thoughts that accompanied their development are no match for them. While hoping that current happenings could serve the social ideals people had in mind, men have found themselves practically powerless to solve the problems.

The opinion of those under the delusion that it would be possible to retain the old scheme of things in the face of the demands of the workers must be dismissed. When we look at the aims of those who want to remodel social life, we have to admit that party programs are drifting about among us like the dried corpses of now dead creeds. The facts call for decisions for which the creeds of the old parties are altogether unprepared. The parties certainly did evolve along with the facts, but they and their habits of thought have not kept pace with events.

The tragedy revealed in all the attempts to solve the social question arises because the real meaning of the working-class struggle has been misunderstood. Men by no means always read their own purposes correctly.

What is the real meaning of the modern working-class movement? What is its will? Does the usual thinking about the “social problem” reveal that question in its true form? Or is an altogether different line of thought needed?

Such questions cannot be approached impartially unless one has had the opportunity of coming into intimate relationship with the modern worker's soul, his feeling-life. Much has been said and written about how the developments of recent economic life have led to the current demands of the workers. True enough, these have been evolved during the growth period of modern science and capitalism. But recognition of this fact gives no clue at all to the impulses behind these demands. The fact is that, although the demands are economic, the underlying impulses are of a purely human character. One must arrive at the cause of these impulses if one would understand the true form of the social question.

There is a word of striking significance frequently used by the modern worker: he has become “class-conscious.” He no longer follows, more or less unconsciously, the lead of the other classes. He knows he is a member of a class apart and is determined that the relation established between his class and the other classes shall be turned to good account for his own interests.

The way this word, “class-conscious,” is used by the worker standing in the midst of modern technical industry and capitalism, gives an important clue to his view of life. His soul has been impressed and fired by scientific teachings about economic life and its bearing on the destinies of men, and the idea that the “uneducated” working man has had his head turned by Marxism and by later labor writers of the Marxist school will not help towards the necessary understanding of the true facts.

The scientific evolution of recent times is responsible for the concepts that fill the consciousness of the working man. In the demands put forward by the workers today, whether moderates or radicals, we have the expression, not of economic life somehow metamorphosed into human impulse, but of economic science by which the working-class consciousness is possessed. This stands out clearly in the literature of the labor movement, with its scientific flavor and journalistic style.

The individual, working at his machine, may be a complete stranger to “science.” Yet those who enlighten him as to his own position borrow their method from this same “science.”

Everything said about modern economic life, the machine age and capitalism, may throw an instructive light on the underlying facts of the modern working class movement. But the decisive light on the present social situation does not come directly from the fact that the worker has been placed at the machine and harnessed to the capitalist scheme of things. This light comes from the different fact that his class consciousness has been filled with a definite kind of thought, shaped at the machine under the influence of the capitalist economy.

Many people may look at the stress laid on this factor as a mere dialectic play upon terms, but anyone who wants to understand the working-class movement must start by knowing how the worker thinks. For the working-class movement, all the way from its moderate efforts at reform to its most devastating excesses, is not created by “forces outside man,” that is to say “economic impulses.” This movement is created by human beings, their mental conceptions and the impulses of their will. These human ideas and impulses do not lie in what capitalism and the machine have implanted in the worker's consciousness. The labor movement turned to modern science for the sources of its thought because capitalism and the machine could give to the soul of the worker no nourishment worthy of a human being.

The medieval craftsman did not feel this lack. He got such inner substance from his craft that his humanity was enhanced by his work. Tending a machine under the capitalist scheme of things, the man was thrown back upon himself, his own inner life. As a result, the worker's class consciousness turned towards the scientific type of thought.

This change occurred at the time the leading classes were working towards a scientific mode of thought which, however, was lacking in spiritual force. The old views of the universe gave man his place as a soul in the total spiritual complex, but modern science viewed him as a natural object set in a purely natural order of things. The old conceptions withdrew from the everyday world and lived on full of things that meant nothing to the souls of the workers.

The leading classes did not look for new substance for their consciousness, because they were able to hold on to the old that had been handed down to them. But the modern worker was torn out of his old setting. His life had been put on a totally new basis. For him there disappeared all possibility of drawing from the old spiritual springs.

Therefore the faith of the modern worker turned to the modern scientific conception of the world. Here he sought the new content that he needed for his inner consciousness. For the ruling classes the concept of a natural order of things leading up from the lowest animals to man remained purely theoretical, without an emotional content.

The worker took the scientific outlook in earnest and from it drew his own practical conclusions for life. It was the only thing left to him that had the power to awaken faith. Some may smile at this, but it is a fact of modern life on which the fate of the future turns. The educated man has made a pigeonhole for science in the recesses of his soul, but it is the circumstances of actual life that give the direction to his feelings.

The worker may be far from what others call scientific, yet his life's course is charted by such scientific lines of conception. For him science is turned into a creed of life, even though it be science filtered down to its last shallows and driblets of thought.

Now what scientific thought has not brought down from the old order is the consciousness of being rooted, as a spiritual type, in a spiritual world. For a member of the leading classes this presented no difficulty. Life, to him, was filled by the old traditions. But it was different for the worker. His new situation drove the old traditions from his soul. He took over from the leading classes a scientific mode of thought—a spiritual life that denied its spiritual origin.

I know very well how these thoughts will affect a lot of people. Believing they have a practical acquaintance with life, they look at the view expressed here as something remote from realities. But the language of actual facts, as voiced by the state of the world, will increasingly prove such a view as theirs to be a delusion.

I know, too, how someone professing working-class views will react to what has been said. I can hear him saying, “Just like the rest of them. Trying to shunt the real gist of the social question off onto lines that promise to be smooth for the bourgeois.” He is unable to see that he himself lives as a working man but thinks as a bourgeois, using a type of thought inherited from them.

The scientific mode of conception will only become life-sustaining when, in its own fashion, it evolves an inner content. In its transition to the new age, the old spiritual life has turned into something which, for the working class, is ideology. The worker feels that this inner life does not come to him from a spiritual world of its own.

An important factor in the modern labor movement is this belief that spiritual life is ideology. It affects the worker's mood of soul as expressed in current social demands. Anyone who says that this idea exists only in the minds of the workers' leaders does not know what has been going on. The influence of this concept ties in with the demands of the Socialist and extends even to the deeds of those who “hatch revolution” out of the blind promptings of their inner life.

The non-worker listens with dismay to the worker saying, “Nothing short of socializing the means of production will make it possible for me to have a life worthy of a human being.” But the non-worker is unable to form the faintest notion of how his own class, in the period of transition, not only summoned the worker to labor at means of production that were not his, but even failed to give him anything to satisfy and sustain the soul in his labor.

Worker and non-worker may both insist that the soul does not come into the picture, but such insistence does not touch the essence of the social question nor reveal its true form. For if the working population had inherited from the leading classes a genuine spiritual substance they would have had a different consciousness within their souls and would have voiced their social demands in a different fashion.

The unhappiness of the workers over the ideological character of spiritual life, even though they are not definitely conscious of it, makes them suffer acutely. In its significance for the social question today, it far outweighs all demands for an improvement in external conditions, justifiable as some of these demands may be.

[ 19 ] The modern proletarian movement has sprung out of thoughts. I did not come to this conclusion as a result of lengthy pondering, but from years of actual experience and observation, when I was a lecturer at a workers' institute, giving instruction in a wide variety of subjects. And I have had occasion to go further and follow up the tendencies at work in the various unions and different occupational groups.

[ 21 ] It is hard for members of the middle class today to put themselves into the soul of the worker or understand how the worker's still fresh, unexhausted intelligence opened up to receive a work such as that of Karl Marx. I am not proposing to discuss the substance of the Marxian system. This is not the significant thing. What seems to me significant above all else is the fact that the most powerful impulse at work in the labor world today is a thought system.

[ 22 ] No practical movement, making the most matter-of-fact demands, has ever rested almost entirely on a basis of thought alone. Indeed it is in a way the first movement of its kind based completely on a scientific approach. But this must be seen in its proper light. Of main importance is the fact that thoughts have become the determining factor of the worker's attitude toward life while in other classes thoughts affect only the activity in the intellectual sphere.

[ 23 ] Thus, what has become an inward reality in the worker is a reality that he cannot acknowledge because thought life has been handed down to him as an ideology. He really builds up his life upon thoughts, yet he feels thoughts to be unreal ideology. This inner contradiction, with all that it involves, must be clearly recognized. Otherwise, it is impossible to understand the workers' views of life and the way those who hold these views set about realizing them in practice.

[ 24 ] One cannot expect a spiritual life that one feels as mere ideology to provide deliverance from a social situation one has resolved to endure no longer. The scientific cast of the modern worker's thought has turned not only science but also religion, art, morality and legal rights into so many constituent parts of human ideology. He fails to see behind these branches of the spiritual life the workings of an actual reality that exists in his own life and could contribute something to material existence. To him the intellectual sphere is only the mirror image of the material life. He is convinced that anything that will lead to the removal of social difficulties can arise only out of the sphere of the material processes themselves.

[ 25 ] In fact the impotence of the spiritual life is an article of faith with a large part of the working class, and is openly stressed in Marxism and similar creeds. Yet the man obliged to lead the life of a worker today needs a spiritual life from which inner strength can come, strength to give him the sense of his own human dignity. The discovery of a path out of the maze of confusion into which social affairs have fallen depends on a right insight into this fact. The path has been blocked by the social system that has arisen, under the influence of the leading classes, with the new form of industrial economy. The strength to open it must be achieved.

[ 26 ] In a human community where spiritual life plays a merely ideological role, the general social life lacks one of the forces that can make and keep it a living organism. The impotence of the spiritual life in modern man is what is ailing the body social today, and the disease is made worse by the reluctance to acknowledge its existence. Once this fact is acknowledged, there will be a basis on which to develop the kind of thinking needed for the social movement.

[ 27 ] At present the worker thinks he has come in contact with a major force in his soul when he talks about his “class consciousness.” The truth is that ever since he was caught up into the capitalistic economic machine he has been searching for a spiritual life that would sustain his soul and give him a consciousness of his human dignity. Yet there is no possibility of this with a spiritual life which he feels to be an ideology.

This human consciousness was what he was seeking. He could not find it, so he replaced it with “class consciousness” born of the economic life. His eyes are riveted on the economic life alone, as though some overpowering influence held them there. He no longer believes that anywhere in the spirit or in the soul can there be a latent force capable of supplying the impulse needed for the social movement. All he has faith in is that the evolution of the economic life, devoid of spirit and soul, can bring about the state of things he feels to be worthy of man. So he is driven to seek his welfare in a transformation of the economic life alone.

[ 28 ] He has been forced to the conviction that with this mere transformation of the economic, all the social ills would disappear. He feels these ills were brought on through private enterprise, through the egoism of the individual employer, and also through the individual employer's powerlessness to do justice to the employee's claims of human self-respect. So he was led to believe that the only welfare for the body social lay in converting all private ownership of the means of production into a communal concern or into actual communal property. This conviction is due to people's eyes having, as it were, been removed from everything belonging to soul and spirit and fixed exclusively on the purely economic process.

[ 29 ] Hence the paradox in the working-class movement. The modern worker believes that the economic life itself will, of necessity, develop everything that will ultimately give him his rights as man, the rights for which he is fighting. Yet in the heart of the fight something different makes its appearance, something which never could be an outcome of the economic life alone.

The fact is that this element lies in the direct line of evolution, through the old slave system, through the serfdom of the feudal age, to the modern proletariat of labor. This is what provides the fundamental force actuating the social purpose of the modern worker. It is related to the fact that the modern capitalistic system of economy recognizes basically nothing but commodities. In its processes something has been turned into a commodity which the worker feels must not and cannot be a commodity: the labor of the worker. If only the loathing that he feels at this were recognized as the fundamental force that it is!

[ 30 ] Once people become aware of what this loathing means, they will have discovered the second of the two impulses making the current social question so urgent. The first, as was indicated earlier, is that spiritual life is felt as an ideology.

[ 31 ] The fact that labor is still stamped with the character of a commodity has not remained unnoticed, but in studying it, people keep their attention fixed entirely on economic life. They see how the economic life gave the commodity character to human labor. What they do not see is that it is a necessity inherent in economic life that everything incorporated in it becomes a commodity.

Economic life consists in the production and useful consumption of commodities. One cannot divest human labor of its commodity character unless one finds a way of separating it from the economic process and bringing it under social forces that will do away with its commodity character. Any other form of industrial economy will only make labor a commodity in some other manner.

The labor question cannot take its place in its true form within the social question until it is recognized that the considerations of economic life (which determine the laws governing the circulation, exchange and consumption of commodities) are not considerations which should govern human labor.

[ 32 ] Modern thinking has not learned to distinguish the totally different fashions in which the two things enter into economic life. On the one hand there is labor, which is intimately bound up with the human being himself. On the other hand there are those things that proceed from another source and are dissociated from the human being. The latter circulate along the paths that all commodities must take from their production to consumption. Sound thinking along these lines can show both the true form of the labor question as well as the proper place of economic life in a healthy society.

[ 33 ] Thus we see that the “social question” divides itself into three distinct parts. The first is the question of a healthy form of spiritual life within the body social. The second is the consideration of labor, and the right way to incorporate it into the life of the community. Third is the correct deduction as to the proper place and function of economic life in today's society.

[ 1 ] Judging from the fruitless discussions now going on in many circles over the Works Councils [Betriebsräte], it is plain to see how very little understanding there is of the demands that the historical evolution of humanity has created for the present age and the near future. That democracy and a social form of life represent two impulses struggling to realize themselves within present-day human nature is an insight that has escaped entirely the vast majority of participants in such discussions. Both impulses will continue to cause unrest and destruction in public life until institutions are provided within which they can unfold themselves; but the social impulse that must live in the economic process cannot, because of its essential nature, manifest itself democratically. The aim of this social impulse is that people engaged in economic production should pay attention to the legitimate needs of their fellows. The kind of management that this impulse demands is one that regulates the economic process on the basis of what individuals engaged in it actually do for one another. What they do, however, must be based upon contractual agreements that arise from the economic positions of the individuals concerned. If these contractual agreements are to have a social effect, two things are necessary. First, these agreements must originate as a free initiative of those concerned—an initiative that is based on insight. Second, these individuals must live in an economic body that enables one through such agreements to convey in the best possible way the services of each to the community. The first demand can be fulfilled only when there is no sort of political influence intervening between those working within the economy and their personal relationship to the sources and interests of economic life itself. The second demand will be satisfied when agreements are made not according to the demands of an unregulated market, but rather according to the conditions that result when branches of industry associate with each other and with associations of consumers as dictated by real needs, so that the circulation of goods is managed as these associations see fit. Such associations represent a model for determining how, in each particular case, economic activity should be governed contractually.

[ 2 ] There can be no politicking when the economy is run in this way. There is only the competence and skill of each person in some special branch of industry, and the structuring of these to the best possible social advantage. What is done in an economic body of this kind is decided not by counting votes, but by the voice of real needs: it will necessarily concern itself with finding those most competent to perform certain tasks, and then conveying products to the consumers deemed appropriate by the cooperating associations.

[ 3] However, just as in a natural organism one single organic system would destroy itself through its specific activity if there were no other systems to keep it in balance, so does one function of the social organism need to be kept in balance by another. Work within the economic sphere would, over time, inevitably lead to comparable damage, unless it were counteracted by the political system of laws—that must rest on a democratic basis, just as the economic life cannot. In the sphere of democratic law-making, politicking is appropriate. What is done there works within economic activity to counteract its innate tendency to cause damage. If one were to harness economic life to the administration of the state, one would deprive it of its efficiency and freedom of movement. Those engaged in economic work must receive the law from somewhere outside of economic life, and only apply it in the economic life itself.

[ 4 ] It is matters such as this that should be taken up by those who are busy planning Works Councils. Instead, there is a great deal of oration on viewpoints consistent with the old principle of shaping political legislation according to economic interests. That presently there happen to be different groups pursuing this same principle does not change the fact that a new spirit is still lacking today in places where it is already so urgently needed.

[ 5 ] Today's circumstances are such that there can be no return to health in public life until a sufficiently large number of people recognize the real social, political and spiritual demands of the times, and have the good will and energy to pass on this vital understanding to others. To the extent that this understanding is spread, the remaining obstacles to social health would disappear. For it is merely a political superstition that these obstacles have any objective existence beyond the reach of human insight; it is an assertion made only by people who can never understand the actual relationship between theory and praxis. They are the people who say, “These idealists have quite excellent, well-meant ideas. However, as matters now stand, these ideas cannot be put in practice.” This is not at all the case; the only obstacle to the practical realization of certain ideas at present are those who hold this belief and have the power to use it as an obstacle. And such power is possessed also by those who have gathered around them the masses of the people from former party groups; the masses obediently follow them, their “leaders.” Therefore, one of the fundamental conditions for a return to social health is the disbanding of these old party groupings, and a heightened understanding for the kinds of ideas that grow out of real practical insight in-dependent of any connection with old parties and groups. An immediate and burning question is how to find ways and means to replace the old party creeds with this independent judgement so that they can become a nucleus around which people of all party affiliations can gather—people who are able to see that the existing parties have had their day and that the present social conditions are sufficient proof that their day is over.

[ 6 ] It is understandable that those who need to recognize this do not find it easy. The rank and file do not find it easy because they do not have the time or the leisure (and very often not the training) this recognition requires. It is not easy for the leaders because both their prejudices and their power are bound up with all they have stood for until now. This situation obliges us all the more urgently to look beyond the party traditions of the day and seek the real progress of humanity outside, not within them. Today it is not enough merely to know what should take the place of existing institutions. What is necessary is to elaborate this new way of thinking in a way that will lead as quickly as possible to the disbanding of the old party system and will guide people's efforts toward new goals. Whoever lacks the courage to do this can contribute nothing toward a new and healthy social order. Whoever is deluded by the belief that such efforts are utopian, builds on sinking ground.

Flyer, February 1919

Term:

[ 1 ] 1. The essence of the socialization of the economy is that the organization of production and sales are regulated in accordance with the economic laws inherent in them, and that no "rights" or powers of authority are involved in the resulting economic organism. All "rights" are exercised by the political organism, which is equal to the economic organization and is based on the equality of all men before the law. All intellectual achievements, including technical ideas, are to be placed under the free, individual administration of a third, equal intellectual organism.

[ 2 ] 2. The representatives of the economic organism shall be the elected members of the associations established on the basis of the classification of occupations and the distribution of labor. Representatives of the political organization may be elected on the basis of universal, equal (secret) suffrage. Representatives of the spiritual organization shall be the personalities placed by circumstances at the head of the individual spiritual branches. Delegations elected from the representatives of each of the three bodies serve to connect them. (The three bodies stand side by side like three relatively independent states that organize their common affairs through envoys.)

Practical implementation:

[ 3 ] 3. The transfer of branches of the economy from the present to the future state shall be effected with due regard to the present economic condition, in such a manner that all factors (employers and employees in every form) shall participate in the fundamental (constituent) reorganization, and that the present possible economic organization shall be established on opportunistic conditions.

[ 4 ] 4. The new economic order thus sought must under no circumstances lead to an interruption of consumption by breaking off economic continuity.

[ 5 ] 5. Everything that intervenes in the economic organism as a law that is the same for all people (such as accident prevention, damage through usury and so on) is subject to the powers of the political organization. The general taxes shall be expenditure taxes (which is in no way to be confused with indirect taxes). Revenues as such do not become taxable; they become so at the moment when the public has an interest in them, i.e. when they are transferred into circulation.

Branches of the economy:

[ 6 ] The following can be considered as the most necessary economic sectors to which point 3 should be applied immediately:

1. Mining
2. Iron
3. Electricity
4. Hydropower and its land
5. Gas and water supply
6. Aeronautics
7. Trams; all types of roads
8. Canalization and canal shipping
9. Chemical industry
10. Grain growing and grain processing
11. Sugar industry, brandy and so on
12. Tobacco industry
13. Everything relating to the cultivation of land (whereas the ownership of land belongs to the political body)
14. Insurance
15. Money institutions

The peace treaty

[ 7 ] It is to be effected in such a way that representatives of the three corporations negotiate with foreign countries from the German side with independent mandates emanating entirely from their corporation. A unilateral socialization based on aspects other than those mentioned is also impracticable for Germany for reasons of foreign policy. On the other hand, a justification of foreign policy for the establishment of the three corporations is quite promising.

A recent series of lectures and discussions with workmen and co-workers in Stuttgart has given me deep insight into what takes place in human souls at the present time, into what exists as inner tragedy in mankind's evolution. Now I am again able to spend a few days here in this place which is so closely bound up with the work we must believe will produce the force to guide the present tragedy of humanity into more hopeful channels.

At no time perhaps has there been less inclination than now to raise the soul to the spiritual worlds in true fashion, and it is especially necessary now to do so.¹ Only from these spiritual worlds can come the strength modern humanity requires if it is to go forward in its full humanness. Today there is the most widespread belief that the problems and tasks of the present can be resolved by the thoughts and impulses derived from knowledge based on the external world. How long it will take until a sufficiently large part of humanity will be convinced that real salvation is only attainable on the spiritual path, is extremely difficult to say, for the very reason that reflecting on this question is not fruitful. It is certain, however, that progress can only be made if sufficiently large numbers of people are permeated by the conviction that salvation can come only from the spiritual worlds.

What occupies people's minds today, in the widest circles, are the social problems. However, they lack the intellectual strength to earnestly study these problems, because in the present age the intellectual power of a great part of mankind is as though paralyzed. The belief prevails that the social problems can be mastered by what is called knowledge, but they can never be mastered if they are not tackled from the viewpoint of spiritual knowledge.

We have just passed through a long war. This will be followed by prolonged, perhaps very prolonged fighting by mankind in general. Many people have said that this war, which has been experienced throughout the civilized world, was the most terrible experience of its kind since the beginning of history. We cannot say that this judgment is wrong. The battle which will have to be fought by this or that means, and which will follow this war—the battle between Orient and Occident, between Asia, Europe and America—will be the greatest spiritual battle ever waged by mankind. Everything that has flowed through the Christian world into humanity as impulses and forces will pour over civilization in tremendous, elemental waves of warfare.

It is possible to state today in a simple formula the great contrast between the Orient and Occident. But this simple formula—do not take it as simple. It contains an enormous quantity of human impulses. You know that in my book The Threefold Social Order I drew attention to the fact that for extensive circles of present-day humanity spiritual life has become an “ideology”; that what constitutes men's spiritual properties—rights, customs, science, art, religion, and so on—is looked upon as merely a vapor rising from the only true reality, from the economic means of production, the economic foundation. I spoke to you about these matters when I took leave of you here several months ago.

“Ideology.” That is the answer many people give today when spiritual life is spoken of. It is all something that is mirrored in the human soul from the only reality, the economic reality; it is mere “ideology.” There is much reason to reflect on the real meaning of this word “ideology” in world culture for it means a great deal. One can connect this word with no other word more closely than with the word “maya” of oriental wisdom. “Maya”—“illusion”—properly translated into occidental language means “ideology.” Every other translation of this word is less exact. Thus, we may say: The same concept that the Oriental connects with the word maya is connected by a great part of western humanity with the word ideology. But what a tremendous difference! What does the Oriental think when he uses the word maya? He thinks that the external world is maya; everything that confronts our senses and the intellect bound up with them is maya, the great illusion, and the only reality is what arises in the soul. What a human being achieves in the sphere of soul and spirit, that constitutes reality. What arises and pours forth from man's inner life is reality. What presents itself externally to the senses is maya, illusion, ideology.

The opposite conviction, that the only reality is what presents itself to the outer senses, is spread over a great part of Western humanity. Precisely what the Oriental calls maya constitutes reality for a great part of Western mankind; and what the Oriental calls reality, that which blossoms and wells up in the soul, constitutes ideology, illusion, for a large segment of Europe and America.

You see here a great contrast. This makes deep inroads into men's souls; it shapes them across the earth into two quite distinct kinds of beings. If you survey what has happened in the civilized world in recent years you will say—I hope: Fundamentally speaking, everything that is said about the reasons for this world catastrophe is just skimming the surface, is merely superficial opinion. What has expressed itself in this terrible fighting has arisen with elemental power from unconscious depths. It can be clearly seen today that people participated in this fighting without knowing the reason for it. It is the expression of what this contrast, which will not be resolved for a long time, has brought to the surface as elemental forces. The anti-social element at present is so strong that it has split mankind into these two essentially different parts.

If you connect what I have just stated with other things I have explained to you, you will find that the striving of the West is for freedom. No matter whether this freedom is understood or misunderstood, the longing for freedom wells up as if from dark foundations of the human soul. Turn your gaze to the East. What is called freedom in the West has no real meaning for the East; no concepts or feelings are connected with it. We do not think about what we experience most intensely. Just consider how little attention people give to the phenomena of nature surrounding them every day. They do not think about their immediate experiences. The Oriental, in pursuing the reality natural to him, the inner reality, lives in the freedom he derives from the peculiarities of his race, his folk, and his tribe. He does not think about it. The further we look toward the West the more we become aware of the fact that freedom has been lost in the course of the historical evolution of mankind. Because the Western peoples do not have it they have to strive for it.

We could cite many more instances; in every one of them we would find this fundamental difference between West and East. There is already a first indication of what perhaps will occur in the next few years. At the moment this manifests in outer symptoms taking place in Asia and about which Europe is still silent today—silent for well-known reasons. The fact, for instance, that more than half the population of India is near starvation will bring to birth, out of the spirituality of the Indian nation, something that will be very different from what has happened in Europe. These are outer symptoms. But also, in regard to these outer symptoms mankind is divided today into two essentially different parts. For the Indian hunger signifies something totally different from what it means to the European, because the Indian has behind him a soul development throughout millennia which is quite different from that of the European. These facts have to be sharply focused by anyone who wants to comprehend the course of mankind's evolution. Today we must be clear that what is usually called the social question is something much more complicated than is ordinarily imagined. This social question is an accompanying phenomenon of the culture that arose after the middle of the fifteenth century. I have repeatedly spoken to you about this significant incision in the history of civilized mankind in the middle of the fifteenth century. Since that time natural science has gradually arisen in its modern coloring. During that period, however, industrialism also has arisen in its modern coloring. Natural science and industrialism have been poured over modern humanity and have given it its particular spiritual trend.

I have spoken to you about the special nature of this natural science and have told you that intelligent people, who today reflect on what natural science has to offer, say: What it offers is not the world, it is rather a specter of the world. Everything scientists have thought out and that has become popular education, all this—much more so than is ordinarily imagined—is belief in a spectral world; actually superstition. And along with this world of specters there exists the spiritual effect modern industrialism has had upon men.

We must give attention now to the spiritual significance of this industrialism. Consider what primarily controls it—the machine. A machine is different from everything else man makes use of in outer life. Just consider the animal. If you turn your scientific or other thoughts to an animal—I will not speak today of man in this connection—you can carry on any amount of research concerning an animal, but something always remains, something of a deep and divine essence. You cannot fathom an animal; you cannot discover its secrets. There is always something behind your thoughts about an animal that remains unknown. This is no less the case with a plant. Take even a crystal, the wonderful forms of the crystal world. You will have to say: Certainly we can grasp the external nature of the crystal world, its forms and so on, if we are trained in this respect, but much remains that man can revere and to which his ordinary, non-clairvoyant intellect does not penetrate.

Now consider a machine. It is entirely transparent to our thinking. We know how its power is produced, know the position of its pistons, the magnitude of friction. We can calculate its efficiency if we know the various factors; there is nothing behind the machine which would lead us to say that it cannot be penetrated by the ordinary, non-clairvoyant intellect. This is of great significance for the mutuality of man and machine. And when one has stood once again before many thousands of people who have to do with machines, one knows what it is that drips into these souls from the spiritually transparent machine. For the machine has nothing behind it that can only be divined, something not surveyable by man's non-clairvoyant intellect. That fact that a machine is soul-spiritually so completely transparent that its power and power-relationships lie clearly open before the human senses and intellect—this fact makes contact with machines so disastrous for mankind. That is what sucks out the human heart and soul, making man dry and inhuman.

Natural science together with the machine threatens civilized humanity with a terrible threefold destruction. Now what is this danger threatening modern man if he does not make up his mind to look to the supersensible? In regard to knowledge, that ideal presses to gain control which the scientists describe as follows: One endeavors to arrive at an astronomical way of thinking about nature; that is, thinking fashioned after the pattern of astronomy. When the modern chemist thinks about the content of a molecule he thinks of the atoms within the molecule as being in a certain force relationship. He conceives of it in the form of a small planetary and solar system. To explain the whole world astronomically becomes an ideal. And astronomy itself, what is its ideal? To conceive of the whole world-structure as a machine! Now add to this the work people do by machine!

These are the influences that have become increasingly strong since the middle of the fifteenth century and rob men of their humanness. If they were to continue thinking in the way they think about machine-like astronomy and about the industrialism in which they work, human spirits would become mechanized; human souls vegetized, sleepy; and human bodies animalized.

Look toward America, the climax of the mechanization of the human spirit! Look toward the European East, toward Russia, the wild and frightful impulses and instincts that run riot there—the animalization of the body. In the middle, in Europe, the sleepiness of the soul. Mechanization of the spirit, vegetizing of the soul, animalization of the body—this is what we have to face without deceiving ourselves.

It is characteristic of humanity's path since the middle of the fifteenth century that not only two life-elements have been lost but also a third. Today a powerful party puts forward “social democracy.” In other words, it welds together socialism and democracy although they are the opposite of each other. This party welds them together and leaves out the spirit. For socialism can only refer to economic life, democracy only to the sphere of civil rights, and individualism would refer to spiritual life. Freedom has been omitted from the phrase “social democracy,” otherwise it would have to be called “individualistic social democracy.” Then all three aspects of human concern would come to expression in such a title. But it is characteristic of the modern age that the third element has been omitted; that the spirit has really become maya, the great illusion for civilized humanity of the West, for Europe and its colonial outgrowth, America. This is what we have to bear in mind when we consider spiritual science in the sense of a great cultural question. What lives in the demands of the present cannot in reality be a subject for discussion. These are historical demands. Socialism is an historical demand. But liberalism, freedom, individualism, these also are an historical demand, although they have been little noticed by modern men. People will no longer have anything to say unless they establish the social organism in the sense of the threefold order: socialism for economic life, democracy for the life of rights, and individualism for spiritual life.

This will have to be looked upon as the real, the only salvation of mankind. But we must not delude ourselves about the fact that precisely these intensive, unyielding historical demands of the present age create other demands for one who has deeper insight into these matters. Adults will have to live in a social organism which, in regard to the economic aspect, will be social; in regard to government, democratic; and from the spiritual aspect, liberal, free. The great problem of the future will be that of education. How will we have to deal with children so that they, as adults, can grow into the social, democratic, and spiritually free areas of living in the most comprehensive way? Spiritual science has pointed to this problem of education as present-day humanity will have to understand it if it wishes to advance. Social demands will remain chaotic if it is not seen that at their base lies the most urgent problem of the present time: the problem of education. If you wish to acquaint yourselves with the broad guide-lines concerning this problem of education you only need to study my little book, Education of The Child From The Point Of View Of Spiritual Science. Here one of the most important questions of the present time has been brought to the surface, namely, the social question of education. The widest circles of modern humanity will have to learn what spiritual science has to offer in regard to the three epochs of man's youth and their development.

In this book it has been pointed out that between birth and the seventh year, which is the year when the change of teeth occurs, a child is an imitative being, he does what he sees in his surroundings. If you observe him with real understanding you will find that he is an imitative being who does what the grownups do. It is of utmost importance for a child that the people in his surroundings do only what he may imitate; indeed, that they think and feel only what is wholesome for him to imitate. When a child enters physical existence he only continues the experiences he had in the spiritual world prior to conception. There we live, as human beings, within the beings of the higher hierarchies; we do what originates as impulses from the nature of the higher hierarchies. There we are imitators to a much higher degree because we are united with the beings we imitate. Then we are placed into the physical world. In it we continue our habit of being one with our surroundings. This habit then extends to being one with, imitating, the people around us who have to take care of a child's education by doing, thinking, and feeling only what he may imitate. Benefit for a child is all the greater the more he is able to live not in his own soul but in those within his environment.

In the past when man's life was more instinctive he could also rely instinctively on this imitation. This will not be the case in future. Then care will have to be taken that a child be an imitator. In education the question will have to be answered: How can we best shape the life of a child so that he may imitate his surroundings in the best possible way? What has happened in the past in regard to this imitation will have to become increasingly intensive and conscious in the future. For men will have to make clear to themselves that when children are grown to adulthood in the social organism they will have to be free human beings, and one can become free only if as a child one has been a most intensive imitator. This natural power of a child must be strongly developed precisely for the time when socialism will break in upon us. People will not become free beings, in spite of all declaiming and political wailing about freedom, if the power of imitation is not implanted in them in the age of childhood. Only if this is done will they as adults have the basis for social freedom.

From the seventh year of life until puberty, until the fourteenth and fifteenth year, there lives in a child what may be called action based on authority. When a child undertakes what he does because a revered personality in his surroundings says to him, “This is right, this should be done,” then it is the greatest blessing that could happen to him. Nothing is worse than for a child to get accustomed to making his so-called own judgments too early, prior to puberty. A feeling for authority between the ages of seven and fourteen will in future have to be developed more intensively than has been done in the past. All education in this period of life will have to be consciously directed toward awaking in a child a pure, beautiful feeling for authority; for what is to be implanted in him during these years is to form the foundation for what the adult is to experience in the social organism as the equal rights of men. Equal rights among men will not come into existence in any other way, because people will never become ripe for these equal rights if in childhood regard for authority has not been implanted in them. In the past a lesser degree of feeling for authority might have sufficed; in future it will not be so. This feeling will have to be strongly implanted in a child in order to let him mature for that which is not open to argument but arises as an historical demand.

All primary school education in our time must be organized in a way to let people attain this view of the situation. Now I ask you: How far are people today, how far is modern teacher-training from an insight into these things? How must we work if this insight is to be gained? And it must be gained, because only if this is firmly achieved can salvation come.

If today one visits those countries which have the first revolution already behind them, what does one experience in regard to their programs for so-called “consolidated schools”? What are their programs? To the person who has insight into the relationships existing in human nature, their socialistic educational programs are the most terrifying imaginable. The most awful, frightening things to be thought out and placed before mankind today are the school programs, the curricula, the organized education connected with the name Lunatscharski, the Russian Minister of Education. The educational program developed in Russia murders all true socialism. But also in other regions of Europe the educational programs are actually cancerous evils, particularly the socialist programs of education, because they proceed from the almost unbelievable principle that schools must be established after the pattern of adult life in the social organism. I have read school programs whose first principle is the abolition of head-masters; the teachers should stand in a relationship of absolute equality with the students, the entire school should be built up on comradeship. If one speaks against such a principle today, let us say in South Germany where matters have not advanced as far as other regions in this respect, then one is branded as a person who does not understand anything about social life.

Those people, however, who are in earnest in regard to the creation of a truly social organism, must above everything else be clear about the fact that such an organism can never arise with the socialistic programs for education. Because, if socialism is introduced into schools it cannot exist in life. People become mature for a socially just life together only if during their school years their life has been built upon true authority. We must realize today how far removed from any sense of reality is what people do and think.

After puberty, between the fourteenth and twenty-first years, not only the life of sexual love develops in man; this develops merely as a special manifestation of universal human love. This power of universal human love should be specially fostered when children leave the primary school and go to trade schools or other institutions. For the configuration of economic life, which is a demand of history, will never be warmed through as it should be by brotherly love—that is, universal human love—if this is not developed during the years between fourteen and twenty-one.

Brotherliness, fraternity, in economic life as it has to be striven for in future, can only arise in human souls if education after the fifteenth year works consciously toward universal human love. That is, if all concepts regarding the world and education itself are based on human love, love toward the outer world.

Upon this threefold educational basis must be erected what is to flourish for mankind's future. If we do not know that the physical body must become an imitator in the right way we shall merely implant animal instincts in this body. If we are not aware that between the seventh and fourteenth year the ether body passes through a special development that must be based on authority, there will develop in man merely a universal, cultural drowsiness, and the force needed for the rights organism will not be present. If from the fifteenth year onward we do not infuse all education in a sensible way with the power of love that is bound to the astral body, men will never be able to develop their astral bodies into independent beings. These things intertwine. Therefore, I must say:

Proper imitation develops freedom;

Authority develops the rights life;

Brotherliness, love, develops the economic life.

But turned about it is also true. When love is not developed in the right way, freedom is lacking; and when imitation is not developed in the right way, animal instincts grow rampant.

Thus, in dealing with this problem you see that spiritual science is the proper basis for what must become the content of culture precisely because of the great historical demands that arise today for mankind. Without this content of culture, which can flow only from spiritual science, we cannot make any progress. That is to say, the questions confronting us must be brought into a spiritual atmosphere; this, as a conviction, must enter human souls. I should like to emphasize once more that the length of time it will take for such a conviction to take root may be debated, but in any case, what people unconsciously strive for can in no way be reached unless this conviction lays hold of them. I believe you can see from this the connection between what has been carried on in various fields through our spiritual science and what arises from the distress of the age as the great historical necessities for mankind in the present and immediate future. This was the reason for my statement that spiritual science must be considered in its relationship to the great historical tasks of the present. Of course, people are far, far from judging matters in the way I have characterized. There must first arise in them a tension of dissatisfaction, so that out of the very opposite, purely materialistic striving there may arise the striving for spirituality. Otherwise, how are people to tackle the problem that has led them to use the expressions maya, and ideology, so adversely?

What has resulted from this? You will realize that the impulses behind Oriental and Occidental thinking are very different; but the peculiar thing is that they have produced the same feeling throughout both. This soul orientation has to be considered. That the people of the East described the outer world as maya is of ancient origin. This mystical concept of the world had its great significance then, but it is not significant at present. Because in a sense it has become outmoded the Orient has been overtaken by a certain passive surrender to it; by a false fatalism which, through the Turkish element, has influenced Europe in the crudest manner. Fatalism, an attitude of let-happen-what-may, signifies the passivity of the human will.

In the most precise way the Occidental concept of ideology arose in the same sphere of fatalism through Marx and Engels. This concept is the modern socialistic doctrine that everything of a soul-spirit nature originates in the one and only reality, the economic process, and so is maya, ideology.

How did this doctrine arise? By bringing something fatalistic into the world. Up to the catastrophe of the World War what then was the outer expression of the socialistic doctrine? It was: Capital accumulates, concentrates; bigger and bigger groups of capitalists arise, trusts, monopolies, etc. The economic process of increased concentration of capitalistic groups will run its course quite by itself until the moment arrives when, of itself, the control of capital passes to the proletariat. Nothing has to be done to bring it about, it is an objective, purely economic process. Fatalism.

The Orient arrived at fatalism: the Occident proceeds from fatalism, the majority of the people supporting it. Most of the people are fatalistic. To submit to what the world process is to bring has become the principle of the Orient. It is also the principle of the Occident. For the Orient, however, it is submission to something spiritual; for the Occident it is submission to the material, economic process. In both cases human evolution is seen in a one-sided way. But if we survey evolution as it is today, resulting from former conditions, we find in it a spiritual element that has become ideology, as I have described. This spiritual element is based on Greek culture. The deepest impulse of our souls has a Greek character. Therefore, we have the classical school (Gymnasium), which is an imitation of the Greek soul structure in education. In Greece this soul structure was natural to the growing child up to puberty, for the great mass of the people were the poor people, the slaves, the helots, who were excluded from such education. The conquerors were of different blood. They were the bearers of spiritual life, justifiably so. You can see this expressed in Greek sculpture. Look at a Mercury head (I have often mentioned this) with the special position of the ears, nose, and eyes. In this head the Greeks pointed to that part of the population they had conquered and to whose care they left the outer life of trade, the economy. The spirit had been bestowed by cosmic powers upon the Aryan, characterized by the head of Zeus, of Hera, of Athene.

Do not believe that the Greek soul structure comes only to expression in the general soul constitution. It also expresses itself in the formation of word and sentence in the Greek language. This rests upon an aristocratic soul structure. We have this still in our spiritual life. When the middle of the fifteenth century approached, we did not experience a renewal of spiritual life but only a Renaissance or a Reformation, a refurbishing of the old.

We educate our youth in the classical schools estranged from life. It was self-evident for the Greeks to educate their youth as we do in our Gymnasium, because that was their life. They educated their children and their youth in accordance with their life; we educate youth in our classical schools according to Greek life. For that reason our spiritual life has become world-estranged and is considered to be ideology. Its thoughts are too short-sighted to take hold of life, and, above everything else, to intervene actively in life through deeds.

Beside this element of spiritual education there lives in us a strange education in the field of law. It can be shown in all spheres of life that the middle of the fifteenth century constitutes a mighty incision in humanity's evolution. Grain is expensive today, and everything produced from grain is expensive. It is excessively expensive! If one investigates when it was excessively cheap in European countries one comes to the ninth and tenth centuries. At that time, it was just as much too cheap as today it is too expensive. But in the middle of the fifteenth century it had a normal price.

It is interesting to see how, right down to the price of grain, the fifteenth century shows this great incision in history. At that time when the price of grain was fair over a great part of Europe, the ancient serfdom gradually ceased to exist. But then, in order to destroy this beginning of freedom, Roman law started to become dominant. Today, in the sphere of politics, of rights, we are permeated by Roman law, just as we are permeated in the sphere of spiritual life by the spirit and soul structure of the Greeks. In the sphere of rights, we have been unable to produce anything but a renaissance of Roman law. So, in our social organism we have the Greek spiritual structure and the Roman State structure.

Economic life cannot be shaped as a renaissance. Of course, it is possible to live according to Roman law, and we can educate our children according to the spiritual structure of the Greeks; but we cannot eat what the Greeks ate because this would not satisfy our hunger. Economic life must arise as a part of the present time. Thus, we have the European life of economics as the third element. Since these three areas of living are chaotically intermingled, it is necessary that we bring order into them. This can only be done through the threefold social organism.

In a most one-sided manner people like Marx and Engels have realized that, for they recognized that it will no longer do to govern with a spiritual life that originates in ancient Greece; nor will it do to live with a government that has been derived from Roman law. Nothing remains but economic life, they said, so they concentrated exclusively upon that. Engels said: In future only commodities and the processes of production must be administered and directed; human beings must no longer be governed. This is just as one-sided as it is correct; correct, but terribly one-sided.

Economic life must rest on its own basis. Within the economic member of the social organism only goods—commodities—must be managed and the processes of production directed. This must become independent. But if one eliminates from the social organism the life of rights and the spiritual life in their old form, one must establish them in a new form. That is to say, alongside economic life, which manages goods and directs the processes of production, we need the democratic life of the state, which is based on the equality of men. We need not a mere renaissance of Roman law but a new birth of the life of the state on the basis of the equality of men. We need no mere renaissance of spiritual life as it existed at the beginning of the modern era. We need a new form, a new creation of spiritual life. We must become conscious of the fact that we are really confronted now with the task of creating spiritual life anew.

What has been stated by the demand for the threefold order of the social organism is connected with that which in the deepest sense lives in the development of modern humanity. This idea is not the result of a brainstorm, it is something born of the deepest needs of our age, something that corresponds in the highest degree to our present time. There are many people who say they do not understand this, that it is very difficult. In Germany, when people said over and over that these things are difficult to understand, I said to them that I certainly do make a distinction between these ideas and what one has become accustomed to understand during the last four or five years. There one thought it easy to understand things I could not understand—so I said—things that merely had to be commanded to be understood. The Supreme Headquarters or another place of authority commanded that matters had to be understood, then they certainly were crammed into one's head. They were understood because one was commanded to understand. What is of importance now is to understand something out of one's free human soul. To that end it is necessary for people to wake up. For this, however, there is very little inclination, yet events will depend upon it. Difficulties do not arise from a subject being incomprehensible, but from a lack of will. It is courage that is lacking, courage to look into this reality. It is self-evident that what must speak in a new tone to humanity must be formulated in sentences different from those which men have been accustomed to thus far. For we have been taken hold of by three things that are different from what this threefold order of the social organism requires.

In this threefold order a renewal of spiritual life is demanded in a way that lets people feel a vital connection of their soul with objective spiritual life. They do not now have this connection. When people speak today they speak in hollow phrases. They do this because they have no relationship to what these hollow phrases are supposed to express. Men have lost their connection with the life of the spirit, therefore their words have become empty talk.

Much has been said about rights in recent years, about the establishment of rights among civilized mankind. The events of the present time demonstrate sufficiently how far removed from reality men are today in regard to human rights. They have not fought for rights, only for power, but they have talked about rights.

Now how is it with economic life? There have been no thoughts that would have encompassed economic life, therefore events have taken place of themselves. The characteristic factor in economic life has been continuous production, as I described it in Vienna in the spring of 1914 when I called this continuous producing of goods a social cancer. Commodities were produced and thrown on the market at random; the whole economic process was to take place of itself, not thoughtfully directed. A chaotic economic life without direction; a life of rights become a mere striving for power; a spiritual life degraded to hollow phrases: this is the threefold character of social life we have had and of which we must rid ourselves. We can only get rid of it if we know how to take seriously what is meant by the threefold order of the social organism.

But this can only be understood if we relate it back to anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. People were annoyed when in a public lecture some weeks ago I made a statement which, however, is a fundamental truth. I said: The leading circles of the present time must no longer rely on their brain, which has become decadent. They must rise to a comprehension that does not need the brain, but the ether body. For the thoughts that must be laid hold of in our spiritual science do not need the brain. The leading circles, the middle class of today, the bourgeoisie, just because of their physiological development, must submit to the development of spiritual knowledge that can be fostered even with decadent brains.

The proletariat, the working class, strives upward. It still has unused brains. The lemon hasn't yet been completely squeezed dry; something of an atavistic character still comes out of the brain. Therefore, the proletariat still understands what is said in the sense of the new order of things. The situation today is such that the entire proletariat would be receptive to these things, but not their leaders, for they have become bourgeois. They have become greater philistines than the real philistines. They have taken over philistinism and have developed it into a high culture. But on the other hand there exists a terrible penchant for obedience. This obedience will first have to be broken, otherwise there will be no salvation here either.

You see, matters are more complicated in the present age than we ordinarily imagine, and only the science of initiation can lead to a real taking hold of the social problems of our time. There are three concepts you may also find in my book, The Threefold Social Order, which I have written not only for anthroposophists but for the general public. You will find three important concepts in present-day social life: (1) the concept of commodity, the product, the goods in economic life; (2) the concept of labor; (3) the concept of capital. The social thinking of the present adheres to these three concepts.

How much has been proclaimed in social science in order to comprehend these three concepts! Whoever knows what has arisen in the second half of the nineteenth century on the subject of a scientific national economy, trying to penetrate these concepts of commodity, labor, and capital, knows the impossible science the economists have achieved. It is totally inadequate. I have recently quoted a neat example of this. The famous Professor Lujo Brentano, the luminary of national economic science in middle Europe at the present time, has recently written an article entitled, The Entrepreneur, in which he develops three marks of distinction for the enterpriser. I shall only mention the third one, the use of the means of production at one's own risk. The enterpriser is the owner of the means of production and undertakes production for the market at his own risk. Now, Brentano so formulates his concept in that article that he is able to designate a further enterpriser beside the manufacturer and industrialist, namely, the modern laborer. The workman is an enterpriser because he has the means of production, that is, his own labor-force, and this he offers on the market at his own risk. Mr. Brentano's concept of the enterpriser is crystal clear as it includes the laborer among the enterprisers. This shows how clever modern economic science is! It is ridiculous. But people are not willing to ridicule such matters because the universities still take the leading positions in spiritual life. Yet this is what universities produce in the field of national economy. People do not have the courage to confess that what is produced in this field is ridiculous. Matters are really dreadful.

Our attention, however, must be focused upon such things, therefore we must ask: Why is it that precisely in regard to social concepts, which at present become burning questions of the day, all science is inadequate? It would give me great satisfaction if I could speak to you more in detail about this question during my present stay here. Today I shall only give a short report.

Although the concept “commodity” is merely economic it can never be formulated with ordinary science. You will not arrive at the concept of “commodity” if you do not base it upon imaginative knowledge. You cannot grasp “labor” in the social, economic life if you do not base it upon inspired Knowledge. And you cannot define “capital” if you do not base it upon intuitive knowledge.

The concept of commodity demands imagination;

The concept of labor demands inspiration;

The concept of capital demands intuition.

If you do not form these concepts in this manner only confusion results.

You can see in detail why such confusion must result. Why does Brentano define the concept of “capital,” which coincides with the concept “enterpriser,” in a way to designate the laborer a capitalist? Because he is a very clever man of the present day but has no idea that, in order to gain a real concept of capital, intuitive knowledge is needed!

In a certain roundabout way, the Bible points to this when it speaks of capitalism as “mammonism.” It connects capital with a certain kind of spirituality, but spirituality can only be recognized by intuition. If we wish to recognize the spirituality active in capitalism—mammonism—we need intuition. We find this already in the Bible. But today we need a world conception that raises this to the modern level.

These matters, which today may still be considered queer, must be penetrated by expert knowledge. Real, expert knowledge in this sphere will result in the demand for a penetration of social concepts by genuine, true, spiritual science. This forces itself today upon the unbiased observer of life. If you were present, you will remember the memorable question that was asked at the end of my lecture at the Bernoullianum in Basel, delivered before my journey. In the following discussion a man asked: “How can it be brought about that Lenin become the ruler of the world?” For, in that man's opinion there is no hope unless Lenin rules the world.

Just consider the confusion! Those men who today behave most radically are the most reactionary. They want socialism. Above everything else one ought to begin by socializing rulership, but they start their socialism with the universal economic monarchy of Lenin! Not even a beginning is made to socialize the relationships of rulership. This is how grotesque things are today. The real situation should be kept in mind if someone says to you that Lenin ought to become world ruler. Those who believe they have the most enlightened concepts have the most perverted ones, and clarity in this sphere cannot be attained if there is no will to seek this clarity in the science of the spirit.

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner's Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment for what he means by “spiritual worlds.”

Automated Translation

I think you have seen that the momentous challenge that arises from the flood of human events and that we call the social movement is treated externally according to the peculiar forces of the time, treated from the point of view as if there were actually only a physical, a sensual world, precisely where it is most intensively considered and felt. The social question has indeed become effective as a proletarian demand. It lives in the proletarian demands in a certain, one might say abstract-theoretical way, and the danger exists that the abstract-theoretical way, which should never become an external fact, can become an external fact, or at least that it is demanded that it become an external fact. But this proletarian consciousness, from which the social question asserts itself today, is thoroughly imbued with a belief only in the material world, with its ethical addition of mere ethical utilitarianism, of mere utilitarian morality.

This is a fact that anyone today can actually grasp: that the ideas for the social movement are drawn from a certain belief only in material existence and the usefulness of human life and the useful powers of human life. But for those who see through life, it is especially significant that the actual enlightenment about the social question, namely about the ideas that are necessary for this social question in the present and the near future, cannot be obtained from any, even the most scientific, consideration of the external, physical-material world.

This is something that the present must know, that people of the present must penetrate. They must penetrate that the social question can only be solved on a spiritual basis, and that today its solution is sought without any spiritual basis. This expresses something tremendously important for our time. You see, the ideas needed for the social movement cannot be formed in the whole field that can be surveyed with the mere faculty of sense and the mind that is bound to this faculty of sense. These ideas, if they are to be seen in their direct effectiveness, lie entirely beyond the threshold that leads from the physical-sensual world to the supersensible world. The most necessary thing for the present and the near future, in terms of the development of human destiny, is to bring in certain ideas from beyond the threshold. The most characteristic phenomenon in the present is that such a bringing in from beyond the threshold is downright rejected. And all work in this field must be imbued with the will to overcome this reluctance to bring in socially effective ideas from beyond the threshold of physical consciousness.

Of course, there is an extraordinary difficulty in this undertaking, a difficulty that simply presents itself when one considers that, since we are living in the age of the consciousness soul, so everything should or must actually be striven for more or less consciously, that it is necessary, necessary for an important contemporary demand of the present time, to become acquainted with truths that lie beyond the threshold of physical consciousness.

Now, of course, one can say that very few people at the present time have a proper appreciation of what lies beyond the threshold of consciousness. Very few people today have a proper appreciation of initiation and the wisdom of initiation, as it must actually prevail or must become prevalent in the present day. Those abilities that lie in every human soul and that bring in certain ideas from the supersensible, people of the present time, out of the often characterized comfort, do not want to make use of them. And it is also the case that one must say: there is a definite objective difficulty in this field. You must not forget: I might say, in their original form, the things and entities that lie beyond the threshold can only be observed by the one who has crossed this threshold. But this crossing of the threshold is indeed one of the most important events in one's personal life. It is also an event in one's personal life that is thrown into a special light when, as I have just done, it is brought into such close relation to the social question. The social question, as its name already indicates, is a matter of groups of people, of human contexts; the secret of the threshold is a matter of individuality. One could say that no one is actually in a position to communicate the secret of the threshold directly to another person if they know it. One could even say that it signifies a certain crisis in the human soul when the secret of the threshold becomes clear to one inwardly, out of certain contexts in which one has otherwise received it.

You, or rather those of you who have been involved for years in spiritual scientific contemplation, insofar as it is anthroposophically oriented, have all had the opportunity to find your way to the secret of the threshold. When you approach the secret of the threshold, you will definitely receive the consciousness through the thing itself, that one can speak well about the paths that lead to the secret of the threshold, but that one cannot make a direct statement about the secret of the threshold. Thus, in a sense, the secret of the threshold is an individual matter for each person, and yet it is necessary to bring from beyond the threshold precisely the most important ideas for social development. Today, the secret of the threshold is a very special matter, because today there is little trust from person to person. That is something that has terribly diminished among people, the trust from person to person, and it would be quite different for our social life if there were just a little more trust from person to person. Thus it is that today, when anyone knows the secret of the Threshold, knows it through becoming acquainted with the Dweller of the Threshold, a trust is established that is much too weak, or one that is wrongly directed, wrongly oriented, wrongly adjusted.

As you can see, this would be a rather hopeless situation if something else were not to happen. For one could say: Thus, for example, the social question can only be solved by initiates. — But the initiates will simply not be believed due to the lack of trust that people today have in each other. People will not believe that they have an insight into life. This can only be perceived in a certain area, namely, beyond the threshold, which they cannot speak of directly from person to person, at least not at all times and under all conditions. If, for example, someone were to carelessly communicate his experiences with the Dweller of the Threshold to another person who absorbs them emotionally or, let us say, in such a way that he does not place himself in the region of his soul in which he has practised a certain degree of self-discipline, and might even become one who, having received the secret of the Threshold in this way, would divulge it further. This would indeed be a transition of the secret of the Threshold into social life, but it would have a very bad consequence. It would cause the same thing that sometimes results from merely communicating the way to the secret of the threshold: people would be divided more or less into two camps, and people would be set against each other. For while the ideas coming from beyond the threshold, when they work in their true power, in their purified spiritual power, are likely to bring about social harmony among people, if they are scattered among people unrefined, they are likely to cause quarrels and wars among people.

You see, then, that there is something very peculiar about the Mysteries of the Threshold. And if something else did not intervene, the hopelessness of which I have spoken would be justified. But since something else does intervene, it must be said that the path which the future must take can be clearly characterized. Today it is the case that socially fruitful ideas can only be found by a few people who can make use of certain spiritual abilities that the vast majority of people today do not want to use, even though they lie in every soul. They not only consciously do not want to use them, but mostly unconsciously do not want to use them. But these few will have to set themselves the task of communicating what they extract from the spiritual world with regard to social ideas. They will translate it into the language into which the spiritual truths, seen in a different form beyond the threshold, must be translated if they are to become popular. They can become popular, but must first be translated into a popular language.

In view of the general character of the times, people will naturally not believe those initiated into the mysteries of the Threshold who speak about social ideas, because the necessary trust among people is not there. In today's democracy-crazed times – I should say democracy-addicted times – any social idea that is actually not a reality, as you can see from the above, any social idea that is directed towards the sensory world with the ordinary mind, will of course be In our present-day democracy-crazed age, one would naturally consider such a purely intellectually-derived social idea, which is none, to be democratically equivalent to what the initiate brings out of the spiritual world and what can really be fruitful. But if this democracy-craving view or feeling were to prevail, we would, in a relatively short time, experience social chaos in the most dreadful sense. But the other is precisely what is present and applies to an outstanding degree to the social ideas that are brought from beyond the threshold by initiates. I have emphasized it again and again: anyone who really wants to make use of his sound understanding, not his scientifically tainted understanding but his sound understanding of human nature, can always, even if he cannot find what only the initiate can find, test it in life and understand it once he has found it. And this is the path that socially fruitful ideas will have to take in the near future. There is no other way to make progress. Socially fruitful ideas will have to take this path. They will emerge here and there. At first, of course, as long as one has not examined, as long as one has not applied one's common sense to it, one can confuse any kind of Marchist thought with a thought of initiation. But when one will compare, reflect, and really apply common sense to the things, then one will indeed come to the distinction, then one will indeed realize that it is something different in reality content, what is brought from beyond the threshold from the secrets of the threshold, than that which is taken entirely from the sense world, such as Marxism.

In this way I have not characterized just any program, for in the near future humanity will have very bad experiences with programs; I have characterized a positive process that must take place. Those who know something about social ideas from initiation will have the obligation to communicate these social ideas to humanity, and humanity will have to decide to think about the matter. And by thinking about it, just by thinking about it with the help of common sense, the right thing will come out. This is so extraordinarily important that what I have just said now should really be seen as a fundamental truth of life for the near future, starting right from the present! It is not the demand that one should believe that one can do this or that from any arbitrary idea, but the demand is that one should believe: people must work together. Direct personal collaboration between people is necessary so that those who have the relevant ideas from the other side of the threshold are also among those working together. So you see, what is important for the present is not something to be trifled with. It is an extremely serious matter that confronts people from the present. And one can say: in the wide circle of human consciousness there is still little sense for the tremendous seriousness that applies precisely to these things.

There is a further difficulty, which at least those who can start from certain spiritual-scientific considerations in these matters must know. The social problem of the present day is international in its effects. Herein lies a fatal error, which has recently found practical expression in the fact that a man like Lenin, who was entirely oriented towards the West, towards England and America, was driven in a sealed car under the protection of the German government, to Russia in a sealed car, in order to bring about a situation there with which the German government, namely in the person of Ludendorff, believed it could make peace and maintain itself. This is based on the fallacy that something truly international, applicable everywhere, can actually be achieved. And precisely Leninism in Russia shows how impossible it is to graft something that originated entirely in the West onto Russian national identity, something that the West does not want at all.

When social harmony is sought in the near future, it will not be a matter of abstractly coming back to the fact that all people are equal with regard to their fundamental nature, but rather it will be a matter of people having to learn to understand each other in their individuality, also in the great, eternal forces that pass through human individuality. Today, it is still something extraordinary and exciting for some people to hear the things that are meant to help people learn to understand each other better. Today, you can experience it when you tell someone: the German national character is such that the national spirit speaks through the ego, while the Italian national character is such that the national spirit speaks through the sentient soul. You can experience it today when someone is able to say: well, the Italian is less valued because the sentient soul is less than the ego, for example. That is what people say. It is, of course, complete nonsense, because these things are not about establishing values, but about providing something that allows people all over the world – and today, people's destinies cannot be ordered in any other way than across the globe – to really learn to understand each other. From a certain point of view, nothing of this kind is more valuable or less valuable, but each has its task in the development of humanity. And then, of course, there is something in every human being that is connected with the mystery of the threshold, whereby he stands out from such a group-like nature, which is characterized by the fact that one says: there the sentient soul is at work, there the I, there the spiritual self, and so on. But today we need to know these things, otherwise people will always miss each other and yet not know much more about each other than at most two things: firstly, that most people have their nose in the middle of their face, or that what journalists know when they travel the countries is correct. Both are truths of roughly equal importance.

That is what it is about: not an abstract, general humanity, but a real connection between people based on an interest in the particular individual design that a person acquires by being placed in a specific national character. The time has come when such things, which are not only perceived as uncomfortable but sometimes even as hurtful, must become popular. We cannot move forward without such things becoming popular. This must be properly considered. But all these things are such that they are truly accessible to common sense. And if only this self-confidence would arise in a large number of people, this self-confidence that does not always say: Yes, I cannot see into the spiritual world after all, I just have to believe the initiate – but which says: Now, this or that is being claimed; but I want to apply my apply my common sense to understand it. If this self-confidence, but effective, energetic, not just abstract or theoretical, were to enter into a larger number of people, then it would be good and then an enormous amount would be gained, especially for the path that must be taken with regard to the social problem. But that is precisely the harm, that through human education in the nineteenth century, people have lost this self-confidence in their common sense, more or less. The harmful characteristics through which this self-confidence and thereby the use of human judgment has been forfeited, these harmful characteristics were also present in earlier times, but they were not so harmful because man did not live in the age of natural science, which necessarily demands of him that he really applies a unified judgment, that he applies his common sense completely. But that is precisely what has been most lacking in recent times.

The examples that can be given for this are not taken seriously at all. But I will give you an example that I could not only multiply a hundredfold, but a thousandfold. I have a treatise here; this treatise is called: “On Death and Dying from a Purely Scientific Point of View.” This essay is a speech, the reproduction of a speech that was held in the auditorium of the University of Berlin on August 3, 1911 by Friedrich Kraus. He wants to talk scientifically about the problems of death and dying and says a lot on 26 pages. This speech, which was held in memory of the founder of the Berlin University, King Frederick William III, was always held, and such speeches also happen at other universities. This speech, of course, also has a beginning, and I will read this beginning to you. It was a treatise on death and dying, delivered in a strictly scientific sense, at least in the opinion of the lecturer, in the opinion of the deans and senators standing around the magnificence and the other illustrious gentlemen of science, and this speech begins: “Honorable Assembly! Dear colleagues! Fellow students! The University of Berlin celebrates today its founding and its royal benefactor. The speakers who take the floor at this hour each year, in remembering our origin, usually recall the difficult times, out of which adversity this university emerged, and the truly royal word of the replacement of lost physical by intellectual strength. Today, in a time of powerful prosperity, when the Emperor's strong arm protects our peace in honor, we can calmly consider that even the life of a nation with the strongest heartbeat runs in waves of ups and downs."

Well, today events provide the correction of these things; today events provide the correction of a sentence like: “Today, in a time of powerful prosperity, where the emperor's strong arm protects our peace with honor”! But what should common sense say in such a matter? Common sense should say: A person who is capable of saying this, which is nothing more than a great folly, must also be regarded as saying foolish things about everything else concerning death and dying. But who decides to use such common sense? So you see, the issue is not that common sense is incapable of making a decision, but that, for certain fundamental reasons of the present day, the use of common sense is out of the question. These things must be clearly understood.

The Berlin Academy of Sciences was founded by the great philosopher Leibniz. That is one example. One could cite other examples, which would have to be characterized similarly, from Munich, from Heidelberg, if you like. I will omit one country out of a certain courtesy – well, one does not say that today, so out of a certain feeling. I will say this: one could find similar things in Paris, in London, in Washington and so on, in Rome of course, in Bologna and so on. Leibniz undertook to found the Berlin Academy of Sciences under the Elector Frederick. Well, it was a good intention. But it could only be realized if Leibniz the great philosopher condescended to compare the elector – who was nothing like Leibniz said he was – to King Solomon and to call him the Prussian King Solomon. Yes, he even had to compare the electress with the Queen of Sheba. But this Berlin Academy of Sciences, which the great Du Bois-Reymond called “the intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern,” did not fulfill its tragicomic destiny with this fate. Because one day Frederick William I found that Professor Gundling was getting too much salary, namely because he was too clever. So he was deprived of his livelihood, was chased away, and Professor Gundling was forced to perform something vaudevillian in all sorts of taverns, to use his special talents to fool people into a kind of vaudeville show. King Frederick William I heard about this, and Gundling, whom he had previously chased away, began to interest him. So he made him a court jester, and now he gave him a salary again. But he said: “The court jester can also do something else for us.” So he made him president of the Academy of Sciences. And so Professor Gundling indeed became president of the Academy of Sciences. But this is not just a single fact that arose from a single quirk, but Frederick the Great, who then wanted to appoint Voltaire to the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, heard about the salary that Voltaire was demanding for his admission to the Academy of Sciences; he said: This salary is much too large for a court jester. So, the issue was to treat the entire Academy of Sciences in terms of the attitude that one is dealing with fools.

You have to be able to point out such things if you want to draw attention to the discrepancy in events, that from a certain royal house the scholars are put on the same level as the court jesters, in reality, and that the scholars then dismiss them as they did the one example I just told you about from the year 1911. The point is that you cannot arrive at a healthy understanding of people if you do not have the will to look at reality without embellishment, to pursue the things that are accessible to you. And pursuing things in one area or another is actually something that can train every person with regard to a sense of reality, with regard to everything that gives you a healthy understanding of people. If you have – of course you have, naturally, I would not be so rude as to deny anyone common sense, because I believe that every person has it – but if you have the ability, the will to use common sense, then you can only do so by approaching things in any field completely without prejudice and with an open mind. Just try to realize that this is a difficulty, but one that can be overcome. Try to think how much of national or other human prejudices there is in you that prevent you from approaching things impartially and without prejudice. You have to have the good will to engage in this self-reflection, otherwise you will never be able to say a rational word when it comes to deciding which ideas are socially fruitful for the present and the near future and which ideas are not socially fruitful.

Having established this, I would like to say, more as a characteristic of the attitude than as a characteristic of any theoretical basis. From this point of view, let us consider rhapsodically, aphoristically, some details that may be important to us for understanding and for our actions in the present and in the near future. I will start with one of the basic ideas that is truly and intensely rooted in the modern proletariat. From Marxism, this modern proletariat has absorbed the notion that in the real progress of humanity, the opinion of the individual human being, the opinion of the individual individuality, actually has no significance. The opinion of the individual has significance only for those things that are his private affairs – at least, that is what the modern proletarian world view believes. But everything that becomes historical happens out of necessary economic foundations, as I characterized them the day before yesterday. The very opposite was the impression I made on the modern proletariat through my Philosophy of Freedom, in that it demands that everything be built precisely on human individuality, on the content and energy of human individuality, to which these modern proletarian ideas attach no importance at all, but which only want to accept man as a social animal, as a social being. Society brings about everything that has any developmental character in history, that is in any way fruitful in history. Whatever a minister or a factory owner or anyone else does out of his individuality – so the proletarian thinks – has a meaning within the four walls of his house or at his card table or wherever he is a private person, it has a meaning for his amusement, it has a significance for the personal relationships that he forms with this or that person; but what comes from him as a member of humanity does not come from his individuality, but from the whole social class context, and so on, as I have characterized it to you.

This idea is firmly rooted in the modern proletariat. It is intimately connected with the modern proletariat's disbelief in the individual human being and his insight. It is of little help to the modern proletariat when the individual communicates some knowledge to this proletariat, because the proletariat then says: What the individual thinks is of private value only to him; only what he says as a member of a class, as a member of the proletariat, and what anyone can say has real external social value. In connection with the ideas of the modern proletariat, there is a terrible leveling with regard to human individuality, an absolute disbelief in this human individuality. From this you will see how tremendously difficult it is for him to penetrate to what comes from the most individual, namely to the truly fruitful social ideas. But in our time, the course of events itself is such that such great world-historical prejudices – for when millions profess them, one can speak of world-historical prejudices – are refuted by the facts, by reality. There could be no stronger refutation for proletarian theory, which wants to derive everything from the impoverishment of the masses, in short, from social phenomena, from the economic crises that necessarily occur from time to time and so on – from this, it says, the development of things arises, not from what people think or recognize – There could be no stronger refutation of this principle, this world-historical prejudice, than the fact, given by the latest events, that ultimately – I say ultimately, but this “ultimately” has a great significance for this world catastrophe – the decision of this world catastrophe depended on very few people. By a very few people. What has become of it ultimately depended on the thread of the fears, the suspicions, the aspirations of a very few people. And one can say: like flocks, millions of other people have been driven into this catastrophe by a very few people. — This is unfortunately the sad truth that presents itself to anyone who looks at the conditions of the present from a realistic point of view.

It is true that now people are beginning to realize a little what all depended on Ludendorff's will, which was extraordinarily narrow-minded in so many respects. Just think how easily something like this could remain hidden! It is conceivable, absolutely conceivable, that it would not have come to this terrible catastrophe of the present with all its terrible consequences, and that Ludendorff's strange way of acting would not have come to light. But it has come to light. Other statesmen, who do not belong to the Central Powers, may be voted out of office at the next election or may retire from public life. This event will be discussed, but no one will think of them as having done as much harm to humanity as Ludendorff. This is also a chapter that belongs to the education of common sense, because it is easy to ignore common sense out of adoration of success or for some other reason. Those who have common sense will not be persuaded to look upon Woodrow Wilson, no, I mean those people who today fawn over Woodrow Wilson – and after all, how few do not! – those people who today fawn over Woodrow Wilson, any differently than they would upon Professor Kraus, who in 1911 spoke the words that I have read to you. That is what one would like: to encourage people to use their common sense. Of course, this is closely related to the will to face facts. It is an enormous detriment to the present that the most impractical people today feel precisely that they are the strongest practitioners. How much the Central Powers have felt themselves to be practical, let us say in the field of militarism! They felt tremendously practical and were the greatest illusionists, were the greatest fantasists, and made not only incorrect but grotesquely incorrect judgments about almost all the things that have happened in the course of the last, well, I will say, two and a half years, and acted on the basis of these grotesquely incorrect judgments.

It is difficult when you see how people who are actually good people, often in the sense of what is commonly referred to as good people, cannot even be reached by common sense. In this respect, one could have the most terrible experiences over the last four years, when one saw, for example, what happened in Germany in recent years with officers who wanted to lead the people's education, who wanted to hammer into the people how they had to think so that everything would go right, so that the people behind the front would also “hold out”, as it was so beautifully called. It was terrible. When you then had a more precise insight into what was to be drummed into people, and what those who drummed it into them often presented with the very best of intentions – it was probably, in reality for my sake, the thing in its own way honest, but they did not want to make use of their common sense. And that is what matters. And that is of the greatest importance for the present, because this common sense must look at reality everywhere, and must not reject it because it finds something unpleasant out of prejudice. Is it not true that in our time we have witnessed the grotesque combination of the monarchical principle, which almost borders on absolutism, with Ludendorffism – with Leninism in Russia, with Bolshevism, because Bolshevism is actually a creature of Ludendorff. Bolshevism was created by Ludendorff in Russia because Ludendorff believed that he could make peace with no one in Russia except the Bolshevists. Thus not only did the German people, but also that the misfortunes of Russia are in many respects connected with the grotesque errors of this one man. These things show the colossal error of the proletariat, that the opinion of the individual has no significance in the social organization of conditions. These things must be seen quite objectively with common sense.

If we start from this attitude, we find in particular a sentence that I ask you to take to heart, because this one sentence can, among other things, have a guiding force for social thinking in the future. This one sentence is: It is enough to have no ideas in times of revolutions and wars, but it is not enough to have no ideas in times of peace; for when ideas become rare in times of peace, then times of revolutions and wars must come. — For wars and revolutions one needs no ideas. To maintain peace, one needs ideas, otherwise wars and revolutions will come. And that is an inner spiritual connection. And all declamations about peace are of no use if those who are called upon to guide the destinies of nations do not endeavor to have ideas, especially in times of peace. And if they are to be social ideas, then they must come from beyond the threshold. If an age becomes poor in ideas, then peace itself fades out of that age.

One can say such a thing; if people do not want to examine it, they will simply not believe it. But the terrible fate of the present depends on disbelief in such things. This is one of those principles that it is extremely important to take on board for the present and the near future. You will find another principle in the essay on “Theosophy and the Social Question”, which I published years ago in “Lucifer-Gnosis”. I am convinced that very few people take this principle fully to heart. I tried to draw attention to something that should work as a social axiom. I pointed out that if the relationship arises that a person is paid for his immediate work, nothing beneficial can come of it in any social structure. If a prosperous social structure is to emerge, it must not be the case that people are paid for their work. Work belongs to humanity, and the means of existence must be provided to people by other means than by paying for their labor. I would like to say, as I have already done in that essay: If the principle of militarism, but without the state, were transferred to a certain part — I will speak of this part in a moment — of the social order, then an enormous amount would be gained. But the underlying principle must be the realization that there is trouble on the social plane when people are in society in such a way that they are paid for their work, depending on how much or how little they do, that is, according to their work. Man must have his livelihood from a different social structure. The soldier receives his means of subsistence, then he has to work; but he is not paid directly for his work, but for being a human being in a certain position. That is what it is about. That is the most necessary social principle, that the proceeds of labor be completely separated from the means of subsistence, at least in a certain area of the social context. As long as these things are not clearly understood, we will achieve nothing socially. As long as this is the case, amateurs, who are sometimes professors, like Menger, will speak of “full labor income” and the like, which is all wishy-washy. For it is precisely the labor yield that must be completely separated from the procurement of the means of existence in a healthy social order. The civil servant, if he does not become a bureaucrat due to a lack of ideas, the soldier, if he does not become a militarist due to a lack of ideas, is in a certain respect – in a certain respect, do not misunderstand me – the ideal of social cohesion. And not an ideal of social cohesion, but the opposite of social cohesion, is when this social cohesion is such that man does not work for society, but for himself. That is the transference of the unegoistic principle to the social order. He who understands egoism and altruism only in a sentimental sense understands nothing of the matter. But the person who, practically, without sentimentality, with pure, healthy common sense, realizes that every society must necessarily perish because man only works for himself, that is, purely what is egoistically shaped in the social order—that person knows the right thing.

This is a law, as surely effective as the laws of nature work, and one must simply know this law. One must simply have the ability to apply common sense in such a way that such a law appears as an axiom of social science. Today we are still far from realizing this. But the recovery of conditions depends entirely on the fact that just as someone regards the Pythagorean theorem in mathematics as something fundamental, he takes this sentence as the basis of the social structure: all work in society must be such that the labor yield falls to the society and the means of existence are not created as labor yield, but through the social structure.

Of course, there are a number of such social axioms, because social life is naturally complicated. But today we are faced with the necessity of somehow considering how the social structure of human development can be put on a healthy footing. Above all, we must have a healthy eye for the parts, for the components of social life. One must be able to distinguish in a healthy way the different links of social life. You see, with all the things at stake today, it is not so much a matter of listening to the buzzwords that come from the Bolshevist or the Entente side , because today they are almost opposites, aren't they, but what is important is to realize what is needed by humanity, to acquire a sound judgment for the structure of social life. Of course, social life must be there. And precisely because social life must be there, that is why people are so attached to the Mongolian – well, excuse me, it is only meant to be symptomatic – to the Mongolian idea of the state, to the omnipotence of the state, because people imagine: what the state does not do cannot happen for the benefit of the people. – Incidentally, this view is not that old. For it was quite a while before the nineteenth century was over that an insightful man wrote the beautiful treatise: “Ideas for an Experiment to Determine the Limits of the Effectiveness of the State.” He was a Prussian minister, Wilbelm von Humboldt. This essay was particularly close to my heart because in the 1890s and even into the twentieth century, my Philosophy of Freedom was always categorized as a work of “individualist anarchism” – not by me, but by others. Wilhelm Humboldt's essay on the limits of state effectiveness was always categorized as the first work, while my Philosophy of Freedom was usually always categorized as the last, in chronological order. Well, you see, it was possible to be registered under “individualistic anarchism,” but at least together with a Prussian minister!

Social organization, social structure must be there, but it cannot be uniformed. It cannot be done in such a way that everything is, as it were, brought under one roof. What is needed today, what is important, could have been done in a certain way a long time ago, could have been done during this war catastrophe, and it can be done now, but it is always modified. For you must not forget that in the last few weeks the world has become a different one for Central Europe, and that one has an effect on the other. Now, for years I have endeavored to awaken understanding here and there for the form that is to be effective from Central Europe to Eastern Europe, for example — for the Entente is not teachable, of course, and should not be taught — I have endeavored to make that valid. The point is that if you want to assert something like that, you have to structure the lives that people have to lead together in the right way. When these ideas were presented to statesmen, let's say, I can only sketch these ideas out for you briefly; the point is that they have to be increasingly individualized. When these ideas were presented to a statesman some time ago, when it was already quite too late for the form I had given them at the time, but I told the gentleman that if he was thinking of approaching these ideas in any way, I would of course be willing to rework them in an appropriate way for the time that was then the present. Today, of course, they would have to be reworked again for the particular circumstances. In this context, it is important to really appeal to common sense when presenting such ideas. Then it is important that someone can see that social and other human coexistence is properly structured. The question arises as a main question: How must one differentiate in what people lead as a communal life? — And here it is important to distinguish between three aspects. Without this distinction it will not work, and no forward development from the present into the near future will come about without this threefold distinction being made. The first point is that, whatever the social group in question may be, small or large, it is essential that some social group should be so constituted that order prevails within it in terms of security of life and security towards the outside. The security service, conceived in the broadest sense – I must use such sweeping words – is one element. But this security service is also the only element that can be directed into the light of the idea of equality. This security service, everything military and police, if I may speak in the old sense, is also the only thing that can be treated in the sense of a democratic parliament, for example. Every person can have a say in this security service. So there must be a parliament, however the social group is constituted, in which deputies can be elected, for example, by universal, secret, direct suffrage, who have to form the laws and everything that is intended for this security service. Because this security service is a link in the chain of order, but it must be treated separately from the rest and then harmonized with the others only from a higher point of view.

A second aspect, however, must be kept entirely separate from all that concerns the security service, internal and external security. This aspect, which cannot be treated according to the idea of equality, is the actual economic organization of the social groups. This economic organization must not be directly related to what I have mentioned as the first link, but must be treated separately. It must have its own ministry, its own people's commissariat – today we say people's commissariat – which must be completely independent of the ministry, of the commissariat of the security service. It must have its own ministry, which is completely independent and which is chosen according to purely economic criteria, so that there are people in this economic ministry who understand something of the individual branches, both as producers and as consumers. This second link in the social order must be governed by completely different considerations, both in parliament and in the ministries. The first link can, let us say, be adjusted to democracy; if it suits us better, it could also be adjusted to conservatism. That depends entirely on the circumstances; if it is done properly, it will work, and the rest is a matter of taste. What is important is this trinity. For in the sphere of economic life there must prevail brotherhood. Just as everything in the sphere of security service must be subordinated to the principle of equality, so in the sphere of economic life the maxim of brotherhood must everywhere prevail.

Then there is a third area, which is the area of spiritual life. To this I count all religious activity, which must have nothing to do with the security service and economic life; to this I count all teaching, to this I count all other free spirituality, all scientific work, and to this I also count all jurisprudence. Without including jurisprudence, everything else is wrong. You will immediately arrive at a threefold structure that makes no sense if you do not structure it in the following way: security service according to the principle of equality, economic life according to the principle of brotherhood, and the areas that I have just enumerated: jurisprudence, education, free spiritual life, religious life, from the point of view of freedom, absolute freedom. And out of this absolute freedom must arise the necessary administration of this third link in the social order. And the necessary balance can only be sought through the free interaction of those who guide and determine these three links. In the sphere of intellectual life, to which jurisprudence also belongs, we shall not find anything like a ministry or a parliament, but something much freer. The structure will be quite different.

Of course, there must be transitional forms in addition to what is being striven for. But this should be clear to people. And we will not arrive at a healthy state until it becomes clear to people that this threefold order, of which I have spoken, must underlie everything, that we must think in such a way that we cannot maintain a uniformed state. For the idea of the state can be applied directly only to the first part, to the security and military service. Whatever is placed under state omnipotence, except for security and military service, stands on an unhealthy basis, because economic life must be built on a pure basis, whether it be corporative or associative, if it is to develop healthily. And the spiritual life, including jurisprudence, is only built on a healthy basis if the individual is completely free. He must be free in relation to everything else. He must also be able to appoint his judge, in my opinion from five to five, from ten to ten years, who is both his private and his criminal judge. Without that it does not work, without that you will not achieve an appropriate structure. These national questions could have been solved without territorial shifts! This is said by a man who has studied the difficult Austrian conditions, where there are thirteen different official languages or at least languages in official use, and who has been able to study these Austrian conditions, which is particularly necessary in the field of jurisprudence. Suppose two countries meet at some border, let them be divided by nationality or something else. Here is a court and here is a court, there is the border. The man here determines himself: I will be judged by this court in the next ten years – the other determines himself: I will be judged by this court. The matter is absolutely feasible if it is carried out in detail. But all the other things are ineffective unless there are things like this. For everything must indeed work together. But it only works together when the things are presented in such a way that they are made with a real understanding of what is there.

I have had the opportunity to present these things to a wide variety of people in the past, because I was sure, and still am today, that the circumstances of the last few years would have taken a completely different turn if this program had been countered by the Wilson program. And this program would have been the only real program that would have been effective if it had been presented before Brest-Litovsk. Of course, Brest-Litovsk would never have happened if such a program had been understood. Things would have had to take a completely different course. For I had worked it out in those years as a guideline not only for an internal policy but also for an external policy; internal politics seemed superfluous to me when everyone was busy manufacturing ammunition. All the talk of three-class legislation and its amendment seemed wishy-washy to me, but it seemed necessary to me to have a real impetus – not a program – a real impetus that would have been able to give things a different turn. I can only give you a few points of view here, as I have done. But the matter can be worked out in such detail that it is absolutely effective precisely for solving the most important questions. One has indeed had painful experiences in the process. I gave the elaboration to a man - not just one, but many, but I will tell you about one case as an example - who wrote to me after months. That was a good sign, because he had really studied the matter, had put a great deal of honest effort into it, and had also discussed it with me. Both in his letters and in his conversations with me, two objections came up, for example, that are very characteristic. I have heard such objections over and over again in the most terrible way over the past few years, objections of that kind. One objection was this: Yes, it is well known that most of the wars to date are hidden, masked resource wars, that they are mostly states of war that arise from resource interests, from international, that is, mutual resource interests. But if you look at what you have done, then there could no longer be conflicting resource interests. “Yes,” I said, ”Privy Councillor, if you would tell me that to confirm what I have written to you, then I would understand; if you thought that what I have written would be good, because then the terrible masked wars for raw materials would finally be over in the world through the final solution of the tariff relationships, which in this second part of the economic program, if I may call it that, are thus solved. If you tell me something that corresponds to the reality of life, I would understand; but that you tell me this as a refutation, I cannot understand.

The second objection was this: he wrote to me after having studied the matter for months: Yes, I cannot imagine how, if you were lucky with something like that, a social-democratic policy could still be pursued, because your economic program would no longer make a social-democratic policy possible. — Yes, you laugh. I did not laugh, because I have learned from these things, which I could duplicate for you in great numbers, and which you can find everywhere today, how bad the selection is that is practiced today by the circumstances in determining those people who are to be the responsible leaders in this or that field. I spoke to you here a long time ago about the fact that today we suffer from the selection of the worst, who always come out on top. This is also something that belongs to a healthy sense of reality and thus also to a healthy human understanding: to see this selection of the worst.

In this way, I have given you, I would like to say, guidelines. The recovery of the situation for the future is based on this threefold nature. All the mischief is based on the confounding of these three links. What actually applies only to the first link, to security and military service, is applied to economic life, where it cannot possibly bring about any healthy conditions, but it is even applied to spiritual life, including jurisprudence, where it is quite impossible. Oh, if only people would want to get a little closer to what follows from the secrets from beyond the threshold, they would be able to see so very easily that just such truths as I have told you about the threefold nature of social life must be taken from the supersensible world, but can be grasped here by the senses. That is just it. I have given you guidelines, but they are not guidelines that represent some abstract program. Rather, they are guidelines of which I could say, for example, when I handed over the matter to a man who had a very important position (I will not say what an important position in the past and for whom it would have been an enormously significant act if he had made a manifesto in this direction. Yes, I told the man: you have the choice of either doing one thing or experiencing the other. What I have worked out here is not based on ideas that arise from, well, women's clubs or pacifist societies or the like, but from the study of the development of humanity in the next thirty to forty or fifty years. That is the content of what wants to and will develop in Central and Eastern Europe, and you have the choice of either promoting it through reason or expecting it to materialize through revolutions in a roundabout and extremely painful way. But you see, people have to believe such things, believe them by applying their common sense to verify them. People must have the insight to recognize that reality has to be examined. Because what develops in humanity develops according to certain impulses that one must study and of which one can say: they want to take shape. If you go against them, you govern badly, regardless of whether you are a socialist or a monarchist, a republican or a prince of Monaco or whatever.

But it is precisely the courage to do such things that people have been unable to muster in recent times, because they lacked precisely that trust of which I have spoken in these days, and that is based on the Fichte proposition, that is, on the attitude that comes from the Fichte proposition: Man can do what he should; and when he says, “I cannot,” he means “I will not.” People who had understood to some extent what I wanted came together; but those who had the courage – which only comes from the real use and handling of common sense – to implement something like this did not come together. And one can only hope that now that the forces of scrutiny have become even stronger, people will gradually come together. But one should not believe that what was formulated here years ago does not now need to be reformulated to fit the new conditions that have arisen. One must think so realistically that one knows: at every point in time, when things are to be thrown into reality, things must be thought of somewhat differently. — And so one could truly have very tragic experiences in the last years. For example, one of the monarchs who has now also passed away, when he saw what was coming, once again demanded these ideas and had his advisor come to hear them from him because he had forgotten the things and wanted to hear them again. He couldn't understand them quickly enough, so he said to the advisor in question, “So write these things down for me again briefly!” Yes, but I don't know how I am supposed to get the letter? How am I supposed to get this letter that you are supposed to write for me? It has to go through the ministry or the Cabinet Office, doesn't it? — This matter was never resolved because it went through the ministry, where everything was rewritten.

I am telling such things today – and I will tell many more in the future – because it is necessary that we learn a great deal from the recent past. Unless we learn from the past, we will not be able to move forward on a fruitful path. It is not enough to consider only the immediate situation; it is essential to have the will to look into the underlying causes that lie behind the mere symptoms. And one cannot look into them unless one develops a sound understanding of how symptoms arise and acquires the will to really assess them. Today, things are urgent. One would like to say again and again: If only they were not grasped drowsily, but if they were grasped with the full seriousness, which also includes having a sense of how much things have gone wrong due to the selection of the worst, and how inclined people are to let their judgment go astray, to be pulsed by false impulses! We must find a way to ensure that the continuity of economic life is not disrupted until ideas that can be used to further develop economic life have been introduced into people's minds in a certain way. We must gain the possibility of putting something realistic in the place of the economic nonsense that is produced by university economics professors in all countries today. We will not make any progress if we are not able to tackle education in the broadest sense first. Because we need understanding. Everything that the existing educational institutions provide about the necessary organization of social life or the social body is useless. But that is also what social democracy has inherited, and it is useless. Firstly, it is necessary to bring sensible ideas into people's heads. Therefore, it is necessary that anyone who wants to participate in social life at the present time should first find the possibility of such a transitional state that best satisfies what can best be satisfied. That is: security and public order. Why not give the people a parliament, which is something the democratic element, in particular, is now, well, yearning for. But the point is that the economic really acquires an independent position alongside the other things. This must first be carefully transformed into a complete set of provisional arrangements. Only the first link can be tackled radically today; the rest must be transformed into a series of provisional arrangements. And the spiritual life is the one that should be attacked immediately. The third link is the one to start with. And if someone were to come up with the idea that the universities, above all, would have to be cleaned out, and he does not want that, then, then there is simply no talking to him in this area. However, they must be cleaned out first!

I wanted to talk to you about this in the context of the important issues of the present.

This volume contains seventeen of the more than 6000 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) during the early part of this century. As with many of his lectures Steiner assumes a certain familiarity with his basic writings an the part of his listeners, a familiarity which can be gained by reading one or more of his introductory works. Chief among these are four books: The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, An Outline of Occult Science, Theosophy, and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. The readers unfamiliar with the above works might be well advised to consider first reading one or more of them before attempting this volume both as a way of increasing their appreciation and comprehension of this work and in fairness to Steiner who explains in detail how he came to his knowledge in these four volumes.

Some of the volumes of Steiner's lectures are known as cycles because they addressed a single theme and were delivered over a short period of time to the same audience. The seventeen lectures collected in this sequence do not, strictly speaking, constitute a cycle. They are strung together along a definite path stretching between the dates of August 6 to September 18, 1920; but two were delivered before a very different audience, in Berlin. Added to these lectures is an address to the General Assembly of the Berlin branch of the Anthroposophical Society.

To the careful student of Rudolf Steiner's work it may seem, however, as if these lectures indeed form a definite cycle. They transmit a powerful appeal to all those who are deeply concerned with the condition of the social fabric, irrespective of political partisanship; but who look to its cultural and philosophical basis as a means for social action and renewal.

The range of these lectures is enormous, and thereby symptomatic of Rudolf Steiner's contribution to the civilization of our time. We only need look at some of the themes of the lectures:

Spiritual science must be a knowledge of action.

The twelve senses of the human being in their relation to Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition.

The science of initiation and the impulse for freedom.

Viewpoints for the forming of a healthy social judgment.

The lectures turn to profound and deeply stirring observations concerning the inherent tasks and intentions of the peoples in the West and East, and describe the diverse influences upon them through various spiritual powers. To this stream a talk is added in honor of Hegel's 150th birthday, making us aware of the pervasive, albeit mostly unconscious, influence of this thinker upon the West, and by no means only in the form in which Communism claimed him.

The lectures which follow belong perhaps to the most exciting ones we can find in Rudolf Steiner's lectures an the fundamentals for a social renewal. Like a slow-growing plant they begin to open only gradually into full significance.

The initiative to make this volume available in English arose out of a circle of people, including this writer, who have long concerned themselves with social renewal. We are a group who have chosen to live and work with handicapped people all over the world in special communities, the Camphill communities.

The social forms developed by these Camphill communities are new types of villages or related forms of communal life. In these villages we have enabled exciting relationships, new ways and new values of labor to emerge and for these strivings this volume might become a constant source of strength and encouragement. Just as there exists a curative course¹ by Rudolf Steiner which provides insight and inspiration for educators of handicapped children, so these lectures can be regarded as a source of inspiration for the whole range of activities which unfold as social therapy. The practical labor arising therefrom thus could give the right background for applying the indications given in these lectures. The lectures would then provide truly new ways of understanding the impulses and efforts of community life. They would demonstrate what it means to become free from those often highly developed thoughts which have, nevertheless, led the actions of individuals, groups and nations into catastrophic situations for several hundred years. And they still continue to do so despite increasingly desperate calls for change! But do we truly want to change? Without insights of a spiritual nature we cannot and will not attempt to change. Neither can it be expected to be an easy task or to be done by the mere acceptance of some creed.

Rudolf Steiner says in the 10th lecture:

We come closer and closer to total decline precisely because our intellectuals will not venture to construe the tasks in this world by utilizing ideas other than those gained from waking life, from what lies between birth and death.

At the same time we must be aware of the slow, though fundamental process to which we can aspire when we take seriously what Rudolf Steiner has to say at the very beginning of the 12th lecture:

One becomes acquainted with the same things from everchanging viewpoints; thus, conviction increasingly gains in strength.

This growing conviction becomes firmer, the more flexible the standpoint, the deeper and the more truthful the shift from one to another perspective is, and it brings that certainty we can see in the planetary companions of the sun as they move in their regular orbits, in that galaxy to which they belong, to which we ourselves belong. Ultimately, this is the cosmos of love and truth.

The practical-minded expert will either smile or get angry at this. What role shall such lofty sentiments play in a world of brutality, deceit and despair? In the midst of such conditions (where the practitioners of old vices and their political and power-seeking responses continue to be at work, Rudolf Steiner spoke the following, describing neither a wish nor an ethical utopia, but describing rather his sober insight into a law, that is akin to a law of nature.

This will be the healthy social relationship in the future. You can see it already today. Labor will be a free activity out of the insight into the necessity that labor has to take place. Men labor because they look at the human being and recognize that he needs labor. What was labor in the ancient world? It was a tribute; it was done because it had to be done. And what is labor today? It rests upon self-satisfaction, and that kind of enforcement which is exerted upon us by egoism. Because we are where we are, we want to be paid for our labor. We work for our own sakes, for our own wages. In the future we will labor for the sake of our fellow human beings, because they need what we can work for. This will be the reason for our work. We will clothe our fellow human beings, we will make our work available to them for what they are in need of—as a completely free activity. Wages have to be completely separated from this. A tribute was labor in the past—an offering it will be in the future. Labor has nothing to do with self-satisfaction, nothing to do with payment. If I allow my work to be dictated by the needs of my brothers with a view to what mankind really needs, then I will find myself in a free relationship to it, and my work becomes an offering for mankind. Then I shall work with all my strength, for I love mankind and put my strength at its disposal.²

Who cannot imagine the unbelieving, if not contemptuous, faces raised upon hearing this—the cynicism and impatience? For all those who at times play at intellectual games with Rudolf Steiner's indications, another paragraph of the same lecture shall be quoted. Rudolf Steiner continues:

This must become possible and will only be possible when life's requirements are separated from work. And this will indeed happen in the future—no one will be the owner of the products of his own labor. Mankind must be educated for free labor, one for all and all for one. Each one will have to act accordingly. Today, if you would found a small community in which each one throws into a communal account what he earns and each one works as best he can, then his very life's existence—his needs—will be brought about out of the communal consumption. This will cause a greater freedom than the ordering of wages according to production. When that happens we shall turn in the right direction. Today, this could flow into law, into each regulation; of course, not in absolute terms, but approximately. One could today build up factories in this way. But it will require healthy, clear and sober thinking in the sense of anthroposophy.

A deeper understanding of all this can be obtained from the present volume of lectures.

If Rudolf Steiner's printed work needs a preface or an introduction at all, it is to emphasize that it cannot be read like other books. It belongs to the type and quality of his thoughts that they have the characteristics of living things: the inherent power of growth and potential for change which lies in the unfolding of all living things. We are not accustomed to such activity with thoughts, with thinking as a force akin to doing. Yet such is the nature of Rudolf Steiner's thoughts. They appeal to an otherwise dormant participation in us and offer an invitation to social activity. No doubt, this is an unusual demand. Conceivably it can cause offense. But the request is emphasized here and with good cause.

In our time, no one can be free from grave concerns for the future, which is reaching with its tentacles right into the present. Much good will and increasing desperation is spent on finding “solutions,” on seeking, on organizing, on imploring to try different ways; ways of amelioration, of appeasement, of change with a truly human face—with few results. It would not be, then, a wasted effort to enter into the reading of these lectures with more than that intellectual scanning to which we have become accustomed, but instead to hear, almost from the first words, the intonation of a selfless voice, selfless even in search for knowledge. This voice speaks with the tone of hope and of insight and with the aspirations of all of us. Its familiarity should, in the encounter with its message, lead us securely—and far more deeply than we usually listen—to those places of the will in us which alone can bring about change and evolutionary responsibility.

Carlo Pietzner
Michaelmas 1985

• 1. Curative Education, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1984
• 2. These two quotations come from a public lecture given by Rudolf Steiner in Berlin an October 26, 1905. This lecture was published only recently for the first time in Beitrage zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe, St. John's Time 1985, #88.

It is beyond doubt that the War and all its terrible accompaniments have given the social question a new aspect for men to-day. True, this change is not recognized by a sufficient number of people in the way one could wish; but it is there and will become more and more significant.

The members of the classes hitherto accustomed to lead and rule will find them­selves compelled by force of circumstances, in dealing with the social question, to abandon limited ideas and measures which deal with it piecemeal. They will be forced to turn their thoughts and direct their will to the social problem as the most important in the life of mankind, both to-day and in the immediate future. While they will only understand their times by adopting a wholly new conception of their problem in all their thinking, feeling and willing, on the other hand it will be necessary for the masses, the proletariat, to achieve an essentially different attitude to it.

For more than fifty years the mass of the people have been acquiring social and socialist ideas. Unless we have gone through the last ten years with our eyes shut we must have noticed what changes have come about inside the ranks of the proletariat with regard to the social question. We saw what form it took at the moment of the outbreak of the appalling catastrophe we know as the World War. Then came the end of that fearful disaster. The proletariat found itself in a new position, no longer confined by a social order dominated, at least in Central and Eastern Europe, by the old ruling powers. It was itself called upon, to a considerable extent, to set its hand to building a new form of social organization. And just in face of this fact, wholly new in history, we experienced some­thing extraordinarily tragic.

The ideas to which for years the proletariat had devoted itself with its heart's blood proved inadequate when realization became possible, and at this point occurred a great historical opposition, even a conflict. The facts of world-history taking place about us might have become the great instructors of mankind. They showed that the hitherto ruling classes had, during the last three or four hundred years, developed no ideas which can, or could, be any guide for all that was forcing its way out in the economic and other social facts of human experience. The remarkable thing was that those who had power to act in the world of affairs had arrived at the state of letting them take their own course. Their thoughts and ideas had become so restricted that they could not stretch them to include the facts, which had grown above their heads, out of reach. This had been evident for some time, especially in the economic life, in which protection and similar ideas had been superseded by competition for a free market as the only motive for regulation; in which ideas were active, not moulding the economic life solely with regard to production, distribution and consumption of goods, but unfailingly leading to continual crises owing to the hazard of the "free market." He who will is able to see that since the social impetus of these ungovernable facts had spread over the great imperial states, the affairs of these states had acquired their movement, susceptible to control neither by thought nor by any efforts towards adjustment.

Man should consider such things to-day, should be able to keep before his spiritual eye to-day's necessity of looking more deeply into human activities and of grasping such a thing as the "Social Question " with more intensity of purpose than is customary. It is, after all, obvious that ideas have become inadequate for the developing facts, yet men will not see it. Three or four hundred years of routine in business and public affairs have accustomed them to account it practical life and to regard anyone who sees a little further and can judge of things through longer vision, as Utopian or unpractical. I give you an illustration of this; for to-day, when the destiny of the individual is so closely bound up with the destiny of mankind, only examples drawn from personal experience and honestly meant can be sufficient illustration of the impulse and motives to be found in public life—therefore I may be pardoned if I give you one of my own. It is not intended in a personal sense. In the spring of 1914, in a series of lectures I gave in Vienna on spiritual-scientific subjects, I was forced, months before the outbreak of the so­ called World War, in the presence of a small audience (a bigger one might have laughed me to scorn) to sum up what seemed to me the view we ought to hold about the social development of the present conditions. I then said that for anyone looking with open eyes at what was going on in the public life of the civilized world, it appeared as infected by a social tumour, a malignant social illness or cancer; and this illness within our economic and. social life must express itself in a terrific disaster.

Now how was one regarded who, in the early spring of 1914, spoke of an imminent catastrophe, from his observation of events going on under the surface? He was "an unpractical idealist," not to say a fool. What I was then obliged to say was a great contrast to what at that time, and indeed even later, the so-called practical men were giving out—those men who were not practical at all, only revolutionists who scorned anyone who tried to comprehend the history of the time from some knowledge of its underlying idea. What did these "practical" men say? One such person, a Foreign Minister of one of the Central Euro­pean States, announced to the enlightened representatives of the people that the general relaxation of tension in the political situation was making pleasing progress, so that they could be assured of peaceful conditions - in Europe in the near future. He added that the relations with St. Petersburg were the most friendly possible. Thanks to the Government's efforts the Russian Cabinet took no heed of the publications of the Press, and our relations with St. Petersburg would continue friendly, as before. Negotiations with England were expected to be concluded in the near future on such a basis as to produce the best possible relationships. What a difference between "practical outlook " and "gloomy theory”!

Many more examples might be given to illustrate the view of, or rather the insight into, the facts at the beginning of the period which held such terrible things for humanity. It is very instructive to let the facts speak: these practical men spoke of peace and the next months brought a peace in which the civilized world occupied itself for several years in killing, at a low estimate, ten to twelve million men and crippling three times as many. I am not saying this to re-new a sensation: it must be mentioned because we can see by this how inadequate men's thoughts have become, that they are no longer far-reaching enough to master facts. We shall only see these events in the right light when we recognize in facts the strongest indication that for the healing of our social conditions what we need is not a small change in this or that arrangement, but a vast alteration in thinking and learning: not a trivial but a tremendous settling up with the old which is too foul and decayed, to be allowed to mingle with what the future may bring.

We might say the same thing about the life of rights or the economic life in detail as about the wider institutions of mankind. Every­where men's words betray that their thoughts are inadequate to master facts. We may say that the former leading and dominant class has the practical experience but lacks the effective ideas necessary to the practice of life. Opposed to these circles stands the great mass of the proletariat which has educated itself in a rigorous school of Marxian thought for half a century. It is not enough to-day merely. to look round on the proletariat to find out how they are thinking. It is comparatively extraordinarily easy to refute logically what the masses and their leaders think about economic institutions. That does not much matter: what does matter is the historical fact that in their heart and soul lies a sort of precipitate, formed out of the intensely active thoughts which have been converted into a "proletarian theory." This theory, which might, after the break-down of the old order have proved itself much more effective than it has in actual practice, shows a peculiarity which is quite comprehensible. For as a result of the way in which the social evolution of mankind has moved under the influence of the capitalist order and modern technical science during the last three to four hundred years—especially during the nineteenth century—the masses have been more and more closely confined within the economic system, so confined that each man was restricted to one small, limited piece of work. This strictly limited piece of work was fundamentally all he saw of the reality of the increasingly extending economic life.

What wonder that the workman experienced, in the effect on body and soul, that under the influence of technical science and private capital, developed by the new life of economics, he could not see the mainsprings which moved it. He might be the "worker" in this life, but his social position prevented him from looking rightly into its ordering, into the way in which it was controlled. It is quite comprehensible that as a result of such facts something grew up of which the fruits are before us; certain subconscious impulses and demands of the masses became a far-reaching socialist theory, really fundamentally alien to econo­mic and other social facts, since the proletariat could gain no insight into the actual driving forces behind the facts and simply had to accept the one-sided ideas derived from Marx. So we find that in the course of years, various things have eaten into the feelings of the masses which may in reality be ever so deeply justified but which, all the same, miss the facts. I should like to, give as an example the enormous effect of one slogan, amongst others poured out over the proletariat by its leaders. "In future no production for the sake of producing—production only, for consumption." Certainly a remark to the purpose, with the merit (rare in slogans) of being absolutely true; but becoming an unreal abstraction, elusive, when carried to its logical conclusion with practical sense and real insight into economic conditions. The chief thing in practice is "how things are made"—there is no meaning in the clamour" produce only for consumption" from a practical point of view. It calls up in the soul the idea of how beautiful the economic life could be if profit were ignored and consumption only were of consequence! But there is no indication whatever in this phrase as to how the structure of the economic life could be arranged so as to give effect to what is expressed in these words. Many other catchwords (of which we shall touch on some) have the same defect. They often have their origin in deep truths yet, when adopted as party slogans of the proletariat, have become abstractions, just Utopian pointers to an indefinite future. If we would be honest with the proletariat, we must say that this unfortunate proletariat which is raising its just claims lives as in a cloud of views which are theory, it is true, but remote from the facts of life, because they have no contact with the facts and are placed in an isolation from whence they can survey only a single corner of life.

That is the conflict to which I would draw your attention—on the one side the attitude of the ruling classes who have power over the facts, but no idea how to use it to control them: on the other, the proletariat with its acquired, abstract ideas which have no correspondence with the facts.

If we try to describe the genesis of all this in a few words, taking note of active forces and impulses, more essentially important than anything that has occurred hitherto in the course of human history, we can only rightly estimate expressions like "the lack of ideas in the practice of our leaders " and "the un­practical theory of the proletariat" if we have a feeling of the torrent pouring in the present-day development of humanity with such vigour and mutually destructive force. The existence of such a contrast between the attitude of soul of the dominant classes and that of the proletariat leads, and has led, to a deep cleavage between the thinking, feeling, willing and actions of the former and all the longings, wishes and impulses of the latter. We do not even understand adequately what is the demand of our age, of which we hear the first faint tone from the proletariat. We may understand the form of the words when they mention the theory of surplus-value, i.e., the theory that we should produce only for consumption, or that of transformation of private ownership into common property; but what are they in reality as expression of their wishes and ideas? Can they be regarded merely as a subject for logical criticism by the leaders of the well-to-do? It is hard to find a more naïve response than that of a director of some company who hears the "surplus value” theory from his work-people and answers that the surplus, made up of banknotes, etc., is so small that, divided among them, there would be no share for each worth having. I repeat, it is hopelessly naïve to deal in this way with the theory of "surplus value." The "calculation " of the directors is obvious and incontrovertible, but that is not the real point. To try to refute what are the actual words of the proletarian theory is just like having a thermometer in a room to indicate the temperature and applying a flame to the tube because it registers too low a temperature to please us. By this temporary expedient of tampering with the thermometer we do not occupy our­selves with the root-cause of the trouble. To take proletarian theory to-day and try to refute it is simple-minded, for such theories are nothing really but to use a classroom word—"indices" of something lying much deeper. Just as a thermometer indicates the temperature of a room, but does not produce it, so proletarian theories are a sort of instrument by which we can recognize the forces active in the social question from this aspect, now and in the immediate future. In this we are much too easy-going. The question has been regarded as purely economic because it first meets us in the economic sphere, based on the demands of the proletariat, hitherto entangled in economic life during the epoch of private capitalism and technical science: we have not seen lying behind the theories all that is betokened by them concerning capital, labour and goods. The workman experiences the whole sphere of human life in the economic field; therefore the social question appears to him entirely in an economic perspective.

Anybody who has the opportunity to acquire wider views is bound to see how clearly three spheres of life are to be distinguished, in which three fundamental aspects of the social question present themselves. To have learnt through his life's destiny not only to think about the masses or have feelings concerning them, but to think and feel with them, will have taught him to observe what is seething in the soul-depths of their best members, even in the phrases which run through all socialist theories - as their keywords. What are these?

First we have the phrase "surplus value," of which I have already spoken. Association as man to man with the proletariat is enough to show how deeply this phrase has sunk into their hearts. It is this sinking-in that matters, not the verification of any theory. Anyone who, like myself, has worked in Berlin at the ‘Workers' School founded by Wilhelm Liebknecht, while decisive events were taking place within the social movements of the new era, will know more about this question that I have, touched upon, through practical life, than perhaps some captain of industry does, especially if the latter should be—how shall I phrase it inoffensively—a revolution-profiteer, a superficial chatterer about revolution, even as we had war-profiteers. "Surplus value" was generally taken to mean something of this sort: the proletariat works productively and produces goods of some kind: the capitalist puts them on the market and gives the worker just sufficient wage to keep him alive, in order that he may continue to produce. Anything over and above this is "surplus value." As Walter Rathenau says—although in social questions he falls into great errors—it is true that this surplus value, divided, would not improve the condition of the masses at all; but through processes of calculation which float in space we do not arrive at the facts; we must deal with this surplus value correctly as to its social significance. Can it have as little, real existence as Rathenau, for instance, “accurately" reckons? In that case there would be in Berlin no theatres, no high schools, no public school, nothing of what we call cultural life, the life dealing with the human spirit; since that, for the most part, is really con­tained in the "surplus value." It does not really matter how this value is forced to the surf ace as "goods" or "cash in circulation": it is in this catchword itself that we find expressed the whole relation of our modern cultural life to the wide masses of the people who cannot directly participate in it.

Anyone who has taught for years amongst the workers and has taken the trouble to teach directly out of our common human feelings, speaking as man to man, will know what a spiritual education must be like if it is to be universally human and, further, how the form of education will differ from our present one, which has grown up during the last three or four hundred years under the influence of an economic order based on private capital and technical organization. If I may once again speak personally, to illustrate the general fact—I was well aware when I spoke to the workers, in lecturing or teaching, that in their souls kindred strings were sounding and that they were receiving a knowledge which they could absorb. But a time came when the proletariat had to follow the fashion and share in "education"—that education which was, from a spiritual point of view, the outcome of the dominant culture. They had to be taken to the museums and shown what had developed out of the experience of the ruling middle classes. Then if men were honest they must have known (if not, they invented all sorts of phrases about "popular education " and the like) that there was no bridge between the spiritual culture and education of the ruling classes and the spiritual needs and longings of the proletariat. Art, science, religion can only be understood if they issue from circles with which one has some common social ground, so that one can share their social feelings and attitude: not where there is an abyss between those who are supposed to enjoy culture, and those who can actually enjoy it. Here there was a vast cultural lie, and nowadays no benevolent mask must be spread over these things, but they must be brought into clear daylight. The lie consisted in setting up "People’s High Schools" or “Educational Schools" in which an education was to be shared by the masses without any possible bridge over which it could pass to them. The proletariat stood on one side of the abyss, looked over it at the art, science, religion, ethics, which had been produced by the leading classes, did not understand them, and took them to be something which only concerned those classes, a sort of luxury. There they saw the practical application of the "surplus value" which they had talked about, but they actually felt quite different from what was spoken in this "thermometer" language about surplus value. They felt: here is a spiritual life created by what we produce, by our labour, from which, however, we are excluded!

This is the way in which we must approach the question of the surplus-value, not theoretically, but as it really and vitally exists in life. Then, too, we can see the essential problem of the social question taken as a whole—its spiritual side. We can see that, side by side with the rise of the new technical science and new capitalist economics, arose an intellectual life only capable of living within the souls of men who were divided by a deep golf from the great masses to whose ,education they gave inadequate attention and from which they held aloof. The tragedy of it! The ruling classes discuss these problems in well-warmed, mirrored rooms, speaking of their brotherly love for all men, our duty to love all men, or of the Christian virtues, while a fire warms them which is fed with coals from the mines into which children of nine, eleven, thirteen years of age are sent down. In the middle of the nineteenth century this was literally so (things have improved since then, not, through any merit of the ruling classes but through the demands of the proletariat); these children went down before sunrise and only came up again after sunset, so that they actually never saw the sun the whole week through.

We are assumed to be agitating nowadays if we talk like this. Not at all! We have to say these things to show how the cultural life of the last few hundred years is separated from the real life of men. People have talked in abstractions about morality, virtue, religion, while their real practical life was in no way touched by the talk of brotherliness, love of one's neighbour, Christianity and so forth. Here, then, confronts us, as a distinct aspect of the social question, the spiritual problem. We stand before the whole sweep of the spiritual life especially as it relates to men of the present age and the immediate future in the realm of teaching and education. As a result of the way in which the territories of dukes or princes have been formed into single state-economics, the intellectual life in its wider form has been absorbed by the State organization. It is to-day a source of pride. that education has torn itself away, as regards science, as regards intellectual life generally, from its medieval association with religion and theology. Proudly it is asserted and repeated: "In the Middle Ages the intellectual and scientific life were in leading-strings to religion and theology." Of course we do not want to have these times back; we must move forward, not backward. We are living in different times: we must not simply point in pride to the way in which intellectual life was train-bearer to the Church in the Middle Ages. Something different is demanded. Let us take an example not so very far away.

A very distinguished scientist, for whom I have great respect (I do not mention these things in order to disparage people)—the Secretary of the Berlin Academy of Sciences—was speaking of the relation of this Academy to the State. He said, in a well-considered speech, that the members of this Academy regarded it as one of their highest distinctions to be "the scientific bodyguard of the Hohenzollerns." That is only one example of what might be repeated a thousand fold, bringing to our lips the question: "What nowadays has taken the place of the Church which formerly used intellectual life as its train-bearer?” Nor were things so bad in the recent past as they must become, if such State regulations were to be made as would favour the growth of that appalling State-regulation of teaching which has arisen in Eastern Europe and which has conclusively proved that it would bring about the death of all culture. We must look not only into the past, but above all into the future and assert that the time has come when intellectual and spiritual life must exist as a self-dependent part of the social organism and must be under its own control.

When a thing like this is mentioned, we are met by all sorts of prejudices, and we are reckoned mad if we cannot appreciate the enormous blessings to be found in State-control of education. But healthy conditions will never be found until education and everything connected with instruction, including , the teachers from the lowest form to the highest grade in the public schools, passes from the control of the State into its own control. That is one of the great objectives we must specially aim at to-day.

The men who first showed me any friendliness when it came actually to fitting the idea of the threefold organization into the present age are those to whom we owe the first really free Einheitsschule in Stuttgart. In connection with the Waldorf-Astoria Factory, we are establishing the first model Einheitsschule, based on the science of pedagogy and teaching which has its origin in the true and real knowledge of the growing human being. Social class and rank make no real difference to him between the seventh and fifteenth years—all human beings are at the same stage. But to be able to teach and educate him means learning first to understand him. As it fell to me to give the preliminary course to the teachers working at the school, there came under my notice certain things which are nowadays taken as a matter of course. The serious significance of such an acceptation is not realized. It has only developed fully in the last decades. Since these things are the subject of practical life-work and must form its experience, I may remark, on such an occasion as this, that my comments on them arise from no irresponsible youthful mind, I speak as one who has already reached the sixties. I can remember how in days gone by the syllabus was short: the subject of teaching was presented by means of lectures, books and the experiences of men who had living ideas of education, who were creative spiritually. But to-day we have no short syllabus; instead, we have thick books which not only direct us to take one subject in one year, another in another, but tell us how to teach it. What should be the subject of free instruction is to be—indeed is—a matter of regulations. Unless we have a clear, adequate feeling of how unsocial all this is, we shall not be ready to collaborate in the real healing of mankind. Therefore, in the establishment of a spiritual, intellectual life which is free and independent of the State lies the first, central problem of the social question. This is the first of the three self-dependent members of the threefold organism which we have to set up. If we represent these facts, pointing out how healthy it may be to have no authority within the spiritual part of the social organism save that of those who take some active part in it, then the teaching of the future will be seen to have little kinship with that of the present-day unitary State. The whole of life will resemble a model republic. Teaching will be created out of the spirit, to satisfy the demands of education, not given according to the claims of regulations. We shall not merely enquire what standard shall be set in the socialized State for a pupil of thirteen or seventeen, but what lies deeply in man himself, which we can draw out of him in such a way that when these forces, liberated from the depths of his being, are at his disposal, he will not be weak-willed or crushed, as so many men are to-day, but will be equal to his destiny and able to direct his forces with determination to the tasks of his life. This points us to the first member of the threefold social order.

To give utterance to such thoughts as these brings questions, objections, like the one I had to meet in a South German city. I was answered in the discussion at the end of a lecture by a secondary school teacher, some­what in this wise: "We Germans shall be a poor nation in the future, and here is a man who wants to make the spiritual and intellectual life independent: a poor people cannot pay for that, there will be no money, there­fore we shall have to draw on the national exchequer and pay for education out of the taxes. What becomes of independence then? How can we refuse the right of the State to inspect, when the State is the source of income? " I could only reply that it seemed strange to me for the teacher to believe that what was drawn from the Treasury as taxes grew there somehow or other, and would not in future come out of the pockets of the "poor nation." What strikes me most is the lack of thought everywhere. We need to develop a real practical thinking which sees into the facts of life. That will give us practical suggestions which can be carried out.

Further, just as on the one hand the spiritual life, in education, etc., must become independent, so on the other hand must the economic life. Now, two demands, rather remarkably, have lately arisen from the depths of human nature, the one for Democracy, the other for Socialism. They contradict one another. Before the War the two contradictory impulses were thrust into each other's company and a party was even founded with the title "Social Democratic." You might as well talk of "wooden iron." They are contradictory, yet both are noble and honest demands of our times. Since then, the catastrophe of the War has passed over us, with all its con­sequences, and now there is a new form for the social demands and a "democratic Parliament " is rejected. When such a theoretical demand, entirely unaccompanied by know­ledge of the facts, with its catchwords of an abstract kind, like " the seizure of political power " or " the dictatorship of the proletariat " and the like, is pushed forward, this originates in the depths of socialist feeling, but it shows that people have come to realize the contradiction between that attitude and the democratic one. In future, we shall have to take into account the realities of life, not be content with catchwords: we shall realize that a socialist is quite right when he feels there is something repellent about democracy. And the democrat is right when he finds "the dictatorship of the proletariat " an alarming prospect. What are the real facts in this sphere?

We must observe the economic life in its connection with the State in the same way as we did the life of the mind and spirit. A common idea of modern times, especially amongst people who consider themselves advanced thinkers, is that the State should more and more participate in industry. Post office, railways, should be under State control, and its authority should be even more widely extended. This is a very comprehensive sub­ject to touch upon in a few words; and since I must limit myself to a short lecture, I must risk being charged with superficiality in making these remarks, which are, however, really to the point, and can be supported by countless instances from modern history. They are far from being superficial. This idea of the "advanced" thinkers will reveal itself in its true form if we take socialism seriously. Moreover, we can ascertain that true form if we so regard a remark made by Friedrich Engels in one of his most brilliant moments, in his book The Development of Socialism from Utopianism to Science. There he says "If we survey the State, in its present development, we find that it includes management of branches of production and control of the distribution of goods; but, inasmuch as it has undertaken economic management, at the same time it controls men." The State laid down the laws according to which men who stand within the economic life must act whether within or outside of their economic activities. In future this must become different.

Engels was quite right. It was his opinion that within the sphere of economic production itself there should be no more control of men: control should be limited to the production and distribution of goods. A right view, but only half or one-quarter of the truth: because the laws effective within the economic sphere have hitherto coincided with the life of the State, and if the State is removed as controller and manager of economics, the economic sphere must have a place of its own, not one from which men shall be ruled from a centre, but where they will rule themselves democratically.

That means that these two impulses, democracy and socialism, point to the fact that by the side of the independent spiritual member of the social organism there must be two other separate spheres, covering what remains of the function of the former type of State. These two spheres are the control of economic life and the domain of public rights, this latter including everything on which a man is entitled to give judgment when he is of age. What is the meaning of the demand for democracy? It means that, as a matter of history, humanity is becoming capable of deciding, in the sphere of the free State and public rights, everything in which all men are equal, every question on which any man who is of age can pronounce, whether directly through a referendum, or indirectly by representation. In future, therefore, we must have an independent sphere of rights, which will take the place of the old State built up of power and might. We can never have a proper State based on law and right, unless the sphere of law is limited to those matters on which every adult human being is capable of judgment. There has been a good deal of talk on this subject among the workers, though, once again, we can only take their words as a social thermometer. There is a remark of Karl Marx which has sunk deeply into their feelings: "It is an existence unworthy of a human being when a worker must sell his labour-­power in the market, as if it were a commodity: we pay for a commodity at its market price and we pay for labour-power by means of wages which are the price of this commodity, labour-power."

This is a remark which has been significant in the development of modern humanity, not so much through its actual content as through the electrical effect it has had on the proletariat, an effect of which the ruling classes can hardly form any idea. What is at the bottom of it all? In the economic circuit, i.e., in the production, distribution and consumption of goods, which alone belong to this circuit, the regulation of labour, according to amount, time and character, etc., has been placed. We shall never have a healthy condition of things in this sphere until the character, amount and time of human work has been taken out of the economic circuit, whether the work be physical or intellectual. The actual regulation of labour-power does not belong to the economic life, in which the economically stronger can impose the type of work upon the economically weaker. The regulation of work as between man and man, what one man does for another, should belong to the sphere of law and right, where each adult human being is on a level with every other. How much work one human being has to do for another ought never to be decided on economic grounds, but solely on principles which will develop in the State of the future, the State of Rights as opposed to the present State of Might.

Here again we meet with a mass of prejudices. It is a commonplace nowadays to maintain that so long as the economic order is settled by the conditions of a free market, so long will it be natural for labour to depend on production and the price of commodities. But if we imagine that things must always go on as they do now, we are shutting our eyes to the different demands which are growing up as history unrolls. In future we shall see, for instance, how foolish it would be for men in control of some industry to meet and, examining their accounts for a certain year, to say: "We produced so much last year. This year, to equal that total we shall need so many days of rain, so many of sunshine, etc." We cannot dictate to Nature to accommodate herself to our prices; prices must be subject to Nature-conditions. On the one side economic life is bounded by natural conditions, on the other by the State of Law or Rights, through which, as we have seen, labour has to be regulated. Hours of work must be settled on purely democratic grounds and prices will follow them, regulated according to natural conditions, as is the case in agriculture. We have not to consider alteration in a few minor details of the system: we must change our whole way of thinking and learning. The unrest created at present in our industrial life will never disappear until labour-power is judged on an independent democratic basis, when one adult human being stands over against his fellow as equal and can, as free man, bring his work into the independent economic life, in which agreements about production will be made, not about work. This must be understood.

I can but touch on these things in the short time at my disposal. I would gladly give a whole course of lectures to deal with them, but that is impossible. I must just indicate what form this third member, the economic life, must take in the threefold social organism of the future.

In this economic sphere there must not be, as in the past, control of capital, of land, of means of production (which incidently is control of capital) and of labour: we may only admit control of the production, distribution and consumption of goods. And how is the essential fact of an economic life which is to be based only on knowledge of facts and on practical ability—this "settling of prices"—to be achieved? It must not be decided by the chances of a free market as has been the case hitherto in both national-economy and world- economy. By means of the Associations which will come into being to suit the circumstances existing between the various branches of production and consumption—Associations which will be composed of men whose position is justified by their knowledge of facts and practical ability—we shall obtain organically and rationally what is nowadays attained through crises in the chances of a free market. In the future, when a decision as to the kind and character, of human labour has to be made in the Rights State, it will happen in the economic life that a man will receive in return for his product enough exchange-values to supply his needs until he can produce another such product. To give a rough superficial example, I might explain that, supposing I produce a pair of boots, I must be able, through the mutually-fixed values, to get as much goods in exchange for my boots as I shall require for my needs until I have made another pair. There will have to be arrangements within the society for supplying the needs of widows, orphans, the sick, of education, etc., but the actual regulation of prices in this way—and that alone will be the task of the economic organization—will depend on the formation of Corporations (whether elected, or nominated from the Associations formed among the various branches of production combined with the Associations of consumers) whose business it will be to get at true prices in real life.

This can only be achieved if the whole economic life (not planned after a Möllendorff scheme, but in a living fashion) is so ordered that, for instance, notice is taken of actual conditions. Say that some particular article shows a tendency to become too expensive: that means that it is too scarce. Workmen must be diverted to that branch of production, through some form of agreement, in order to produce more of it. If some article is too cheap, factories must close down and the workers be transferred to other factories. “It is all very difficult," people reply when we mention this sort of thing to-day: but they should realize that to reject it as difficult, and to prefer to play about with minor improvements in social conditions, means to preserve present conditions as they are. What I have said shows you that, as a result of the Associations created simply out of the economic life, economic life can be made self-dependent, controlled only by the economic forces them­selves instead of being under the aegis of the State: and in such a way that within this self-dependent control the initiative of the individual will be maintained as much as possible. This cannot be done by a planned economy, by the establishment of a common organization of the means of production, but only by the Associations belonging to such free branches of production and their agreement with the consumers' Associations.

It would be a terrible mistake to push to extremes the State control which has hitherto been under the direction of the ruling classes, and extend "Corporations" over the whole life of the State, using the framework of the State for the purpose, a procedure which could but undermine all connection between such a planned economy and the economic forces outside it. The Associations, on the other hand, as part of the Threefold Organization, would aim particularly at maintaining the free initiative of those engaged in industry and at keeping open everything which unites a closed economic circuit with other economic circuits without.

Many things would look very different—for example, something I can only indicate by an analogy. Socialist doctrine demands "the abolition of private property " and "trans­formation of private possessions into communal, property "—mere unmeaning words, which can signify nothing to a man with practical knowledge of affairs. Yet they might have a meaning—which I can describe to you in pictorial fashion. We are very proud nowadays, for instance, of our philosophers, and in one way they do think fairly accurately, that is, where intellectual or spiritual work is concerned. In the material sphere they do not manage to think in the same healthy way. In the matter of intellectual possessions it is realized that what is produced in that realm by anyone is his own work, he has to be present. Nobody talks of its being produced by some common economy or corporate industry. Everything here must be left to the individual, for we get the best result when he is present with his faculties and talents at the work, not when he is cut off from it; but from a social aspect we think that thirty years or less after his death the spiritual product should no longer be the property of his heirs, but of any person who can best make it accessible to the community. That seems natural to us, because we do not value spiritual product as anything peculiar. But we make no effort, in the case of material property, to treat it in the same way, and see that it should only remain private as long as a man is in contact with it with all his faculties. When this is no longer the case it should pass over—not to the community (which has no real being) bringing fearful corruption in its train, but to the man who could in his turn by use of his faculties put it to the best use for the community.

It is easy enough to see clearly if we think impartially. We have undertaken to found a school for Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum, at Dornach, near Basel, in Switzerland. This has been its title ever since the world became "Woodrow-Wilsonized" and it became necessary for Germany's spiritual life-treasure to be boldly displayed before the world. A very different thing, this, from ordinary Chauvinism—a Goetheanum in a foreign country as the representative of German spiritual life. Fur­ther, it is being built, and it will be controlled, by those who have the capacities to call it into being; but to whom will it belong when these people are no longer among the living? It will not pass by inheritance to anyone, but to those who can control it best in the service of humanity. Actually it belongs to nobody. Social thought in economics will bring into being the things which are necessary for health in the future. I have dealt more fully with the circulation of private property in my Three­ fold Commonwealth, where I have shown how the social organism must be divided into three members, separate but co-operating as such:

(a) The spiritual organization with control of itself on the basis of a free spiritual life.

(b) The organisation of the State with political rights and with democratic control based on the judgment of every grown-up person.

 (c) An economic life placed under the control only of individuals, who have shown themselves expert and competent, and their Associations and Corporations.

All this seems so new that once when I was talking of it in Germany, someone objected that, I was dividing the State (which must be a unity) into three parts. I could only ask in reply whether I should be dividing a horse into parts if I said it must stand on its four legs? Or is a horse a unity only if it stands on one leg? Just as little can one expect that the social life should be an abstract unity, if such a unity could exist at all. We must not in the future allow ourselves to be hypnotized by the abstract idea of the "unitary State"; we must see that it must be divided into three members on which it can be supported—into a free spiritual sphere controlling itself, an organization of rights with democratic legislation, and an economic organization with expert and competent economic control.

One-half of a great truth was uttered more than a hundred years ago in Western Europe, in the words: "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity," three ideals which were capable of being graven deep into the hearts and souls of men: but it was not fools or madmen who maintained in the nineteenth century that these ideals were really contradictory, that where absolute equality rules, neither freedom nor fraternity can exist. These objections were sound, but only because they were made at a time when men were obsessed by the idea of the so-called "unitary State." Directly we free ourselves from the hypnotism of this idea and can understand the necessity for the three­fold social organism we shall speak otherwise.

I hope you will allow me in closing, to sum up in a comparison what I fain would discuss at greater, length. I have only been able to give an outline sketch of what I meant: I know I have but hinted at what needs a comprehensive description to be understood; but in conclusion I should like to point out what a hypnotic effect the "unitary State " idea has had on men, and how they have let the unitary State be dominated by the three great ideals of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." We shall have to change that idea. At present people look on the Unitary State as a sort of divinity. In this, their attitude is like Faust's attitude towards the sixteen-year-old Gretchen. It is like the lessons which Faust gave to the child Gretchen, suited to her years, but usually regarded by philosophers as something highly philosophical. There Faust says, "The All­-enfolding, the All-upholding, folds and up­holds he not thee, me, Himself? " (Faust, Part I, Scene XVI) This is almost the same view as of the Unitary State. Men are hypnotized by it as by an idol of unity and cannot see that this unitary picture must become threefold for the health of mankind in the future. Many a manufacturer would be only too glad to speak to his work-people about the State as Faust speaks to Gretchen: "The all-enfolding, all-upholding State, does it not enfold and uphold you, myself, itself? "—only he would have to clap his hand over his mouth lest he should say "myself " too loudly! The necessity of the threefold ordering must be realized, especially amongst the workers, but that will only be when their eyes are opened to the need. In future it will not be the cry of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," with all the contradictions involved in these ideals. They will hold sway, but the independent spiritual life will be the domain of "Liberty " for there it is justified. "Equality" will be the rule in the democratic State, where all grown men will be equal in rights; finally, "Fraternity " will hold dominion in the economic life, independently controlled, supporting and sustaining every one. Thus applied to the three divisions of the social organism the three ideals no longer contradict each other.

And now, though we look in agony at what has happened at Versailles, seeing in it the starting-point of much misery, poverty and pain, yet we can still hope. Things external can be taken from us, yet if we have the vigour to reach back over the years in which we were false to our own past to the Goetheanism of the period at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe and others were active in other spheres: if we have the vigour to reach back in our time of need, in the strength of our own inner being, to the great glories of Central Europe, then, in spite of the stress of our times, will peal forth from Central Europe the complement to the half­truth of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity " which rang out a hundred years ago, the other half—perhaps in external dependence, but certainly in inner freedom and independence.

Liberty in the Life of the Spirit.
Equality in the democratic Life of Rights.
Fraternity in the Economic Life.

In these words we can sum tap what men must think and say and feel if they are to comprehend the Social Question in its entirety. May it be received and grasped by many, many minds, so that what is only a question to-day may be the practice of tomorrow.

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.

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.