The Rudolf Steiner Archive

This lecture appeared in The Golden Blade, 1954.

From the two preceding lectures you will have realised that in finding it necessary to speak at the present time of the threefold social order, anthroposophical spiritual science is not actuated by any subjective views or aims. The purpose of the lecture yesterday was to point to impulses deeply rooted in the life of the peoples of the civilised world—the world as it is in this Fifth Post-Atlantean Epoch. I tried to show how, from about the year 1200 A.D. onwards, there awakened in Middle Europe an impulse leading to the growth of what may be called the civic social order, but that this civic social life of the middle classes was infiltrated by the remains of a life of soul belonging to earlier centuries—by those decadent Nibelung traits which appeared particularly among the ruling strata in the mid-European countries.

I laid special stress upon the existence of a radical contrast in mid-European life from the thirteenth until the twentieth centuries, culminating in the terrible death-throes of social life that have come upon Middle Europe. This incisive contrast was between the inner, soul-life of the widespread middle-class, and that of the descendants of the old knighthood, of the feudal overlords, of those in whom vestiges of the old Nibelung characteristics still survived. These latter were the people who really created the political life of Middle Europe, whereas the bulk of the middle class remained non-political, a-political. If one desires to be a spiritual scientist from the practical point of view, serious study must be given to this difference of soul-life between the so-called educated bourgeoisie and all those who held any kind of ruling positions in Middle Europe at that time. I spoke of this in the lecture yesterday.

We will now consider in rather greater detail why it was that the really brilliant spiritual movement which lasted from the time of Walter von der Vogelweide until that of Goetheanism, and then abruptly collapsed, failed to gain any influence over social life or to produce any thoughts which could have been fruitful in that sphere. Even Goethe, with all his power to unfold great, all-embracing ideas in many domains of life, was really only able to give a few indications—concerning which one may venture to say that even he was not quite clear about them—as to what must come into being as a new social order in civilised humanity. Fundamentally speaking, the tendency towards the threefold membering of a healthy social organism was already present in human beings, subconsciously, by the end of the eighteenth century. The demands for freedom, equality and fraternity, which can have meaning only when the threefold social order becomes reality, testified to the existence of this subconscious longing. Why did it never really come to the surface?

This is connected with the whole inherent character of mid-European spiritual life. At the end of the lecture yesterday I spoke of a strange phenomenon. I said that Hermann Grimm—for whom I have always had such high regard and whose ideas were able to shed light upon so many aspects of art and general human interest of bygone times—succumbed to the extraordinary fallacy of admiring such an out-and-out phrasemonger as Wildenbruch! In the course of years I have often mentioned an incident which listeners may have thought trivial, but which can be deeply indicative for those who study life in its symptomatological aspect. Among the many conversations I had with Hermann Grimm while I was in personal contact with him, there was one in which I spoke from my own point of view about many things that need to be understood in the spiritual sense. In telling this story I have always stressed the fact that Hermann Grimm's only response to such mention of the spiritual was to make a warding-off gesture with his hand, indicating that this was a realm he was not willing to enter. A supremely true utterance, consisting of a gesture of the hand, was made at that moment. It was true inasmuch as Hermann Grimm, for all his penetration into many things connected with the so-called spiritual evolution of mankind, into art, into matters of universal human concern, had not the faintest inkling of what ‘spirit’ must signify for men of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch of culture. He simply did not know what spirit really is from the standpoint of a man of this epoch. In speaking of such matters one must keep bluntly to the truth: until it came to the spirit, there was truth in a man like Hermann Grimm. He made a parrying gesture because he had no notion of how to think about the spirit. Had he been one of the phrasemongers going about masked as prophets today endeavouring to better the lot of mankind, he would have believed that he too could speak about the spirit; he would have believed that by reiterating Spirit, spirit, spirit! something is expressed that has been nurtured in one's own soul.

Among those who of recent years have been talking a great deal about the spirit, without a notion of its real nature, are the theosophists—the majority of them at any rate. For it can truly be said that of all the vapid nonsense that has been uttered of late, the theosophical brand has been the most regrettable and also in a certain respect the most harmful in its effects. But a statement like the one I have made about Hermann Grimm—not thinking of him as a personality but as a typical representative of the times—raises the question: how comes it that such a true representative of Middle European life has no inkling of how to think about the spiritual, about the spirit? It is just this that makes Hermann Grimm the typical representative of Middle European civilisation. For when we envisage this brilliant culture of the townsfolk, which has its start about the year 1200 and lasts right on into the period of Goetheanism, we shall certainly perceive as its essential characteristic—but without valuing it less highly on this account—that it is impregnated in the best sense with soul but empty of anything that can be called spirit. That is the fact we have to grasp, with a due sense of the tragedy of it: this brilliant culture was devoid of spirit. What is meant here, of course, is spirit as one learns to apprehend it through anthroposophical spiritual science.

Again and again I return to Hermann Grimm as a representative personality, for the thinking of thousands and thousands of scholarly men in Middle Europe was similar to his. Hermann Grimm wrote an excellent book about Goethe, containing the substance of lectures he gave at the University of Berlin in the seventies of the last century. Taking it all in all, what Hermann Grimm said about Goethe is really the best that has been said at this level of scholarship. From the vantage-point of a rich life of soul, Hermann Grimm derived his gift not only for portraying individual men but for accurately discerning and assessing their most characteristic traits. He was brilliant in hitting upon words for such characterisations. Take a simple example. In the nature of things, Hermann Grimm was one of those who misunderstood the character of the wild Nibelung people. He was an ardent admirer of Frederick the Great and pictured him as a Germanic hero. Now Macaulay, the English historian and man of letters, wrote about Frederick the Great, naturally from the English point of view. In an essay on Macaulay, Hermann Grimm set out to show that in reality only a German possessed of sound insight is capable of understanding and presenting a true picture of Frederick the Great. Hermann Grimm describes Macaulay's picture of Frederick the Great in the very apt words: Macaulay makes of Frederick the Great a distorted figure of an English Lord, with snuff in his nose.

To hit upon such a characterisation indicates real ability to shape ideas and mental images in such a way that they have plasticity, mobility. Many similar examples could be found of Hermann Grimm's flair for apt characterisation. And other kindred minds, belonging to the whole period of Middle European culture of which I spoke yesterday, were endowed with the same gift. But if, with all the good-will born of a true appreciation of Hermann Grimm, we study his monograph on Goethe—what is our experience then? We feel: this is an extraordinarily good, a really splendid piece of writing—only it is not Goethe! In reality it gives only a shadow-picture of Goethe, as if out of a three-dimensional figure one were to make a two-dimensional shadow-picture, thrown on the screen. Goethe seems to wander through the chapters like a ghost from the year 1749 to the year 1832. What is described is a spectral Goethe—not what Goethe was, what he thought, what he desired.

Goethe himself did not succeed in lifting to the level of spiritual consciousness all that was alive within his soul. Indeed, the great ‘Goethe problem’ today is precisely this: to raise into consciousness in a truly spiritual way what was spiritually alive in Goethe. He himself was not capable of this, for culture in his day could give expression only to a rich life of the soul, not of the spirit. Therefore Hermann Grimm, too, firmly rooted as he was in the Goethean tradition, could depict only a shadow, a spectre, when he wanted to speak of Goethe's spirit. It is thoroughly characteristic that the best modern exposition of Goethe and Goetheanism should produce nothing but a spectre of Goethe.

Why is it that through the whole development of this brilliant phase of culture there is no real grasp of the spirit, no experience of it or feeling for it? Men such as Troxler, and Schelling too at times, pointed gropingly to the spirit. But speaking quite objectively, it must be said that this culture was empty of spirit. And because of this, men were also ignorant of the needs, the conditions, that are essential for the life of the spirit. Here too there is something which may well up as a feeling of tragedy from contemplation of this stream of culture: men were unable to perceive, to divine, the conditions necessary for the life of the spirit, above all in the social sphere; For the reason why the social life of Middle Europe has developed through the centuries to the condition in which it finds itself today is that it had no real experience of the spirit, nor felt the need to meet the fundamental requirement of the spiritual life by emancipating it, making it independent of and separate from the political sphere. Because men had no understanding of the spirit, they allowed it to be merged with the political life of the State, where it could unfold only in shackles. I am speaking here only of Middle Europe; in other regions of the modern civilised world it was the same, although the causes were different.

And then, in the inmost soul, a reaction can set in. Then a man can experience how in his study of nature the spirit remains dumb, silent, uncommunicative. Then the soul rebels, gathers its forces and strives to bring the spirit to birth from its own inmost being! This can happen only in an epoch when scientific thinking impinges on a culture which has no innate disposition towards spirituality. For if men are not inwardly dead, if they are inwardly alive, the impulse of the spirit begins of itself to stir within them. We must recognise that since the middle of the 15th century the spirit has to be brought to birth through encountering what is dead if it is to penetrate into man's life of soul. The only persons who can gain satisfaction from inwardly experiencing the spiritualised soul-life of the Greeks are those who, with their classical scholarship, live in that afterglow of Greek culture which enables the soul-quality of the spirit to pulsate through a man's own soul. But men who are impelled to live earnestly with natural science and to discern what is deathly, corpse-like in it—they will make it possible for the spirit itself to come alive in their souls.

If a man is to have real and immediate experience of the spirit in this modern age, he must not only have smelt the fumes of prussic acid or ammonia in laboratories, or have studied specimens extracted from corpses in the dissecting room, but out of the whole trend and direction of natural scientific thinking he must have known the odour of death in order that through this experience he may be led to the light of the spirit! This is an impulse which must take effect in our times; it is also one of the testings which men of the modern age must undergo. Natural science exists far more for the purpose of educating man than for communicating truths about nature. Only a naive mind could believe that any natural law discovered by learned scientists enshrines an essential, inner truth. Indeed it does not! The purpose of natural science, devoid of spirit as it is, is the education of men. This is one of the paradoxes implicit in the historic evolution of humanity.

And so it was only in the very recent past, in the era after Goetheanism, that the spirit glimmered forth; for it was then, for the first time, that the essentially corpse-like quality in the findings of natural science came to the fore; then and not until then could the spirit ray forth—for those, of course, who were willing to receive its light. Until the time of Goethe, men protected themselves against the sorry effects of a spiritual life shackled in State-imposed restrictions by cultivating a form of spiritual life fundamentally alien to them, namely the spiritual life of ancient Greece; this was outside the purview of the modern State for the very reason that it had nothing to do with modern times. A makeshift separation of the spiritual life from the political sphere was provided by the adoption of an alien form of culture. This Greek culture was a cover for the spiritual emptiness of Middle European life and of modern Europe in general.

On the other hand, the need to separate the economic sphere from the Rights-sphere, from the political life of the State proper, was not perceived. And why not? When all is said and done, nobody can detach himself from the economic field. To speak trivially, the stomach sees to that! In the economic sphere it is impossible for men to live unconcernedly through such cataclysms as are allowed to occur, all unnoticed, in the political and spiritual spheres. Economic activity was going on all the time, and it developed in a perfectly straightforward way. The transformation of the old impenetrable forests into meadows and cornfields, with all the ensuing economic consequences, went steadily ahead. But into economic life, too, there came an alien intrusion, one that had actually found a footing in the souls of men in Middle Europe earlier than that of Greece, namely the Latin-Roman influence. Everything pertaining to the State, to the Rights-life, to political life, derives from this Latin-Roman influence. And here again is something that will have to be stressed by history in the future but has been overlooked by the conventional, tendentious historiography of the immediate past, with its bias towards materialism—the strangely incongruous fact that certain economic ideas and procedures are a direct development from social relationships described, for example, by Tacitus, as prevailing in the Germanic world during the first centuries after the founding of Christianity.

But that is not all. These trends in economic thinking did not go forward unhampered. The Roman view of rights, Roman political thinking, seeped into the economic usages and methods originally prevailing in Europe, infiltrated them through and through and caused a sharp cleavage between the economic sphere and the political sphere. Thus the economic sphere and the political sphere, the former coloured by the old Germanic way of life and the latter by the Latin-Roman influence, remained separate on the surface but without any organic distinction consistent with the threefold membering of the body social: the distinction was merely superficial, a mask. Two heterogeneous strata were intermingled; it was felt that they did not belong together, in spite of external unification. Inwardly, however, people were content, because in their souls they experienced the two spheres as separate and distinct.

One need only study mediaeval and modern history in the right way and it will be clear that this mediaeval history is really the story of perpetual rebellion, self-defense, on the part of the economic relationships surviving from olden times against the political State, against the Roman order of life. Imaginative study of these things shows unmistakably how Roman influences in the form of jurisprudence penetrate into men via the heads of the administrators. A great deal of the Roman element had even found its way into the wild Nibelung men in their period of decline. “Graf” is connected with “grapho”—writing. One can picture how the peasants, thinking in terms of husbandry, rise up in rebellion against this Roman juridical order, with fists clenched in their pockets, or with flails. Naturally, this is not always so outwardly perceptible. But when one observes history truly, these factors are present in the whole moral trend and impulse of those times. And so—I am merely characterising, not criticising, for everything that happened has also brought blessings and was necessary for the historic evolution of Middle Europe—all that developed from the seeds planted in mid-European civilisation was permeated through and through by the juristic-political influences of the Roman world and the humanism of Greece, by the Greek way of conceiving spirit in the guise of soul.

On the other hand, directly economic life acquired its modern, international character, the old order was doomed. A man might have had a very good classical education and be an ignoramus in respect of modern natural science, but then he was inwardly on a retrograde path. A man of classical education could not keep abreast of his times unless he penetrated to some extent into what modern natural scientific education had to offer. And again, if a man were schooled in natural science, if he acquired some knowledge of modern natural science and of what had come out of the old Roman juristic system in the period of which I have spoken, he could not help suffering from an infantile disease, from ‘culture scarlet fever’, ‘culture measles’, in a manner of speaking. In the old Imperium Romanum a juristic culture was fitting and appropriate. Then this same juristic principle, the res publica (i.e. the conception of it), was transplanted from ancient Rome into the sphere of Middle European culture, together with the element of Nibelung barbarism on the other side. One really gets ‘culture scarlet fever’, ‘culture measles’, if one does not merely think of jurisprudence in the abstract, but, with sound natural scientific concepts, delves into the stuff that figures as modern jurisprudence in literature and in science.

We can see that this state of things had reached a certain climax when we find a really gifted man such as Rudolf von Ihering at an utter loss to know how to deal with the pitiable notions of jurisprudence current in the modern age. The book written by Ihering on the aim of justice (Der Zweck im Recht) was a grotesque production, for here was a man who had made a little headway in natural scientific thinking endeavouring to apply the concepts he had acquired to jurisprudence—the result being a monstrosity of human thinking. To study modern literature on law is a veritable martyrdom for sound thinking; one feels all the time as though so many worms were crawling through the brain. This is the actual experience—I am simply describing it pictorially.

We must be courageous enough to face these things fairly and squarely, and then it will be clear that we have arrived at the point of time when not only certain established usages and institutions, but men's very habits of thought, must be metamorphosed, re-cast; when men must begin to think about many things in a different way. Only then will the social institutions in the external world be able, under the influence of human thinking and feeling, to take the form that is called for by these ominous and alarming facts.

A fundamental change in the mental approach to certain matters of the highest importance is essential. But because between 1200 and the days of Goetheanism, modern humanity, especially in Middle Europe, absorbed all unwittingly thoughts that wriggled through the brain like worms, there crept over thinking the lazy passivity that is characteristic of the modern age. It comes to expression in the absence of will from the life of thought. Men allow their thoughts to take possession of them; they yield to these thoughts; they prefer to have them in the form of instinct. But in this manner no headway can be made towards the spirit. The spirit can be reached only by genuinely putting the will into thinking, so that thinking becomes an act like any other, like hewing wood. Do modern men feel that thinking tires them? They do not, because thinking for them is not activity at all. But the fact that anyone who thinks with thoughts, not with words, will get just the same fatigue as he gets from hewing wood, and actually in a shorter time, so that he simply has to stop—that is quite outside their experience. Nevertheless, this is what will have to be experienced, for otherwise modern mankind as a community will be incapable of achieving the transition from the sense-world into the super-sensible world of which I spoke in the two preceding lectures. Only by entering thus into the super-sensible world, with understanding for what is seen and apprehended in the spirit, will human souls find harmony again.

The year 1200 is the time of Walter von der Vogelweide, the time when the spiritual life of Middle Europe is astir with powerful imaginations of which conventional history has little to say. Then it flows on through the centuries, but from the 15th and 16th centuries onwards takes into itself the germs of decline with the founding of the Universities of Prague, Ingolstadt, Freiburg, Heidelberg, Restock, Wurzburg and the rest. The founding of these Universities throughout Middle Europe occurred almost without exception in a single century. The kind of life and thinking emanating from the Universities started the trend towards abstraction—towards what was subsequently to be idolised and venerated as the pure, natural scientific thinking which today invades the customary ways of thought with such devastating results.

Fundamentally speaking, this gave a definite stamp to the whole mentality of the educated middle class. Naturally, many individuals were not deeply influenced, but all the same the effect was universal. Of salient importance during this period was the increasing receptiveness of people to a form of soul-life entirely foreign to them. Side by side with what was developed through those who were the bearers of this middle-class culture, which reached its culmination in Goethe, Herder and Schiller, alien elements and impulses were at work.

I am speaking here of something profoundly characteristic. In their souls, the bearers of this culture were seeking for the spirit without a notion of what the spirit is. And where did they seek it? In the realm of Greek culture! They learnt Greek in their intermediate schools, and what was instilled into them by way of spiritual substance was Greek in tenor and content. To speak truly of the spirit as conceived in Middle Europe from the thirteenth right on into the twentieth century, one would have to say: spirit, as conveyed by the inculcation of Greek culture. No spiritual life belonging intrinsically and innately to the people came into being. Greek culture did not really belong to the epoch beginning in the middle of the 15th century, which we call the epoch of the evolution of self-consciousness. And so the bourgeoisie in Middle Europe were imbued with an outworn form of Greek culture, and this was the source of all that they were capable of feeling and experiencing in regard to the spirit.

But what the Greek experienced of the spirit was merely its expression in the life of soul (Seelenseite das Geistes). What gave profundity to the culture of ancient Greece was that the Greek rose to perception of the highest manifestation of soul-life. That was what he called ‘spirit’. True, the spirit shines down from the heights, pulsing through the realm of soul; but when the gaze is directed upwards, it finds, to begin with, only the expression of the spirit in the realm of soul.

Man's task in the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, however, is to lift himself into the very essence of the spirit—an attainment still beyond his reach in the days of Greece. This is of far greater significance than is usually supposed, for it sheds light upon the whole way in which medieval, neo-medieval culture apprehended the spirit.

What, then, was required in order to reach a concept, an inward experience, of the spirit appropriate for the modern age? It is precisely by studying a representative figure like Hermann Grimm that we can discover this. It is something of which a man such as Hermann Grimm, steeped in classical lore, had not the faintest inkling—namely, the strivings of natural science and the scientific mode of thinking. This thinking is devoid of spirit; precisely where it is great it contains no trace of spirit, not an iota of spirituality. All the concepts of natural science, all its notions of laws of nature, are devoid of spirit, are mere shadow-pictures of spirit; while men are investigating the laws of nature, no trace of the spirit is present in their consciousness.

Two ways are open here. Either a man can give himself up to natural science, contenting himself—as often happens today—with what natural science has to offer; then he will certainly equip his mind with a number of scientific laws and ideas concerning nature—but he loses the spirit. Along this path it is possible to become a truly great investigator, but at the cost of losing all spirituality. That is the one way. The other is to be inwardly aware of the tragic element arising from the lack of spirituality in natural science, precisely where science appears in all its greatness. Man immerses his soul in the scientific lore of nature, in the abstract, unspiritual laws of chemistry, physics, biology, which, having been discovered at the dissecting table, indicate by this very fact that from the living they yield only the dead. The soul delves into what natural science has to impart concerning the laws of human evolution. When a man allows all this to stream into him, when he endeavours not to pride himself on his knowledge, but asks: ‘What does this really give to the human soul?’—then he experiences something true; then spirit is not absent. Herein, too, lies the tragic problem of Nietzsche, whose life of soul was torn asunder by the realisation that modern scientific learning is devoid of spirituality.

As you know, insight into the super-sensible world does not depend upon clairvoyance; all that is required is to apprehend by the exercise of healthy human reason what clairvoyance can discover. It is not essential for the whole of mankind to become clairvoyant; but what is essential, and moreover within the reach of every human being, is to develop insight into the spiritual world through the healthy human intelligence. Only thus can harmony enter into souls of the modern age: for the loss of this harmony is due to the conditions of evolution in our time. The development of Europe, with her American affinities on the one hand and the Asiatic frontier on the other, has reached a parting of the ways. Spiritual Beings of higher worlds are bringing to a decisive issue the overwhelming difference between former ages and modern times as regards the living side-by-side of diverse populations on the earth.

How were the peoples of remote antiquity distributed and arranged over the globe? Up to a certain point of time, not long before the Mystery of Golgotha, the configuration of peoples on earth was determined from above downwards, inasmuch as the souls simply descended from the spiritual world into the physical bodies dwelling in some particular territory. Owing to physiological, geographical, climatic conditions in early times, certain kinds of human bodies were to be found in Greece, and similarly on the peninsula of Italy. The souls came from above, were predestined entirely from above, and took very deep root in man's whole constitution, in his outer, bodily physiognomy.

Then came the great migrations of the peoples. Men wandered over the earth in different streams. Races and peoples began to intermix, thus enhancing the importance of the element of heredity in earthly life. A population inhabiting a particular region of the earth moved to another; for example the Angles and Saxons who were living in certain districts of the Continent migrated to the British Isles. That is one such migration. But in respect of physical heredity, the descendants of the Angles and Saxons are dependent upon what had developed previously on the Continent; this was a determining factor in their bodily appearance, their practices, and so forth. Thus there came into the evolutionary process a factor working in and conditioned by the horizontal. Whereas the distribution of human beings over the earth had formerly depended entirely upon the way in which the souls incarnated as they came down from above, the wanderings and movements of men over the earth now also began to have an effect.

At the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries, however, a new cosmic historic impulse came into operation. For a period of time a certain sympathy existed between the souls descending from the spiritual world and the bodies on the earth below. Speaking concretely: souls who were sympathetically attracted by the bodily form and constitution of the descendants of the Angles and Saxons, now living in the British Isles, incarnated in those regions. In the 15th century this sympathy began to wane, and since then the souls have no longer been guided by racial characteristics, but once again by geographical conditions, the kind of climate, and so forth, on the earth below, and also by whether a certain region of the earth is flat or mountainous. Since the 15th century, souls have been less and less concerned with racial traits; once again they are guided more by the existing geographical conditions. Hence a kind of chasm is spreading through the whole of mankind today between the elements of heredity and race and the soul-element coming from the spiritual world. And if men of our time were able to lift more of their subconsciousness into consciousness, very few of them would—to use a trivial expression—feel comfortable in their skins. The majority would say: I came down to the earth in order to live on flat ground, among green things or upon verdant soil, in this or that kind of climate, and whether I have Roman or Germanic features is of no particular importance to me.

It certainly seems paradoxical when these things, which are of paramount importance for human life, are concretely described. Men who preach sound principles, saying that one should abjure materialism and turn towards the spirit—they too talk just like the pantheists, of spirit, spirit, spirit. People are not shocked by this today; but when anyone speaks concretely about the spirit they simply cannot take it. That is how things are. And harmony must again be sought between, shall I say, geographical predestination and the racial element that is spread over the earth. The leanings towards internationalism in our time are due to the fact that souls no longer concern themselves with the element of race.

A figure of speech I once used is relevant here. I compared what is happening now to a ‘vertical’ migration of peoples, whereas in earlier times what took place was a ‘horizontal’ migration. This comparison is no mere analogy, but is founded upon facts of the spiritual life.

To all this must be added that, precisely through the spiritual evolution of modern times, man is becoming more and more spiritual in the sphere of his subconsciousness, and the materialistic trend in his upper consciousness is more and more sharply at variance with the impulses that are astir in his subconsciousness. In order to understand this, we must consider once more the threefold membering of the human being.

When the man of the present age, whose attention is directed only to the material and the physical, thinks of this threefold membering, he says to himself: I perceive through my senses: they are indeed distributed over the whole body but are really centralised in the head; acts of perception, therefore, belong to the life of the nerves and senses—and there he stops. Further observation will, of course, enable him to describe how the human being breathes, and how the life passes over from the breath into the movement of the heart and the pulsation of the blood. But that is about as far as a he gets today. Metabolism is studied [in] all detail, but not as one of the three members of threefold man: actually it is taken to be the whole man. One need not, of course, go to the lengths of the scientific thinker who said: man is what he eats (Der Mensch ist, was er isst)—but, broadly speaking, science is pretty strongly convinced that it is so. In Middle Europe at the present time it looks as if he will soon be what he does not eat!

This threefold membering of the human being, which will ultimately find expression in a threefold social order because its factual reality is becoming more and more evident, manifests in different forms over the earth. Truly, man is not simply the being he appears outwardly to be, enclosed within his skin. It was in accordance with a deep feeling and perception when in my Mystery Play, “The Portal of Initiation”, in connection with the characters of Capesius and Strader, I drew attention to the fact that whatever is done by men on earth has its echo in cosmic happenings out yonder in the universe. With every thought we harbour, with every movement of the hand, with everything we say, whether we are walking or standing, whatever we do—something happens in the cosmos.

The faculties for perceiving and experiencing these things are lacking in man today. He does not know—nor can it be expected of him and it is paradoxical to speak as I am speaking now—he does not know how what is happening here on the earth would appear if seen, for example, from the Moon. If he could look from the Moon he would see that the life of the nerves and senses is altogether different from what can be known of it in physical existence. The nerves-and-senses life, everything that transpires while you see, hear, smell, taste, is light in the cosmos, the radiation of light into the cosmos. From your seeing, from your feeling, from your hearing, the earth shines out into the cosmos.

Different again is the effect produced by what is rhythmic in the human being: breathing, heart movement, blood pulsation. This activity manifests in the universe in great and powerful rhythms which can be heard by the appropriate organs of hearing. And the process of metabolism in man radiates out into cosmic space as life streaming from the earth. You cannot perceive, hear, see, smell or feel without shining out into the cosmos. Whenever your blood circulates, you resound into universal space, and whenever metabolism takes place within you, this is seen from out yonder as the life of the whole earth.

But there are great differences in respect of all this—for example, between Asia and Europe. Seen from outside, the thinking peculiar to the Asiatics would appear—even now, when a great proportion of them have lost all spirituality—as bright, shining light raying out into the spiritual space of the universe. But the further we go towards the West, the dimmer and darker does this radiance become. On the other hand, more and more life surges out into cosmic space the further we go towards the West. Only from this vista can there arise in the human soul what may be called perception of the cosmic aspect of the earth—with the human beings belonging to it.

Such conceptions will be needed if mankind is to go forward to a propitious and not an ominous future. The idiocy that is gradually being bred in human beings who are made to learn from the sketchy maps of modern geography: Here is the Danube, here the Rhine, here Reuss, here Aare, here Bern, Basle, Zürich, and so forth—all this external delineation which merely adds material details to the globe—this kind of education will be the ruin of humanity. It is necessary as a foundation and not to be scoffed at; but nevertheless it will lead gradually to man's downfall. The globe of the future will have to indicate: here the earth shines because spirituality is contained in the heads of men: there the earth radiates out more life into cosmic space because of the characteristics of the human beings inhabiting this particular territory.

Something I once said here is connected with this. (One must always illumine one fact by another). I told you that Europeans who settle in America develop hands resembling those of the Red Indians; they begin to resemble the Indian type. This is because the souls coming down into human bodies today are directed more by geographical conditions, as they were in the olden days. In our own time, the souls are directed, not by racial considerations, not by what develops out of the blood, but by geographical conditions, as in the past. But it will be necessary to get at the roots of what is going on in humanity. This can be done only when men accustom themselves to concepts of greater flexibility, capable of penetrating matters of this kind. These concepts, however, can be developed only on the foundation of spiritual science. And such a foundation is available when the spirit can be brought to birth in the human soul. For this, man needs a free spiritual life, emancipated from the political life of the State.

I have now given you one or two indications of what is astir in humanity, and of the need to strive for a new ordering of social life. Social demands cannot nowadays be advanced in terms of the trivial concepts commonly employed. Men must have insight into the nature of present-day humanity; they must make good what they have neglected in the study of modern mankind.

It seems that at this present moment the question should arise in every soul: Where is humanity heading? Where is the path of humanity within the so-called civilized world going? It is the events of the present that undoubtedly lead to this question arising in every soul. Therefore, today, in the first part of our reflections, we will speak about this question: Where is humanity heading?

We have often spoken of purely human differentiations, of the differences that exist between the soul dispositions of people in the West and those in the East. And I have already indicated in a public lecture at the Siegle House how the present-day armed struggle, which is by no means over yet, will be followed by the great battle of spiritual life between the West and the East, and how this battle will be one of the greatest, most significant battles that humanity will have to fight out in the course of its earthly existence.

A truth that has often been spoken here and within our anthroposophical movement in general should be awakened again and again in the soul for the realization of the human being and his tasks, and that is the truth that in the fifteenth century a radical change took place within European humanity , a radical change which at first was little noticed by people, but which is very clear, both for the spiritual life and for the life of the soul, as well as for the outer physical, for the human body, for the prevailing laws of economic life. In all three areas, the emergence of human independence, the emergence of the human consciousness soul, is clearly noticeable around the middle of the fifteenth century. Since that time, man has had to gradually work his way out of the earlier patriarchal conditions of humanity in order to fully grasp his humanity, to rely on his own judgment, his own feelings, and on the will born of his own judgment and his own feelings. But since that time, human development has also, in essence, forked, if I may use the term. This means that humanity stands at a crossroads. While up until the middle of the fifteenth century humanity went more or less straight ahead, as guided by its instincts, from that point in time in the fifteenth century humanity could go either right or left, the path is forked. Such developments do not take place overnight; such developments allow old legacies to flourish in particular. And there are certainly old legacies left over from the stages of human development that were gone through before the fifteenth century. But those qualities of humanity have also developed alongside, which are precisely characteristics of nature, that have actually only moved into the development of humanity since the fifteenth century.

But we can describe in a very specific way what this turning point in the fifteenth century actually consists of. As you know, I have often emphasized that the history taught in schools is only a fable convenante, something that has terribly little to do with the inner development of humanity. One must go to what has truly happened if one wants to understand the development of humanity. If we now want to describe what actually happened in the middle of the fifteenth century, we have to say that until the middle of the fifteenth century, human beings lived more or less instinctively, carrying all kinds of ancient, atavistic abilities from the primeval times of humanity in their blood. This instinctive life must be replaced by a life of soul and spiritual consciousness. And this life of soul and spirit consciousness should actually become the characteristic life of modern humanity. The purely animal instincts that arise from the body should be transformed into soul and spiritual instincts. There are many forces that want to work against this development of the human being towards the soul and spirit. I have often emphasized that, for example, the Catholic Church, at the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 869, by establishing a dogma, forbade people who were Catholics from meditating on the spirit at all. In those days, the spirit was forbidden for European humanity, insofar as it belonged to the Catholic Church. That was, so to speak, the first resistance against what is most necessary for humanity, against the dawning of spirituality for civilized humanity. That is why it has also come about that this civilized humanity must work its way to the spirit, must work its way against all those powers that oppose the spirit, which, so to speak, would like to hold humanity back in the dullness of the old, instinctive life. What will happen to humanity if it continues to live only from the heritage of the old, the actually overcome, manifests itself in the most diverse ways. It manifests itself differently in the West, in the middle of Europe and in the East.

We must, however, first ask ourselves: What actually awaits humanity if it does not want to turn to a spiritual life, to an understanding of the spiritual life? And I have already mentioned in earlier lectures that something particularly characteristic in the development of humanity is that in ancient times, for example still in the time of pre-Christian cultures, people remained capable of development up to a much higher age than they are today. Today, as I have often indicated, a person is only capable of development up to about the age of twenty-seven. That is the furthest limit of his ability to develop. He then retains the forces that he has developed up to the age of twenty-seven, and lets them continue to flourish in his physical body. Just consider how capable of development man is in the first years of life. He goes through everything that leads him to the important epoch of the change of teeth, around the age of seven. People just become dull to what is going on inside them; they don't pay attention to it. But inner revolutions take place in a person as he approaches the change of teeth around the age of seven. Inner revolutions take place in a person again as he approaches sexual maturity around the age of fourteen or fifteen. The external history does not speak of such an inner revolution of man. The completely Catholicized external history of Europe does not speak of it, and it knows why. Such revolutions took place in ancient humanity, in pre-Christian humanity, up to a much higher age. Man was capable of development for a long time, and so he was able to use the developed powers of his age to penetrate into regions of the world, where he cannot penetrate today if he wants to remain in the ordinary method of education, in the ordinary outer life, because he is only capable of development up to the age of twenty-seven, and then lets that which has developed in him become distorted and ossified. So that actually people become old in their inner soul earlier and continue to vegetate. What has been taken from man by natural forces, clearly taken since the middle of the fifteenth century, must be replaced by conscious work on his soul. And if it is not replaced, man can only rush towards a state that ossifies, mechanizes and so on his later life again and again. These are inner laws of development exactly the same as the laws of development in outer nature, only today man is afraid to develop such strong thinking and cognition that he penetrates to these inner laws of human development. But he must penetrate, if certain things are not to occur in the development of humanity, which will otherwise certainly occur.

Through this law of development, humanity, if it remains as it has developed, faces continuous catastrophes, such continuous catastrophes for which the present catastrophe that has been unfolding since 1914 is only the beginning. These catastrophes cannot be averted by the means that humanity has developed as an old heritage. For man is approaching a development that would, in the future, make his entire soul useless for the later years of his life. Gradually, people would come over the civilized world who, in their youth, show all kinds of spiritual and soul enthusiasm, but who then fade away, and who would vegetate into old age, without soul. Mankind would become soulless, mechanized.

Anyone who has embarked on observing life, especially in our time, could also make observations in this direction in the outer life. I can tell you, especially in the decades of the last third of the nineteenth century, I was always able to observe the emerging talents and even geniuses as they developed. No phenomenon was more common than that people developed as poets, as artists, and also as scientists in their younger years, only to fade away in their twenties and then produce nothing of note. You don't observe such things, but they are there; you just don't train yourself to make such observations. But such observations show what threatens humanity in our time if it does not grasp what can only come from spiritual and soul development itself. And this is evident in the most diverse ways across the geographical territories inhabited today by civilized humanity.

The peoples of the West, in a sense, have strong instincts. These strong instincts of the peoples of the West will protect them from this withering away of the soul and spirit for a long time to come. I would like to say that instincts still arise from the animality of the peoples of the West that protect them from soullessness and ossification. Therefore, these peoples of the West need to cultivate spiritual-mental life less than the peoples of Central Europe and the East. These peoples of Central Europe and the East can do nothing worse than imitate Western culture in any field. Because when they want to imitate, they imitate something for which they have no instincts, something that can never flourish in them. And it was basically our misfortune, our self-inflicted misfortune, that we got so involved in imitating the West in the most diverse areas of life. And in certain circles of the West, which are privy to these things, they know all that I have told you now very well. Therefore, they attach great importance to forcibly de-animating and de-spiritualizing the East, which naturally, through its spiritual qualities, strongly resists de-animation and de-spiritualization. Hence England's efforts in India to work towards the greatest possible de-animation and de-spiritualization.

You see, this is the course of civilization if humanity does not take itself spiritually and mentally into its own hands. Then we will experience that certain democratic-social ideals will instinctively flourish in the West, while in the East that which has already begun will continue. This development in the East must indeed inspire us to special thoughts. We, who for decades have always emphasized that the future of Europe has its source in the Russian national spirit, in the national spirit of the East - we, who have always pointed to all the fruitful forces that must arise in the East of Europe, we must today take special care to consider this East. We can only look at it correctly if we look at ourselves correctly.

We in Central Europe have emerged from the developments that took place during the Thirty Years' War into a certain idealism of spirit, which flourished in Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, in the German philosophers, and which also had its reflection in German music. With that, what is usually called German idealism flourished. This German idealism reached its zenith in the philosophy of Flegel. What, then, is this philosophy of Hegel, which developed out of Goetheanism in Central Europe as the most inwardly sound system of thought? Well, this philosophy of Hegel only carries to its highest point what already lived in Lessing, Herder, but especially in Goethe. And this must be clearly recognized, especially today, in this time of crisis. What lived in this German idealism? Yes, it lived for the last time, in a magnificent way it lived for the last time, what in the form in which it lived at that time must not remain in humanity. German idealism must be regarded in a certain respect as a very beautiful, magnificent, mighty afterglow. And anyone who regards it as anything but a magnificent and mighty sunset regards it wrongly and commits an offense against the spirit of human progress. This is especially evident in Hegel.

It is difficult for people to delve into Hegel's thought-structure, which has been driven to the highest level of abstraction. But anyone who does so as a human being – not as a university professor, but as a human being – can form an opinion of where the human spirit has actually been driven by developing Hegelianism out of Goetheanism. Hegel explains human reason, which reigns in phenomena, as the actual divine-spiritual out of Goetheanism. Hegel places human reason on the highest throne; the reason that reigns in reality places Hegel on the highest throne. Basically, he only carries out what Goethe has already done. Now the peculiar thing is – if you really immerse yourself in Goethe and Hegel as a human being, you notice this – now the peculiar thing is that spirit reigns in Lessing, in Herder, in Schiller and Goethe, in Hegel, but that this spirit that reigns in them knows nothing of the spirit. This is something that people will have to understand, that today still sounds so familiar to people that they understand absolutely nothing of it. It is spirit that prevailed in this German idealism, it is spirit, but it knows nothing of the spirit, it does not deal with the spirit, it does not speak of the spirit.

Hegelian reason is first developed in logic, that is, in ordinary human thinking, which becomes world thinking; it is developed in natural philosophy, where all natural phenomena are administered according to reason; it is developed in the human soul, in human historical characteristics, in what man has produced as religion, as art, as science - but then it is over. This philosophy does not speak of the spirit as spirit. It is spirit itself, it speaks of everything that is not spirit in a spiritual way; but it speaks nothing of the spirit. It is the last sunset, the last beautiful, glorious sunset of that which actually set as the sunshine for all mankind in the middle of the fifteenth century. Therefore, it is necessary to take up a very special position precisely towards German Idealism. He who wants to conserve it, who simply wants to take up what Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller thought, or what Hegel then brought into magnificent abstract world formulas - whoever wants to do that merely in reflection, whoever wants to be a disciple in the ordinary sense of the word in this time, that person sins against the progress of humanity. We cannot take over into the culture of the present day, into the development of the newer times, that which has shone forth as the evening light of humanity, that which still contains within itself the last elements of the light of Greek and Roman antiquity, we cannot do this without it having a killing effect, simply as knowledge, as something absorbed and digested. This was already on my mind as a very young person. That is why, in the 1980s, I did not pursue Goetheanism as much as the others, that I wrote about Goethe, that I historically processed what Goethe researchers, for example, historically processed, but I tried to merely absorb Goetheanism and develop it further. I wrote my theory of cognition of Goethe's world view with the aim of showing how one can think and feel about the world in the spirit of Goethe. Yes, it is based on everything I have just said. It is based on the fact that we can learn from the dawn of German idealism how we can develop further, but that we do not have to continue this dawn in the form in which it has been handed down historically. We have to develop something different spiritually and mentally from this German idealism than it directly presents to us. We must learn from it, gather strength to move forward. Therefore, today Goetheanism is not a cult of Goethe, not a worship of what Goethe directly created, but Goetheanism is the transformed, the converted continuation of what one can develop inwardly, by studying Goethe, by penetrating oneself.

To an even greater degree, this is the case with Hegel. Whoever today would be a Hegelian, whoever would bring Hegelianism to humanity in this or that form, would appear as a withering influence on the progress of our culture. But whoever makes the nature of Hegel's subtle thought-formation his innermost soul-property and from there takes the step that Hegel could not take: into the spirit, he does the right thing, he does what lies in the sense of human progress. You see, our difficult position in the world is that we are least of all Goetheanists when we parrot Goethe, and we are most of all Goetheanists when we can rise to the challenge of saying we must do everything differently from the way Goethe did it if we want to work in Goethe's spirit; we must do everything differently from the way Hegel did and said it if we want to work best in Hegel's spirit. History already shows us the way in a certain sense. For Hegel, the Prussian state was the most reasonable institution in the world, because reason is sought in all things. “The real is the reasonable.” Therefore, the state in which he himself had found a place as a person was the most reasonable of all. All universities were good for him, the Central European universities the centers of the world, and the Berlin University the center of the center. These things are in fact mysteriously connected with those forces in the evolution of humanity, which I have often described as such that one cannot devote oneself to them if one wants to live comfortably in soul, because these forces lead one inwardly to all kinds of pitfalls and abysses, to transitions and inner upheavals. Those who today measure the right by the wrong kind of Hegelianism and false kind of Goetheanism are ignorant of this. And there are truly not a few such people today. And we must realize how these people hinder real human progress.

A book has been published that is truly written in the spirit of the present, written by an inwardly astute and artistically sensitive person, Ernst Michel. The book is called “The Way to Myth.” There is even goodwill to return to a spiritual and psychological understanding of life. But how does Ernst Michel judge the path of Goetheanism? You see, there is one passage I must show you because it is inwardly connected with our present consideration. He says on page 38: “The highest knowledge that, according to Goethe, is granted to man is the intuitive penetration to the archetypal phenomena, i.e., to the seeing comprehension of the created, the appeared as a moving, flooding effect of divine powers. But these themselves remain hidden from us in their metaphysical essence. Man can add nothing and take away nothing; he cannot influence the spiritual, he can only enter its sphere of activity by beholding it or not. Not even the greatest man can transcend this fundamental law of human existence. Theosophy, even in its form as anthroposophy, would have been unreservedly rejected by him (Goethe). “

So you see, this is how a person views Goethe's way of thinking. He points out the instinctive element, the penetration into the archetypal phenomena, and then says: Theosophy, even in its form as anthroposophy, would have been unreservedly rejected by Goethe. What thoughts does one have in the present about something like this, if one really thinks in terms of progress? One has to say: certainly, Theosophy, also in its form as Anthroposophy, would have been rejected by Goethe. But to present it to humanity in the way it is presented here in this book is to sin against the progress of humanity. For it is not a matter of what Goethe would have rejected in his time and until his death in 1832, but of what must have an effect today and what Goethe, in his living spirituality, wants to make of himself. Those, then, who only look back in this way sin against the real progress of humanity.

This is the fear and hatred of today for the living spiritual life into which we must enter if we really want to strive for the development of humanity. It is therefore no wonder that people who look at world development in this way fall into error after error. This is how this author views today's expressionist art, and he finds something about this expressionist art – he speaks very unclearly – but he does not find out how this expressionist art, in all its awkwardness, is nevertheless a beginning of something new, a beginning above all of something that Ernst Michel could not even dream of. That is why Ernst Michel says: “Expressionism followed Symbolism as the second movement, consciously wanting to lead artistic creation back to its highest task: to be shaped confession, expression of a spiritual world view.”

Expressionism is very difficult to understand today, sometimes anti-artistic, not just inartistic, but it is the clumsy way to seek artistic embodiment of the inner spiritual. In this context, Ernst Michel considers the following judgment to be justified: 'Transcendentalism, as the new world view is emerging, does not, however, refer to a new religious revelation, but to the philosophical teachings of Henri Bergson and the new gnosis of Rudolf Steiner, which proclaim intuition as a latent spiritual power in man that is called to replace religious revelation. In the power of intuition, of the seeing consciousness, man is said to be able to overcome the intellect and its illusory knowledge and to penetrate directly to the spiritual essence of things.

At such a point, one must, so to speak, immediately catch the person who is growing out of the present in an oblique way. For here that which is our anthroposophy is thrown together with that which is a phraseology of Henri Bergson brought into the last phases of a development, which stirs up everything that is a world view and which seems to be the well-known personality who always revolves around himself to catch his own braid, who points everywhere to intuitions but never arrives at an intuition, who always talks about how one should penetrate to the soul, but never takes a step to penetrate to a real spiritual knowledge. It is becoming so difficult for people of the present time to distinguish the fruitful from the unfruitful. We in Central Europe have the possibility of making this distinction if we adhere to the great distinction: Goethe as he was until 1832, and Goethe as he must work in us. And the same applies to Hegel. For when they work in us in a transformed form, their spirituality is fruitful for us, helping us to find our way into the spiritual world.

What I have now explained to you is at the same time the key to understanding a very, very important phenomenon of the nineteenth century, which has not caused people to reflect more thoroughly because people in the present are averse to thorough reflection. But is it not strange that the dialectician Hegel, who only spoke from the air of the spirit, should have as his most brilliant disciple the completely materialistic Karl Marx, who only thought of the material and economic? In the mid-nineteenth century, extreme idealism suddenly turns into the most mindless materialism, and not Hegel, but Karl Marx becomes the spirit to which the most forward-looking people of the present adhere. We have not yet been able to really examine this underlying fact in its foundations because we have slept the sleep of Scelenz in the center of Europe. It can only be examined by asking: If the spirit of Karl Marx were to spread throughout Europe, what would become of Europe?

We must begin in the East. From there, the real inspiration of modern civilization would emerge from the national soul, and this East would face a fate that can be described as follows: The mechanization of the spirit, in an economic papacy the complete mechanization of the spirit, the killing of all productivity and freedom of the spirit in a large, extensive accounting over a large territory. Furthermore, the vegetarianization of the human soul. In particular, this vegetarianization of the soul would assert itself in the field of legal opinion and state life. Oh, it is interesting how in our age the unclear but genuinely Russian doctrine of 7o/stoi, the penetration of Dostoyevsky's soul, but also what was less observed in Central Europe and what I would like to call the Russian heroism of the legal idea, has emerged from the spirit of the East, which wants to move forward. This Russian heroism of the legal idea was widespread among many people before this world war catastrophe broke out. These Russian heroes no longer thought of the individual person, they only thought of the human being as such, of what should be right from person to person. And they would have gone not only through fire but also through physical death for the realization, and to a large extent they also died for the realization of the legal idea. And so, in other areas of this Russian life, too, before the outbreak of the world war catastrophe, weighed down by the terrible things the world has experienced through tsarism and imperialism, one finds a certain heroism of the Russian soul. And now it is flooded by that which wants to mechanize the spirit, which wants to vegetate the soul; so that if it continues like this, the Russian East would live through the development of humanity with a sleeping, numbed soul for centuries to come. It would also oversleep what it could have given to the world itself. Furthermore, in this European East, the animalization of the body and the birth of animal instincts in the body are being hastened. |

The old spirit of humanity would be imposed on this unhappy Europe, first in the East, if one did not agree to steer into the spirit of progress. For it is not progress that is now to be carried to the East, it is the most reactionary current, which is born entirely out of what was already destined for humanity to perish around the middle of the fifteenth century. What lives today in Russian Leninism is the continuation of the spirit that dogmatically abolished the spirit at the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in the year 869. This must be seen through. And what rises up against it out of a truly democratic-social spirit is what counts on the real progress of humanity. For this most reactionary thing wants, even if it is not aware of it, the mechanization of the spirit, the vegetarianization of the soul, the animalization of the bodily instincts, which would express themselves more and more in the views of blood. It is no use closing one's eyes to these things. He who wishes to speak out of the spirit of truth must look facts in the face, whatever the consequences may be; and he must also look unsparingly in the face those facts in which a great number of people are foolishly seeking their salvation. And I would say: only in the most extreme case does this Russian East show where humanity wants to rush. It wants to steer with the old spirit into the mechanization of the spiritual life by absorbing the school completely into the state. It wants to rush into the deadening, into the vegetarianization of the soul, by dulling the real sense of right and wanting to replace it with the bookkeeping of a seemingly, but not really socialized state. And it thinks it is leading people to a natural human life by unleashing the most savage animalistic, bodily instincts that man carries within himself.

This is the task that we, born out of the deepest distress in Central Europe, should see clearly in this respect as well. We must clearly see how we have to absorb the great age of German idealism, how we have to transform and reshape it, so that people will not, as would happen in Russia, go around like living corpses when they reach a certain age. In the future, individual abilities would flare up in people at a young age, and all the old people would walk around like living corpses. And culture would die out, because the earth has not been able to give man anything in the way it did since the fifteenth century; he must seek it for himself if he wants to thrive on earth. We in Central Europe have the task of showing humanity how to develop through body, soul and spirit. We have to rebuild that kingdom of the spirit that was undermined by dogmatic Catholicism in 869 at the eighth ecumenical council in Constantinople. Otherwise, along with the spirit of humanity, the soul will also be lost, and it will become a living corpse on this earth, since the earth will no longer be able to give any more vitality. Hence the constant search for the spirit, hence the necessity for a real world view of freedom. Not of that freedom which can be connected with the blackest reactionaryism, but of that freedom which is born out of the spirit of modern man.

In the extreme rarity of its occurrence, Central European humanity was predisposed to bestow on Hegel and Goethe just enough spirit to enable it to function as spirit, but no longer able to grasp spirit , at most, could only hint at it symbolically in Goethe's Fairy Tale and in the second part of Faust. In Hegel's case, he described the world spiritually, but in such a way that this spiritual description of the world remained spiritless. If we see Hegel as a person who can speak about the world entirely from the standpoint of the spirit, but at the same time as the most spiritless person who has ever been born, then we see Hegel correctly. But this legacy of spiritlessness is precisely what is inherent in the Central European development. That is why we have come to the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century in an absolutely spiritless way. We have come to a reign that no longer reflects on life at all. And from not reflecting on life, from the fact that one has unlearned all thoughts about life, it then followed in 1914, which one could express like this: in July 1914, at the end of the month, it was the case that in demonic spirits had confiscated all thoughts in Central Europe, so that these confiscated thoughts would not work in the souls of people, and out of the chaotic subconscious could arise that which then arose. For Central Europe, with its two empires, really gave the impression in July 1914 of people who act in such a way that all thoughts have been confiscated from them. Today, it is not enough to be naive about these things. Today, these things must be seen in the Spirit of Truth, and this Spirit of Truth must at the same time be allowed to be fertilized by what is necessary for the further development of humanity.

Therefore, one must also realize what kind of attitude would bring about humanity, which only comes from the scientific world view, from that scientific world view that wants to understand the whole world and which has then produced its idiotic, feeble-minded blossoms in the monistic associations, where only phrases and phrases were spoken because otherwise nothing could be spoken. Let us assume that this scientific world view, which has crept into all social thinking and feeling, would take hold of humanity. What would be the result? Yes, one must know what the peculiarity of the scientific world view is. You see, Flaeckel was a splendid man, really full of life, a brilliant fellow. I may have already told you the story I experienced myself: We were once sitting in Weimar, I with the old publisher Hertz von Berlin at one end of the table and Haeckel at the other. Now, Hertz, who was a man of the old school, said something like this in the conversation: Yes, what Haeckel teaches leads humanity to its downfall, it is a misfortune for humanity. — Haeckel was sitting, as I said, at the other end of the table. Hertz continued speaking, then this so pleasant, beautiful apparition of Haeckel caught his eye, and he asked: Who is that down there? No, he exclaimed, that cannot be, bad people cannot laugh like that! - You see, in such symptoms those things that came from the old were confronted with those that wanted to go towards the new. But a peculiar phenomenon must be observed: those people who first study natural science in the cabinet or with the nets in the sea, examining Medusa, as Haeckel has done so frequently, who do the research first hand in the laboratory, they can be inwardly active people, they can be there with their soul and even with their spirit. But the pupils, and this is already the third generation, show themselves to be absolutely spiritless and soulless. That is the peculiarity of the scientific world view: it drains people of their spirit and soul, and numbs them. But because it cannot yet drive the emaciation so far in those who do the research at first hand, that is why the original naturalists are often highly likeable guys. The next student, who still has the teacher's image before him, is not entirely without spirit; the third, who is the student's student, is usually already a spiritless and soulless fellow, a monist.

But there is something else connected with this monism. If you become imbued in soul with this monism, if you become imbued in soul with the spirit of modern natural science, then you become alien to man as man, and antisocial instincts develop in you. Sympathies between people fade, while antipathies increase more and more. That is why I have often had to say it here: however great the triumphs of natural science on the ground of nature, human nature, the human essence, is ruined by them from the foundations up, for they produce antisocial instincts and create abysses between human beings. Today we are already standing at such abysses between man and man, which is shown by the fact that only to the slightest degree can man understand man today, can man really empathize with man.

What must take the place of what has just been described? It must be replaced by the development of the soul, which makes its way by absorbing what you, perhaps with weak powers, will find described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. This is at the same time a book on the education of humanity. This is what should be begun with at the beginning of the twentieth century: to speak to people about how they should rely on themselves, on their own strength. Such a thing must also be made fruitful pedagogically. Such a thing is the foundation for Central European pedagogy.

Now, it is impossible for the forces that are to be revealed in “How to Know Higher Worlds” to be cultivated in any state school.

Establish state schools in any form, and people are driven away from what is to be developed in their souls and minds. This can only flourish if spiritual life is placed on its very own free basis, if spiritual life is placed in self-government. Therefore, this shift of spiritual life into self-government is the fundamental question of humanity in the present time. For through this movement of spiritual life into self-government, that which has been most lost under the scientific education of mankind will in turn be generated: the rule of an artistic understanding of the world, from which the imaginative understanding of the world will then arise. For the development of mankind has reached a certain point: when man encounters man today, they can no longer recognize each other at all, because the physicality for this has already been too much dried up. They can only recognize people if they can form a picture, an imagination of them. And more and more, direct personal contact, and everything that should be there for people, will have to be based on images, on imaginations that people can form of each other, on looking at the soul and spirit in people. The actual developmental impulses of people must be thoroughly changed. And there too, it must already be stated: suppose the way of thinking that dominates all of humanity today, the materialistic way of thinking, were to triumph – now we are at the fork in the road of culture – this materialistic view were to triumph: then, starting from Russia, all of humanity would mechanize in spirit, vegetarize in soul, animalize in body, because the evolution of the earth itself is pushing for it. The evolution of the earth gave off the invigorating forces of man, you can follow this into the fifteenth century, where even the prices in Central Europe were the normal prices of the individual economic goods. This is only obscured by history, which is a fable convenante. The earth could only give man what he could find within himself without consciousness until the fifteenth century; only until then could it be the unfolding of man. Since then, man has had to work his way into grasping a pictorial, spiritual view of the world and of other people, in order to come to a right relationship from person to person. If the materialistic world view were to prevail, what I have just characterized would happen, then desolation would flood the earth and the war of all against all would be accelerated.

There is only one way out of this situation: if people turn to spirituality, that is, to pictorial vision, to the imaginative; if they are able to replace that which comes from Greek culture and was beautiful about it, the birth of the spirit, with the realization of the spirit in the world ; if they replace what was alive in Romanism and what, proceeding from Romanism, wreaked havoc in Europe, the officialdom, if they know how to replace that with free legal intercourse, and if they know how to replace that which has particularly flourished in the West through instincts with an organized economic life.

But for this it is necessary that what is recognized scientifically on the one hand is also recognized spiritually. The world could not progress if there were no free spiritual workers in it. Imagine how the world would progress if nothing spiritual were produced. Things must be invented, people must live in art, in a free world view, otherwise humanity would become ossified. Humanity would become ossified under the mechanization of the spirit. But what is the basis of free spiritual creativity? Free spiritual creativity is based on the fact that we preserve for life certain qualities that we otherwise only develop normally in childhood. When someone is as old as Goethe was when he completed Faust, he does so with the soul forces that he acquired in the first third of his life; they must remain, they must be preserved. In the normal course of development, they die out today. In Goethe and in German Idealism, they were still there as inheritance, as the red afterglow of the day, a last stroke of luck in the development of humanity. Now it must be cultivated, cultivated in a spiritual life that really looks at people's individual abilities and develops them appropriately through spiritual pedagogy.

And what, then, is the spiritual and psychological basis of all economic life? This may still sound strange today, but all economic life is based only on economic experience and on having been immersed in economic life, and it is therefore best developed by those soul forces that have been immersed in life for the longest time, namely by the soul forces of the last third of life. Just as one develops a true art only through the very first soul forces, so one develops a true economic life through the last soul forces. If people cannot plunge into an age through the so-called normal development, in which we all break down and can no longer be young, we will not be able to manage, no matter how socialist a state or socialization is. For this it is necessary that we consciously immerse ourselves in the cultivation of the characteristics of old age in human beings; so that we do not grow old ourselves with them, but that we can put them on like a garment. To do this, we must grasp them in our imagination, we must grasp them in pictures. We are instructed to grasp the forces of youth in pictures, in our imagination, on the one hand, and to grasp the forces of old age in pictures, on the other. Humanity is compelled to educate itself towards such a goal. And it cannot educate itself if it does not take the whole of life seriously. Today people take this life so much for granted, as if it were basically already over when a person reaches their late twenties. By this time they are terribly clever, they can no longer become cleverer, they can do everything, can judge everything, and they could not judge better. That later life also has possibilities and absorbs forces is something that humanity knows nothing about because it does not want to develop these forces, because it renounces them. But we will all have to know how to manage our youthful energies, how to manage the energies of middle age, of old age. But we shall only learn this in the threefold social organism, when we lay the things apart, and not when we mix and melt everything together, as the most reactionary development of modern times has done, and as it is often intended to do to the detriment of humanity, to the sin against the spirit of human progress. Our education must arise entirely from a true understanding of the soul's life. For example, we must come to completely eliminate snap judgment, especially in relation to life. Quick-wittedness is nice, it can be there, but it should only be there so that we can make jokes, be amusing. One must be aware that the purpose and goal of quick-wittedness is to live out the phrase. Irony and humor can be beautiful, but they must be phrases, of course. We do not want to disparage the phrase in the place where it is justified. We should appreciate artistically designed phrases, but they must not appear in the wrong place, they must not appear where the word should be imbued with life. We can only get used to this if, for example, we look seriously at the following: there is a person who says something to me that does not suit me or that suits me. A certain revelation occurs from person to person. We quickly judge it. If people could get into the habit of doing it again the next day, after twenty-four hours, when they have slept in the meantime, when their spiritual and mental state has changed completely, then people could get into the habit of visualizing the whole situation again: The person said this and that, you are facing him - and then judging, then something important would happen. In the first place it is not the judging that is valuable, but the power of the soul, which always allows that to be involved which happens to the human being between falling asleep and waking up. This power is cultivated, and it is the gradual development of this power that is particularly necessary for the formation of the imagination. This conscious work of working one's way into an unconscious life will develop the imaginative world and the world that can actually underlie a social life in humanity.

It is equally necessary to understand certain things that have to be understood at some point. You see, as strange as it may sound today, one does not usually see what is for the good or ill of humanity when it occurs in humanity. If I tell someone today the law of corresponding boiling temperatures in physics, he believes me because he is used to it, not because it is logical, but because he has been used to believing in scientific laws for a few centuries. But if I speak today of a spiritual law that is just as well founded as a scientific law, he does not believe it, because it must first be known for a few centuries. But we do not have time to wait that long. People must consciously familiarize themselves with the upheavals of living life. 'People need discoveries and inventions, that is a natural law. When such discoveries, but especially inventions, especially technical inventions, are made by people who are not yet in their forties, then these inventions have a retarding effect on the overall context of humanity, actually holding something back in humanity, especially against the moral progress of humanity. The most beautiful inventions can be made by young people: it is not for the progress of humanity. If a person reaches their forties and retains their inventive spirit for what is to be done for the physical world, then they also give moral content to their invention, and this has a moral effect in the progress of humanity. When something like this is expressed, it is madness for humanity, since humanity does not recognize spiritual laws at all. But it is a spiritual law that man only reaches the point, through his inventive talent, of being able to work for the progress of humanity in the spiritual and especially in the technical field when he is forty years old. We have to take this into account in the laws of human development. Only when humanity decides not just to think: How do you set up these or those economic offices? but when it decides to think: What must be cultivated spiritually and emotionally among people? What must be considered? — then salvation for humanity can be expected.

The church has worked long enough for the sake of human selfishness. They have worked together quietly, this church and this state. I have already said recently that a person can only truly develop freely when he is a very young child, because he is still too unclean for the state. But as soon as he is clean, he is accepted by the state and prepared, not for a human being, but for a state official. But the human being is consoled by playing with his egoism to the highest degree. He is guaranteed a pension until death if he is no longer able to work. This is a very strong incentive for the souls of civil servants. And then, when the state no longer provides, the church takes care of the person by making his soul immortal without his intervention. First of all, the person is insured during retirement, and then, after death, the soul is insured. All of this is built on selfishness. In the future, it will not be built on selfishness. Why did Aristotelian Catholicism keep secret from people that their spiritual self is also there before it enters into existence through birth? Aristotelian Catholicism only wanted to take into account people's egoism, their fear of death and their desire for assurance of an immortal soul after death. But people find it too difficult to accept the idea that I have descended from the spiritual world and that I have to carry out here on earth what I have received as a spirit. This is the most radical thought that must strike present-day humanity: that man must not regard his physical life merely as a preparation for life after death, but that he must also regard it as a continuation of a spiritual life before birth. Then he will change from being a lazy person who does not want to do anything to a person who is aware that he has something to accomplish on earth, that he has a mission. Until this thought can penetrate people, there is no way to avoid their sinking into materialism.

With these considerations, I ask you to consider what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should actually be for people today, what it should give them, and how it should work as an ingredient in the present soul for the whole of human cultural development. In the first part of my talk today, I wanted to present to you the picture that would arise if humanity were to continue to live in the traditional way: the picture of the mechanized mind, the vegetarized soul, the animalized body. This was the picture I wanted to present first. And in the second part, I wanted to present to you what must happen in order to achieve a spiritual life that the old earth can no longer provide, that man must seek out of inner freedom. Those who consider this path of our spiritual life will have the basis for reflecting on the important and essential aspects of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

There are many reasons why the theosophical attitude is currently finding it difficult to gain access to people's hearts. On the one hand, it is confronted by the prejudices of the calculating mind, which, once accustomed to accepting only the tangible, meets the doubting feelings of those who say: the cultivation of the higher spiritual life may be something wonderful, something noble, but we have more important things to do today. Such objections often arise from genuine philanthropy, true compassion for the hardships and sufferings of humanity. Attention is drawn to how many people live in the bitterest misery, how many are tormented by hunger, dulled by living conditions that are truly inhuman. Look at yourselves, the theosophists are called out, the thousands in the big cities in their dark holes that do not deserve to be called human dwellings. Many people are crammed into a space that condemns them to physical and moral depravity. Look at the workers who sacrifice their strength from early morning until late at night for the meagerest of wages and who are condemned to a life unworthy of a human being! Is it not necessary above all to help humanity in this direction? Those who speak in this way see the theosophical endeavors as the work of idle minds who know nothing of what is most urgently needed. And one can only say that such objections to Theosophy have much appearance of right for themselves. One would have to close one's eyes to the things that are happening all around us if one did not want to admit this. It is undoubtedly true that the bitterest need of countless people makes it impossible for them to even think for a moment about the higher goals of life. It can easily even appear as an outrage, as a sin against humanity, when the theosophist speaks to a few who have the good fortune of a more or less carefree existence of the “destiny of man”, of the “higher life of the soul”, while the great mass is wasting away in material misery. Theosophy is only for a few enthusiasts who have no sense of the true, the immediate tasks of life: this can be heard not only from malicious opponents, but also from noble humanitarians, from people whose clever minds and noble hearts above all force them to devote their energies to improving the material circumstances of their fellow human beings. For them, the “social question” is the most important one in the present. And they demand of the theosophists that the teachings of “universal love of humanity” and “fraternity” be practiced above all where practical life, where hunger and misery, where physical and moral decay loudly call for relief.

The theosophical side should not simply reply to such noble humanitarians by saying that Theosophy wants nothing to do with the struggles of the parties and the interests of the day. It is true that it cannot be the task of the theosophist to intervene directly in the disputes of political parties. He must seek to serve and help humanity in other ways than those which parties and legislation can employ. But he must also bear in mind that, by pursuing some unworldly aim which is of no value to thousands upon thousands of people, he would be seriously failing to do what is really needed. The theosophist speaks of the necessity of not allowing the noble spiritual powers in the child's soul to wither away; he speaks of the fact that the germ of the Divine lies hidden in every human being, and that teachers and educators in home and school must make it their business to cultivate this germ of the Divine, that they should make the soul of the child a citizen in the Kingdom of the Eternal. And the socially minded philanthropist replies: you may talk for a long time; but just look at these children, for whom their parents have no breakfast, who come to school weak, hungry and cold, with their mental powers completely dulled. Is nothing more necessary for them than to think of the eternity of their soul?

The theosophist will have to listen to such and similar speeches again and again. And it is not surprising if those who believe that they are doing the right thing to alleviate material need and misery call him an idle dreamer. — Misery and want also kill every spiritual urge in man, they blunt him for all higher aspirations. And if one speaks to a starving crowd about spiritual life, one preaches to ears that are incapable of grasping the words.

These are the facts of which the Theosophist must be clear. The fundamental principle of the Theosophical Society is: “to form the nucleus of a brotherhood that extends to all mankind, without distinction of race, religion, class, nationality or sex”. This is in fact the only principle that is considered binding for the members of this society. All other aspirations should be only means to the great goal that is expressed in this essential requirement. — Many socially minded people of the present day will object: we do not need Theosophy for such a requirement. After all, many humanitarian organizations of our time also make this demand, and in a comprehensive way it is made by those parties that strive for an improvement in the social situation of the economically and spiritually oppressed classes. But, it is said, the socialist parties are grounded in practical life and in real interests that the masses must understand; but theosophy is content with more or less general phrases, with preaching and with an emphasis on things that cannot help the oppressed. And radical socialist newspaper writers and agitators are quick to say: the theosophical talk is only likely to cause confusion in the minds of those who are to be won over for a true improvement of their living conditions. They claim: “We must challenge the oppressed to fight against the oppressors; we must work to put power into the hands of those who are economically weak today, so that their labor does not always remain the prey of those classes by whom they are dominated. The power of the working classes must be conquered by all means of struggle. The workers must fight in their own well-understood interest; and you, Theosophists, want to preach “universal love of humanity” to them; you want to talk to them about “fraternity.” In doing so, you only want to distract them from what can really help them. Have the ruling classes of today ever based their power on “human love” and “fraternity”? It is a pipe dream if you believe that such ideals can ever rule the world. What the ruling classes have achieved, they have achieved out of the selfish interests of their classes; and in the same way, the oppressed today can only act out of their class interests. And then the conclusion is drawn, as a matter of course: “The laboring and starving population could wait a long time if they were to rely on you, Theosophists, with your talk of ‘love’ and ‘selflessness,’ to get anyone to strive for the solution of a social task if that solution is contrary to their class interest.” — It could seem as if Theosophy is a rather superfluous thing in the face of the serious social duties of our time. Demagogic speakers and writers, in particular, will emphasize that it is; and in view of the current situation, they will certainly have the applause of the crowd on their side.

But the ugly phenomena that we are currently witnessing within the socialist party efforts in Germany should prompt those who think more deeply to reflect. We are witnessing how those who have been talking about “class struggle” and “liberation of the people” in the sense described above for years are persecuting and fighting each other in blind passion. One question should arise in any case: Can a movement lead to a fruitful goal whose principles give rise to such attitudes in the leading personalities as we can observe today? Just think about what it means to entrust the leadership of humanity to minds that are not in the least able to be leaders of their own passions. Can such people really contribute to improving the general human condition? It should not be denied that the forms under which we live would change if such personalities achieved their goals. Only the intellectually immature could claim that the nature of human society would be different. The trusting will console themselves with the thought that the terrible things that are coming to light today in the leadership of the masses are only of a temporary nature; and that a great movement must necessarily produce such facts. Well, the reasons for many distressing facts in the present are to be found in the fact that the contemplation of social life that our contemporaries have and from which they would like to intervene in the circumstances in a better way, remains entirely in the external, material conditions of life. As a result, they can only approach their social work in the same way that a simple village locksmith who has never learned anything about electricity would have to behave if he wanted to make an electric motor. No one can understand the external actions of human beings without learning the spiritual laws that underlie them. The personalities who want to heal today's social effects should first of all learn about the causes of these effects. And these causes lie in the depths of human nature. What Theosophy reveals as the soul (astral) and as the spiritual world contains the laws for human life, just as the science of electricity contains the laws for the electric motor. It is understandable that people in socialist circles in particular do not want to know about these laws of the higher worlds because they have no idea of their existence. But as long as people are not willing to engage with these higher worlds, all social work will be powerless. Those who understand something of social conditions and theosophy know this. Annie Besant, the soul of the Theosophical movement in the Gegenwatt, was for years in the midst of social work, developing an exemplary and meaningful activity in it. And when she had made the views of Theosophy hers, it became clear to her that all such work is powerless without the enforcement of the spiritual powers, to which Theosophy provides the key. In her speech on “Theosophy and Social Issues” at the Theosophists' Congress in Chicago in 1892, she spoke the momentous words: “I, who have spent so many years of my life dealing with these — the social — issues in the material realm, who have devoted so much time and thought to the quest to find a cure for the social ills of humanity; I consider it my duty... to say that a single hour of spiritual energy devoted to the welfare of mankind bears a hundredfold fruit more than years of labor in the material world.” In the following, the task of Theosophy in the direction indicated here will be presented.

It will be shown that the words of the great Buddha, “Hate can never be overcome by hate, but only by love,” are not mere figures of speech.

An economics teacher, Professor Dr. Werner Sombart, describes the change that took place in the course of the nineteenth century in relation to thinking about social issues in the following sentences: “It is extremely appealing to observe how, since the middle of our (nineteenth) century... the character of the social movement has been transformed in its fundamental ideas, parallel to the theoretical approach to social issues. For it is obviously the same transformation: that in the theoretical interpretation and this in the practical application. Here, too, it is nothing other than an outflow of that fundamental transformation in the entire conception of the world and life, that gradual displacement of what we can call an idealistic or, better, ideological worldview, through realism... What I mean here by an idealistic view of people and life, which has now increasingly begun to retreat from the marketplace into the study, is the belief in the naturally good human being, who, as long as he is not misled by any error or malice of individual evildoers, lives in the most amicable peace with his fellow man, the belief in that “natural order”: in the past or the future, the unshakable confidence that it would only take enlightenment and encouragement to lead people out of this vale of tears and back to the laughing islands of the blessed, the belief in the power of eternal love, which would overcome evil through its own strength and help good to triumph... This basic sentiment was now reversed into the absolute opposite: faith in the naturally good human being gave way to the conviction that man is primarily dominated by selfish, by no means “noble” motives, that he carries the “beast within him”; in his innermost being, even in all civilization and despite all “progress”. And from this, the conclusion: that in order to achieve something in the world, one must above all awaken the 'interest', the normal, material instincts, but that also - and this was the most important conclusion for the fate of the social movement - because in the world, where something had to be achieved, interest , to shape a state of affairs in a certain sense, to 'emancipate' a class like the proletariat, that one must not oppose eternal love to the interest of the capitalist class, but that one must muster a power against the power, a real power, a power consolidated by the interest.” Without doubt, what is expressed in these sentences has increasingly become the attitude of those who want to play a leading role in the social movement. They have completely withdrawn their attention from the spiritual life of man and are of the opinion that one only needs to keep an eye on material interests and economic conditions if one wants to bring about a favorable situation for humanity. They completely overlook the fact that the causes that determine a person's fate include, above all, the drives and instincts of his or her spiritual life. It is certainly true that the domination of the machine, that the development of industry and world trade have created the situation of our proletariat. But they could only have brought about this situation by developing under the influence of those drives and instincts that have dominated humanity in recent centuries. What is important is to recognize the connection between human perceptions, feelings, and drives and between their destinies. Those who want to change economic conditions without recognizing how they are connected to the development of the human soul are like those who believe that a town hall plan can be transformed into a church plan simply by cutting the stones differently and using different materials. Whoever wants to provide for the people what belongs to the people must, above all, direct his attention to the spiritual connections on which all material life depends. He must turn his eye up to the forces of the soul from which the fate of the nation is woven. — And it is unfortunate that at the very time when the social question has become an urgent one, a materialistic way of thinking has taken hold of the masses, and especially of their leaders. Only in the light of an idealistic, spiritual way of thinking can social questions flourish. Under the influence of materialistic thinking, the character traits of the leading personalities of our time have developed in such a way that no one wants to understand the higher laws of human nature anymore, that no one really wants to learn anything that goes beyond mere sensual reality. But no one can exert a truly favorable influence on the destiny of humanity without knowing the true laws of that destiny. And Theosophy is the way to learn these laws. It is the way to penetrate the souls of those with the right attitude who want to guide material development. Just as a blacksmith's tools are of no use to him if he does not know the laws of how to use them, so all economic measures are of no use to the “world-blesser” if he does not gain access to human souls from his soul. The world is guided by the spirit, and anyone who wants to contribute to its guidance must grasp the essence of the spiritual. Theosophy must therefore become the soul of social affairs. And only when material interests arise on the basis that it creates, can the salvation of mankind follow from it. Therefore, nothing could be more false than the assertion that Theosophy is a foreign spiritual movement from which one can expect nothing for the happiness of nations and the liberation of mankind. No, the theosophist only lives with the realization that you do not build human society by merely laying bricks and stones on top of each other, but above all by fully devoting yourself to learning about the plan of this building. And at the present time, those who claim to have a say and a part in social matters do not want to know anything about this. They suspect nothing of it, and in their materialistic blindness they do not want to suspect anything of the fact that they must investigate the true nature of man. They expect nothing from the “love” in the soul, because they close their eyes to the laws of this “love”. It is sometimes the fate of truth to sound paradoxical in the circumstances of the time. This should not prevent the truth-lover from expressing it. One such truth, however, is that the leaders of social issues cannot work for the benefit of humanity until they have absorbed the knowledge and attitudes of Theosophy. There may be Theosophists who want to remain unworldly and keep repeating that it is the karma of the present-day nations to be tested by their purely materialistic attitude. To them it may be said: it is certainly also the fate of the sick person to be sick; but he who is supposed to heal and does not heal fails in his duty because he regards his sickness as a test.

During these lectures I have often seized the occasion to point out to you that particularly in connection with the most important problems of life, modern men may learn something from the trenchant, penetrating, almost flood-like events of the present time, though this learning from events is a method practised by few people to-day. As a rule, they think that they can learn something from the events if they simply pass judgment on them, and then these judgments are locked upon as experiences. This can be very satisfactory for some people, but it does not suffice, indeed it is quite unsuited, for what we so sorely need at present, and that is an understanding of social life. The essential thing in such matters is to learn from the events themselves; we must allow the events themselves to develop our judgment, instead of pronouncing judgment over the events. Many explanations which I have given you can show you the true methods of spiritual science; and how spiritual science applies these methods to external physical events—for instance, to the events in social life. Here I think that particularly a significant event of modern times connected with social life may teach us something. I have already drawn attention to it, but let me open to-day's lecture by developing thoughts relating to it.

Were we to discuss the social question with a member of the working class now constituting the majority of the population which counts most in the concerns of modern life, and which has, on the other hand, obtained the inner impulse for its views chiefly through Marxism—were we to speak with him on the social question, we would always find that in regard to social work and social thinking he would not attribute much importance to so-called good will, or to ethical principles. Again and again, you would come across the following attitude: Suppose you were to tell him that according to your views the foundation for a solution of the social problem lies therein that all the people who have certain leading positions, particularly those who belong to the class of the so-called employers, should begin to develop a feeling of social responsibility and feel that it is absolutely necessary to create for everyone an existence in keeping with human dignity.

To a man of the working class you speak, for instance, of raising the moral level of the middle classes. When you voice this view to the working man, he will at first smile, and then he will tell you that it is very naive of you to believe that the social question can now be solved through feeling, or an activity engendered through feeling. A member of the greater mass of the working population will tell you: Everything that flows out of the feeling of the leading class of employers does not count at all. This class of employers may think what it likes in regard to ethical or moral feelings… but since the world is now divided into employers and employees, the employers must necessarily be the exploiters. A working man does not even listen to proposals that the feeling of social responsibility should be raised, for he argues: This is quite useless, for everything depends upon the following: The working class must become conscious of the prevailing conditions, so that the working class itself may bring about a change in the social conditions, a change which ends, or at least alleviates the general misery. The essential point is not that of increasing the sense of moral responsibility, but that the oppressed, miserable working class should bring about, in the present struggle, a new non-capitalistic economic order, a change in the prevailing conditions, a new economic order.

This means, in other words, that no trust should be put in the power of thought; we should not believe that a right comprehension, a right understanding of life can bring about a change in social conditions. One might well imagine the following taking place in one of the many “Councils” which are now being formed in central European countries. A comic paper recently published the picture of a man with a long body and with tiny little legs, stating that he was the only man in Germany who did not “govern”, for everybody else already belonged to some “Council”; but the man with the short legs had always remained behind, so that he was the only one in Germany ,who did not belong to a council and who did not govern! People felt that there was a great deal of truth in this picture. If we were to speak at one of these councils of what must now be considered as right, through an insight into the development of humanity and the needs of humanity, the listeners who belonged to the working classes would answer: “What are you talking about ? You belong to the middle class! Because you are a member of this middle class, your thoughts are a priori influenced by the modern economic order. If social conditions are to be improved, it is far better to incapacitate you in one way or the other, so that you have nothing more to say in the matter; this is better than listening to any proposals you can make for a useful development of social conditions!

Things have already gone too far. Because of this, it is necessary to see things clearly. Of course, the majority of people does not wish to see things clearly to-day; least of all those who come together in councils, for they do not in any way desire to judge things clearly.

Every proletarian, every member of the great mass of the working population, should be taught to see the following, and he will do so, if we approach him at the right moment (this is the essential point!): As a proletarian, he denies the possibility of any social improvement in human development through the means of thought. We may ask him how he arrived at the view that an improvement of social life can only be brought about only through A change in the conditions of social life. There is only one answer to this question; which the facts themselves reveal. You see, the whole tremendous impetus of the modern proletarian movement in social life is based upon the idea of Karl Marx and his followers, and it is a very vigorous idea, to be sure. The idea that thought is worthless is a marxistic theory. Consequently this idea has produced the present socialistic way of feeling. But this socialistic feeling, which refuses to have anything to do with the impulse of thought, is nevertheless: based upon the impulse of thought.

In a lecture which I once delivered to proletarians I explained: Those who investigate world-history and the true forces which are active in the development of humanity, will find that with only one exception, a truly scientific impulse has never become a world-historical impulse. Investigate things everywhere and try to discover the real impulses, and you find that these impulses were never of a scientific kind; with one exception, the renewal of the proletarian movement through Marxism. Lassalle felt this truth, when he delivered his great incisive speech on science and the working class. For the only political, social movement having a scientific foundation, is the modern working class movement. It is encumbered with all the errors and the hopelessness of modern science, just because it sprang out of modern science. But it proceeds entirely from thought.

Imagine this colossal contradiction which has found its place in modern life! During the past sixty or seventy years, the idea that thought is worthless has exercised the greatest influence of all: The course of development during the past sixty or seventy years shows this. It is a significant lesson, because it shows that the influence of thought is something quite different from the content of thought. An idea, the idea of Karl Marx, exercised a particularly strong influence. But if we examine this idea in regard to its content, we find that the content as such is quite unimportant; of importance are only the economic conditions. If we have the capacity to immerse ourselves in this contradiction, in this living contradiction of thought, we find something tremendous in it: If we can penetrate into this contradiction, we discover in it a truth of tremendous import for an understanding of the present time.

What must now be grasped at all costs is the fact that the content of theories, the content of programmes„ is really of no importance whatever, for the influence of thought is based upon something quite different: Upon the relationship of the corresponding thought to the state of mind of those who absorb this idea, etc. You see, if Karl Marx had not voiced his idea from 1848 onwards up to the seventies; had he not given expression to the ideas contained in the Communist Manifesto and developed in his system of political economy and in his great work Capital, just at that time, had he spoken of these things in 1800, or in 1796, his ideas would have exercised no influence whatever, nobody would have shown any interest in them.

Here you,have a key for a most important fact. Imagine that Karl Marx's works had appeared, for instance, fifty years sooner—they would have been waste paper! But from 1848 onwards, when general conditions of the proletarians had reached a definite stage, his works did not become waste paper, but an international impulse, and now they continue to live in Russian Bolshevism and in the whole central European chaos, which has already begun and which will increase more and more, they continue to live in the chaos which will spread over the whole world.

With this I wish to draw your attention to the fact that far more essential than the content of a truth is the circumstance whether it is uttered fifty years sooner or later. The content of an idea is only significant for a definite time and it is no mere fad on my part when I say, for instance, in regard to Anthroposophical spiritual science, now is the time to speak of it, now it must enter the hearts of men, for now is the right moment in which human beings should absorb it. But something else should be borne in mind: Marxism was kindled of its own accord; but spiritual science is something which must be taken up by people in freedom.

If we bear in mind that human understanding is really something which is subject to evolution, it will be easier to understand many things which are,we can really say, not only possible, but also necessary to understand, and which people really do not wish to understand. In a certain connection, we discover tremendous things if we encounter the thoughts which now exist in the so-called spiritual life, which is, however, no real spiritual life! Those who can understand such things, will come across plenty of evidence.

We may open, for instance, a certain number of a periodical published here in Switzerland, in which the, author, who frequently writes for this paper, discusses a topical problem. In the article in question he speaks of what he understands by “the people”. He speaks of various personalities and of their responsibility or guilt in regard to the outbreak of war; he discusses the fact—and in many ways he is right—that certain leading men of central Europe must be blamed for it. (I have often explained that here it is not possible to speak of guilt) Then he finds it necessary to explain what he really means by—“the people”. This is how he defines “the people”; They constitute nine tenths of civilised countries, such as Germany? Austria, England, France, etc. and he says that the people are the sum total of the uncultured unfree persons, who are in the widest sense dependent on leaders, and who therefore need leadership.

Consequently we may say that this writer defines “the people” as being the uncultured, unfree, dependent persons, who, in the widest sense, need a leader. But if we were to examine conscientiously the majority of those who belong to the middle classes, or even to the higher classes, they would also answer more or less the same, if they were asked for their opinion as to the meaning of the expression “the people”: The uncultured, unfree, dependent mass, needing guidance, and constituting nine tenths of the whole of humanity.

If we now take the opposite view, we would have to say that only one tenth of humanity is cultured, free and independent, and that it doe's not require a leader! Those who think that they can express an opinion as to the true significance of “the people”, generally think that they belong to this one tenth.

In the face of such a view, which is preeminently important for the development of a social judgment, it is above all necessary to face the question, as to whether it is justified, in the widest sense of the word, to accept the idea that nine tenths of the population consist of uncultured, unfree, dependent men who need a leader! This is the question which each one of us must face, if we wish to form an independent social judgment. Of course, if views are to be exchanged on such questions, it is necessary to build up that intensity of thinking which spiritual science can offer. F For everything else which intensifies thought to-day, does not suffice; this can be seen in the thoughtlessness which now rules the masses.

There is a saying which I have come across again and again during the last months—I do not know if one can call it a coincidence, for in reality no such thing exists. I have found this saying quoted by one or other, whenever social conditions were discussed in public. It is the following: The stupidest calves choose their own butchers. People find it natural to quote this saying and everyone finds an obvious meaning in it. I do not find any meaning whatever in it, for I think that not the stupidest, but the cleverest calves would choose their own butcher, for in that case they would choose one who would kill them as, painlessly as possible, whereas those who do not choose their butcher would fare worst of all. The very opposite is true: Only the cleverest calves choose their own butcher.

Important judgments which require changing, are accepted just as thoughtlessly as this saying. Or when a human being surveys life, he would gladly forego the activity of thought, he has no wish to apply power of thought!

What we need to-day is a keener thought-activity, so that we may reach concepts which correspond to reality. An “advanced” modern thinker—“advanced”, in the meaning of modern academic wisdom, modern illumined thought, modern democratic consciousness may find the idea tempting that nine tenths of the whole of humanity constitute the uncultured, unfree dependent people who need a leader. Nevertheless this idea is quite worthless for the following reason:—

Let us proceed from a historical fact which can teach us a great deal in this connection. Christianity arose, as you know, in an unknown province of the Roman Empire, through the Mystery of Golgotha. Within the Roman Empire of that time, which had already absorbed the Greek civilisation, there lived a population which really possessed a wisdom of deep significance. The Church had to make a tremendous effort in order to eliminate every trace of the ancient Gnosis. (I have already spoken of this) Gnostic wisdom existed at that time. A highest wisdom existed in those days. When Christianity first arose this highest wisdom existed within the Roman Empire. This can in no way be denied. Yet it was impossible for this highest wisdom to absorb the historically powerful impulse of Christianity. The strong impulse of Christianity (I have spoken of this recently) was absorbed by the barbarians of the North, who did not possess the wisdom of the southern populations. When the barbarians of the North encountered the strong wave of Christianity, then Christianity began to exercise the influence which it had to unfold for the remainder of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch and for the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. New conditions have only arisen at the present time.

We should bear in mind the fact that the strongest impulse in history could not be absorbed by the most highly developed and abstract spirituality of a certain epoch; this impulse could instead be absorbed by men who were apparently retarded in their development and whose being was connected with the more instinctive part of human nature.

The view which has just been mentioned in regard to nine tenths of humanity, constituting the uncultured, unfree mass in need of guidance, is not worth much more than the fact that as far as spirituality is concerned, these nine tenths of humanity differ from the people who believe to be the leaders. For these so-called leading men have a degenerated intellect, a degenerated understanding. The nine tenths of humanity constituting the so-called uncultured, dependent people in need of guidance, still possess, as it were, a latent kind of intelligence, which is far more able to absorb the strong historical impulse which must now be received. This impulse is far more powerful than the one to be found among the so-called “intelligentsia”, among the people with a decadent intelligence. What now separates the bearer of spiritual impulses from the masses which are able to receive these impulses, are not the masses themselves, not the souls of these great masses of humanity, but the leaders, the men who have the guidance. These leading men, even the leaders of socialistic proletarians, are completely permeated with the decadent intellect of the “bourgeoisie”.

What is needed above everything else is a clear admission of the fact that the true impulses of spiritual development are accessible to the so-called uncultured, unfree, dependent people in need of guidance; these impulses can reach them, if we gain an insight into the characteristic form of intelligence of these people, and of the way in which it works.

No class of humanity has ever been so fantastic as the bourgeoisie which mocks at fantasy. Practical life to-day is truly fantastic! The practical things in life are “practical” only because they have been given the legal possibility to assert themselves, to enforce themselves, whereas people who do not have the chance to push themselves forward, cannot assert themselves, no matter how skilful and practical they may be.

To-day we should really learn to feel that in the great masses which are not led, but misled by their leaders, there is something which asserts itself as a remnant from that time which is designated—but erroneously—as the migration of the people. At that time, certain barbarian tribes came to the fore, as it were, and they absorbed the very impulses which the more highly developed nations were no longer able to receive.

During the present time we also have a migration of people; this migration, which is forcing its way to the surface, does not start from any definite place, but it comes from the whole sub-stratum, the proletarian sub-stratum of humanity. This is the essential point.

It is necessary to, face this migration of people, to meet it. Let us take the following hypothesis. Suppose that everything which is described in history books as the migration of people had really taken place—all these migrations of the Goths, the Huns, and later on, of the Mongolians, the migrations of the Vandals, the Suevi, etc. Imagine that these tribes had not encountered the stream of Christianity, when they migrated from the East to the South-West. Imagine that this stream of Christianity had not come; think what a difference this would have made in the world! The whole subsequent epoch can only be thought of, if we bear in mind the fact that these barbarian tribes came over from the East to the South West, and that they encountered the stream of Christianity.

Today the proletarian element rises out of the depths. And this proletarian element must be met with a spiritual element which comes from above! You might say that a Spiritual-scientific influence should be exercised upon social conditions, upon the conception of the world. Those who do not wish to believe that a new spiritual revelation comes towards this migration of people, which now follows a vertical, and not a horizontal direction, those who remain by the old spiritual revelation suited to the horizontal direction, in short, those who prefer to remain by the Roman way of propagating Christianity and do not wish to become acquainted with the new revelation of Christ Who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, those people lose a great deal; they lose as much as might have been lost in the Middle Ages if the barbarian stream, which rolled from the East to the South West had not encountered the spreading current of Christianity.

Also at that time, the cultured men of Greece and of Rome stood between the current of Christianity and the barbarian stream.

To-day all the people who cling to old ideas, under the guidance of the so-called intelligentsia, particularly under the guidance of modern science, which has proved so unfruitful in the social field, to-day all these people stand between,the spiritual stream which should flow down to the proletarian stream and this current which flows upwards.

In such matters, we should chiefly strive to become unprejudiced in regard to ideas enabling us to develop a social judgment. But if we do not understand the social organism, we cannot develop a social judgment.

Do you know what results when a modern professor of national economy, who is a guide to others, or when a real political leader speaks of social or of economic questions, etc.—do you know what results in such cases in regard to the social organism?—The social homunculus! This is a fact which we should really try to grasp; we must bear in mind that all those who wish to understand the social organism, without grasping the truth of the threefold structure, give rise, within the social organism; to the homunculus, to nothing but the homunculus! Goethe also believed that the ordinary understanding, based upon the senses and the intellect, could not reach the “homo”, but only the “homunculus”!

You see, in regard to the social organism, the great majority of men is to-day absolutely unable to think; the leading motifs for real thought are lacking.

I have already explained to you that in the social sphere people set out from the strange and grotesque idea that a single state or national territory is a complete organism. Indeed, they even aim at setting up national organisms, complete in themselves! But this is nonsense! I have already told you that if anything on earth which is connected with social life is to be compared with an organism, then it is only possible to look upon the whole earth as an organism; and a single state, or national territory, can only be a part of this organism of the earth. If we wish to apply this idea of an organism, it can only be applied to a complete whole.

Those who wish to establish political economy upon the foundation of one single nation, resemble someone who seeks to establish the anatomy of the whole human being by studying only the hand, or a leg, or the stomach. This should be borne in mind, for it is far more important than people generally believe.

The threefold structure which I have explained to you, does not give any abstract resume and none of the recapitulations to which people are accustomed to—day, but it places itself livingly within the economic structure, within the social structure.

Those who only study the anatomy of the stomach, cannot understand the anatomy of the head or of the throat. But those who study the anatomy of the whole human being, are also able to form a right idea of the stomach, of the head, or of the throat.

Those who know the inner life—conditions of the social organism (and this knowledge can only proceed from the above-mentioned threefold structure) are indeed able to identify themselves with the real conditions, and they are able to have an insight into them, whether they have to judge the social conditions in Russia, England, Germany, or in any other country.

To-day we come across the strange and distressing circumstance that people speak of the different nations as if they were separate countries, and they believe that social reforms, etc. can be brought about in single, separate regions. This constitutes one of the fundamental errors of our time and it may lead to the greatest mischief in practical life.

It can only cause harm to believe that it is possible to do something within a certain limited territory, without taking into consideration that from a social standpoint the earth is an organism which is complete in itself, ever since the middle of the nineteenth century. It is absolutely necessary to reckon with reality, otherwise we cannot progress in any way.

You will see from this that the essential thing is to acquire an unprejudiced attitude, for such an unprejudiced attitude alone enables us to develop judgments out of the things themselves. For we can only judge things rightly, if we have no prejudices.

When social conditions are discussed in the way in which we discuss them here; you will hear over and over again that it is hardly conceivable not to separate economic values from human labour. That this is possible, can't be grasped least of all by the learned political economists of to-day.

If these men were willing to learn something from history, they would say to themselves: Plato and Aristotle were as yet unable to think that slaves are not connected with economic values. Plato and Aristotle still considered the existence of a fairly large slave population as an economic necessity. But to-day no sensible person looks upon the existence of a slave population as an economic necessity, in the meaning of ancient Greece and Rome. Yet people still consider that human labour should be a merchandise, that it should be treated as goods.

You see, when we strive after the gradual realisation of the above-mentioned threefold structure (it can only be realised little by little; we do not aim at sudden reforms or revolutions, but merely indicate a new direction; single measures in keeping with this new direction can be introduced, indeed, everything which calls for reform to-day can be in all details in such a way as to follow these guiding lines, this new direction; this can be done if one does not stupidly adhere to programmes, but to real life and if one moves, in the direction of real facts. This is the essential point)—we divide into three the parts which have merged together during the last phase of human development, thus producing a diseased social organism—indeed, the last catastrophe (the first world war) has clearly revealed this diseased condition. A sound course of development, in keeping with reality, can be reached if we strive to separate into three parts that which has melted together into a whole.

This will lead of its own accord to the separation of human labour from economic values. Even as the slave has ceased to be merchandise, so human labour will cease to be merchandise. But this will not be brought about by laws forbidding that “human labour should be merchandise”, but by keeping asunder the spiritual; the economic and the state concerns. This alone will separate goods representing an economic value, or merchandise as such, from that which has now become crystallised within the merchandise, the human labour employed in it.

In this connection it is really terrible to come across the mistaken and confused thoughts of people who have something to say, or wish to have a say, in the reorganisation, in the necessary reorganisation of social conditions. Let me give you an example:

You have the great mass of the so-called Marxists; these men have a clear idea of the fact that human labour is stored in goods which we purchase, in any merchandise which we purchase; human labour has produced this merchandise. In paying for the goods, I must also pay for the human labour contained in it. This is of course the case under modern conditions, but it is essential to separate human labour from the true goods, to separate it not only in thoughts, but in the real process. But this entails that we should really develop clear thoughts in regard to these matters.

Now it is easy to argue that manufactured goods do not contain human labour as an economic value. A non-Marxist, for instance, would say: It is not right to state that in political economy human labour and manufactured goods have been fused. Non-Marxists, who consider things from another angle, say that in the capitalistic economic structure manufactured goods exist in order to save labour. In fact, there are some goods with a certain purchasing power, which can save labour. Let us suppose, for instance, that you are a painter and that you have painted a picture which is worth £500.00 and that under present conditions you can actually sell this picture for £500.00. This sum enables you to employ so and so many people to work for you. Because you possess an object of value in this picture, you can make so and so many people work for you. Suppose that you do not sell the picture, and that you would have to do the work which others would have done for you, if you had sold your picture for £500! In that case, you would hare to make your own shoes, your own clothes, and even weave the material for your clothes, etc. But first of all, you would have to get the raw material ,for your work, and so forth, for the economic process is an extremely complicated one.

Nevertheless, some economists think that it is not at all a question of labour being stored in goods, but a question of being able to save labour through goods which can be sold. According to these economists, the economic value of a merchandise is therefore based upon the fact of how much labour can be saved through it, and not upon the quantity of labour which was needed to produce it.

We therefore have two sides to-day; one declares that the economic value consists in the amount of labour which has been put into the goods. Take the case of the picture; there, the work put into it can really not be compared with the work which has been saved through the fact that the picture was sold in accordance with the value which it possesses in the economic structure, in the circulation of goods. Under given circumstances, a gifted painter may produce a picture ready for sale in about a month's time—is it not so? His “labour” is, in that case, what he “crystallizes” into the picture in one month's time. This is, however, far less important than the work which he thus saves for himself. He becomes a capitalist through the fact that he saves labour; a capitalistic economic structure arises through the very fact that he can now employ so and so many people to work for him, by saving work through the sale of his picture.

Here you have two opposed definitions. One definition is that the economic value of a merchandise or of goods consists in the labour employed for the production of these goods. The other definition is that the economic value of goods consists in the labour saved through having these goods. These two definitions are diametrically opposed; they are opposed in regard to their real significance. For it would be an entirely different matter if the goods were really valued according to the labour employed for their production, or according to the labour saved through having them.

But in the process of economic circulation goods are valued neither in the one nor in the other way. Let me elaborate my example: Bear in mind the following: Suppose that the picture of which I have spoken, valued at £500 in accordance with prevailing ideas, still hangs in the painter's studio. He sells it, and it now hangs in the drawing room of Herr Mendelssohn, who is not a painter. There it hangs, and only a few people see it. Now, if you wish to define the economic value of the picture, you will say that it consists in the amount of labour, employed to paint it. Yet this definition does not hold good, either in regard to the painter—let us say, Lenbach—or in regard to the buyer, Herr Mendelssohn. As far as they are concerned, the economic value of the picture is not based upon this fact. For Lenbach, or any other modern painter, the immediate value of the picture of course consists in the work which he saves through it; yet this is not true, as far as Herr Mendelssohn is concerned, for he does not save any work through it. The definition of labour saved may therefore be applied, from an economic aspect, to the painter who has produced the picture; you may apply this definition to him, if you think in a one-sided manner. But from the aspect of the person who buys the picture and hangs it up in his drawing room, the above definition no longer holds good; the political-economic definition of the picture's value cannot be applied, if we bear in mind real facts.

You see, what is so important to bear in mind is the fact that to-day people are so easily inclined to define things; when they think to have discovered something in the existing conditions, they immediately look out for a definition. Under such circumstances it is not at surprising that one side should have one view and one side another. It is natural that someone who draws the economic definition of a picture from Lenbach's studio, has quite a different opinion from someone who draws the economic definition of the picture from the drawing room of Herr Mendelssohn. This of course gives rise to disputes.

This is the character of every dispute which now exists in social spheres; differences arise because people do not go back to the original impulses. This calls for sense of reality, which can only be acquired through a spiritual-scientific training.

To-day you may come across hundreds of definitions in the political-economic sphere, but they will only make your heart ache, because they are so very unreal. These definitions fall far short of the reality, though it is possible to “prove” them over and over again, for they always fit into a certain sphere. If you only consider the aspect of the spiritual worker, you may say that the economic value of something consists in the amount of labour saved. But if you only bear in mind the aspect of the proletarian workman, you may say that the economic value of something consists in the labour employed for its production.

I have now given you another example from the field of political economy? In this field, we have—in regard to the theory of money—the so-called nominalists and the metallists. On the subject of money, they have the most terrible disputes, for the latter look upon money as goods, and attribute to it the value which it has as gold or silver; the former only consider money as a symbol for an existing value. The nominalists, on the one hand, and the metallists, on the other, wage a war to the knife on this subject of money; they try to define it and they quarrel over it.

But these people have no idea whatever of reality. As far as money is concerned, nominalism is right at a time when the production of goods is very weak; nominalism is justified when there is a crisis. But metellism is right, when there is superfluity. From the aspect of reality, both are right—at one time this, and at the other time that direction. You see, if we take ideas in the one-sided manner in which people generally take them, we can never apply them to a totality in a healthy way. When we regard a totality, a whole, it is essential to collect all the facts; we should not apply one-sided definitions, and we should develop a feeling which shows us where we can take hold of the facts, throwing light upon reality.

Now the following question might be raised: Where does the economic value arise? It does not arise where human labour accumulates, or becomes crystallised in the goods; it does not arise where labour can be saved through goods; the economic value does not arise in any of these fields. The economic value is a condition of tension.

If here, at this point, you have an electric conductor (a drawing is made), discharging electricity, and if the electric current is intercepted here at this point, we have a tension between the two, between the discharging apparatus and the apparatus which collects the discharge. There is no discharge if the tension is too weak, for a discharge can only take place if the tension is strong enough.

Similarly, the economic value must be sought within a kind of tension, and we can describe this economic value by saying: On the one hand, we have the goods, the wares; then we must consider their different qualities and also the place where they can be consumed. We therefore have, on the one hand, the goods. On the other hand, we have the human requirements, and this is the same as the artificial or natural interest which people have in the goods. We have therefore, on the other hand, the goods in a certain place at a certain time. This tension, and nothing else, gives rise to the true economic value.

The true economic value does not contain the idea of human labour. Within the social organism, labour should be associated with the circulation of goods in quite a different way. The peculiar tension, which resembles the tension existing between an electric accumulator and an electric receiver, is that which produces the true economic value. This tension arises through the existence of definitely qualified goods at a definite place and time and the demand for these goods. This alone determines the real economic value.

Lenbach's efforts in producing a picture within a certain time, through his gift as a painter, and the labour which he could save for himself, through this picture as an object of value, can only determine the picture's value as Lenbach's private property. This applies to every other kind of labour in regard to goods. All this does not determine the economic value.

The economic value at any given moment is determined, on the one hand, by the demand, or the requirement, and on the other hand, by the definite, qualified goods which exist at a given time. This constitutes the true economic value of a merchandise, and this value can always be applied.

But this leads us away from the mere political-economic organism, and leads us instead into the social three partition. For, on the one hand, we have the goods, the wares, leading us into the economic sphere, which can, however, never come into being through the mere circulation of goods, but which depends upon the soil and ground, upon other foundations of Nature This foundation of Nature must exist. It cannot be saddled on to the state. It must exist, on the one side.

On the other side, we have the demand, the requirement. This leads us into the spiritual sphere; it leads us into the spiritual world of man, for consider how different are the demands of uncivilised barbarians and of civilised men!

Here we have two entirely different elements which penetrate into the political-economic life. The essential point which must be borne in mind, the chief thing which we must consider, is that there are other elements which penetrate into the political-economic life.

The social organism thus resembles the human organism which consists, on the one hand, of the chest and of the head into the head penetrates the spiritual world. On the other hand, it consists of that part of the body which takes in nourishment, and the physical world penetrates into this part. But also the social organism is threefold, for on the one hand, we find that it is influenced by all that which gives rise to demands, to requirements, which must never be produced by the economic process itself; and on the other hand, it is influenced by that which Nature produces. This leads us to a threefold structure, for in the middle lies that which unites these two spheres.

In order to perceive the immense fruitfulness, the social fruitfulness of the above thought, it suffices to consider the following fact:—According to the explanations given above, an isolated process, an economic process, should never give rise to demands, but demands should instead come from outside, through some other cultural process, through an ethical process, or something similar.

During unsound times, demands arise through purely economic processes, and people who cannot think soundly rejoice over this. During the time which led to our present social catastrophe, during the time in which the social cancerous growth, the present social cancer, gradually began to develop, people tried in every way to produce demands for goods through processes which did not come from the social structure itself, but which entered it from outside, which came from some other cultural task of humanity, from social processes which were called into being artificially. You could, for instance, read over and over again the following advertisement: “Cook good soups with Maggi!”—Well, the demand for “Maggi” would certainly not have arisen, had it not been advertised!

Advertising has come out of the purely economic sphere. It does not give rise to real demands. To produce demands in such a way as to arouse an artificial interest in certain goods, is unsound and a source of illness to the social organism. It is just the same as if a physician were to induce a boy to learn more diligently by giving him a stimulating powder, so that his stomach makes him more diligent, instead of his being stimulated to study by moral forces.

This social bungling, these social tricks, which arise by saddling everything on to a so-called “monon”, on to a social homunculus, have led to the catastrophes of the present time. For the social organism itself, should never produce, on the one hand, demands, and on the other goods. The goods must be supplied to the social organism by the foundation of Nature. And the course of human development itself, must supply to the social organism the demands for goods.

A social problem should never become, for instance, a problem of population, for this would imply a misunderstanding of the connections which exist between the human being and political economy. This would mean that in our time we do not know the difference between a pig and a human being, as I explained to you yesterday, at the end of my lecture, and it would lead to our making a social problem out of the problem of population.

Political-economic reasons should never determine whether an increase in the population is desirable, or whether it is to kept upon a certain level; other reasons, of an ethical, spiritual kind, should be called in for this. When considering such a problem, we should particularly bear in mind that if a considerable increase in population is obtained through artificial means, we force the souls who would only have incarnated after four or five centuries, to come down prematurely, and consequently, in a deteriorated condition. Under certain conditions, an increase in the population implies a coercion for souls who are thus forced to incarnate in a physical body under unfavourable conditions. This would give rise to moral corruption.

The problem of increase, stability, or decrease in the population, should never be a political-economic problem, but a moral-ethical one in short, a problem connected with a spiritual conception of the world with a spiritual conception of life.

All these things can only follow a sound course of development if they are grasped in a spiritual-scientific manner. You will therefore recognise the necessity of giving a spiritual-scientific foundation to all the thoughts which are connected with social problems. If you really wish to study the horrible things which are now said and written in connection with the social problem you would see that the unfruitfulness contained in all these calls for the application of that sharp, clear way of thinking which these questions entail.

Even as the blind follower's of Plato and of Aristotle had to come to the point of saying: “Man, as a slave, cannot be considered as goods”, so the followers of modern humanity must learn to say: “In no case can human labour be considered as goods”, for other impulses, not the value of products, should induce men to serve and to work for their fellows.

The economic value of goods produced by labour should never be fixed in accordance with the labour accumulated within the goods, nor by the labour saved through the goods, but only in accordance with the justified tension which exists between the goods and human demands. Neither the labour accumulated in the goods, nor the labour saved through them, constitutes the decisive factor, for our labour does not place us within an economic process, we do not work in order to save labour, but we produce goods in order that there may be a certain tension between the goods produced and the corresponding demand .

The corresponding demand may determine that goods which entailed a great amount of work must, under certain conditions, be sold cheaply—and, within a sound economic process, the demand may determine that a product involving little work obtains a higher price. Consequently the work involved can never be the decisive factor.

This is evident from the explanations given above. Those who have an insight into such things, consequently recognise the radical necessity of not seeking the impulses which give rise to human labour in the economic value of goods, but on quite a different direction, which is determined by the above-mentioned state of tension.

Only those who have an insight into such things can arrive at a decision in connection with the two important social problems which face us at the present time: compulsory labour, which is the aim of the Bolshevists, and the right to work, or any other name which we may give to it. Those who do not penetrate to the depths indicated to-day, will always talk in a confused way, no matter whether they speak officially, of compulsory labour, or the right to work, or whether they simply follow certain aims. Only those who penetrate to the depths of reality have a right to speak of such questions. Indeed, it is a serious matter to-day to acquire the right to have a say in such things.

In my next lecture I shall continue to speak on this subject.

In these serious times, we can look at what people who have considered the gravity of the situation think is necessary. We can see what new institutions they imagine are needed, what changes in our untenable conditions are necessary. If we do this, we will see people with the goodwill to dedicate themselves to new institutions, to cooperate in changing what seems to need change in one way or another. If we accept the responsibility for our all-too-obvious social circumstances, then we cannot get around the fact that, although there is so much goodwill and there are so many wonderful ideas, they collapse immediately or, in any event, are not carried out to the extent so necessary today.

Spiritual science seeks, through anthroposophical understanding, to open the path to supersensible knowledge for modern humanity. It has tried for decades to address the conspicuous problems of modern civilization, namely the flagging goodwill and the loss of the wonderful ideas that live in this goodwill. The spiritual science I have presented here for years has attempted to point out exactly what is so necessary in the present, and what so many modern people welcome with such great sympathy or reject with such great antipathy. It tries to point out, on the one hand, what has made conventional science so great, and, on the other hand, as we will discuss today, what this science lacks the means to understand, namely, human will and human feeling.

We live in a time when it is no longer possible for people simply to yield to their instinctive will impulses. The necessity to increasingly transform the old instinctive life into a fully conscious life is especially characteristic of our time, yet so many prejudices arise today when it comes to admitting this. That people must increasingly change the old instinctive motives of human nature into conscious motives is a historical fact, the most important historical fact. It is this fact that has led to the present crisis.

To this end, scientific advances over the last three or four centuries have done much for modern civilization. But today, anyone who contemplates the institutions that arise out of the most vital contemporary needs must come to feel the insufficiencies of modern times that come from the modern scientific orientation and way of thinking. Just now in this city a limited attempt is being made to solve a social problem, a social problem that is more important than most people want to believe. Perhaps this evening we can point out the difficulties of solving such a specific problem.

Through the insight into anthroposophical spiritual science that he has often demonstrated throughout the years, our friend Emil Molt has succeeded in founding the Free Waldorf School upon social thinking appropriate to our times. This school is intended for children of the workers at the WaldorfAstoria factory and for a few others who will shortly be included. The imprint of modern society is visible in the manner of the school’s creation and in its connection with an industrial firm. This school must take into account the most practical needs of the people who entrust it with the education of their children. We could say that it is symbolic that this school was created in connection, in direct connection, with the industrialism that gives rise to the most important social questions of our time.

In founding the school, the faculty (for whom I held an introductory seminar lasting several weeks) considered the social pedagogical tasks relevant to modern culture. More than we are aware, our picture of modern civilization (as I already mentioned) results from the way our imagination has developed out of our understanding of physical nature. As I have emphasized for decades, spiritual science fully recognizes the value and meaning of the modern scientific way of thinking; in fact, spiritual science values conventional science more highly than that science values itself. Nevertheless, because conventional science so colors our picture of modern civilization, spiritual science must go beyond it. I have also emphasized that the means used by spiritual science to come to its understanding of the world differ from those of conventional science. I have repeatedly explained how we can really enter into the supersensible world through the path of spiritual science, how, through the development of inner capacities that otherwise only sleep in human nature, the way opens for us to see into the spiritual world in which we live. We can see into the spiritual world just as we can recognize the laws of the physical world through our senses, through reason, through associated events. I have explained how we, by awakening dormant capabilities, can look into the spiritual world that always surrounds us, but is unknown to us because the necessary sense organs remain undeveloped in ordinary life.

Today I want to discuss the capacities that spiritual science uses to see into the supersensible world—healthy, quite normal capacities of human nature. Those who want a deeper insight into how spiritual science works need not concern themselves with the accusations of our critics that it is based upon the use of unwholesome powers. It is quite simple to show the source of Anthroposophy and its path to the supersensible world.

If you look at my book How 7o Know Higher Worlds, you will see that I describe those stages of supersensible knowledge that people can attain through the development of certain capacities sleeping within them: 1) the Imaginative stage of knowledge, 2) the stage of Inspiration and 3) the stage of true Intuition. Now, where does spiritual science find the forces involved in such things as Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition? We can show that certain capacities forming the basis of human nature are at work during childhood. Later in life, when people have reached their normal size, when growth is complete, in a sense these forces lie unused. This spring I discussed the various stages of child development.¹ I remarked that during the first period of life, people are primarily imitative beings. They instinctively learn everything that people around them do, and they imitate this in their movements, sounds, speech, even in their thoughts. This imitative behavior continues until approximately the change of teeth, until approximately seven years of age. Then those who can more exactly observe human nature begin to see another activity. They can observe the need in human nature, beginning at six or seven years of age and continuing until sexual maturity, to rely upon people with experience, upon those adults in whom children can devotedly believe. During this period, children need to act under the influence of honored authorities. The self-reliance that is based in people’s confidence in their power of judgment, the self-reliance that enables them to involve themselves in all sorts of things in life, first appears with sexual maturity at the age of fourteen and continues to develop until the age of twenty or twenty-one.

These are three quite distinct periods of human youth. Only people who have lost healthy judgment due to all kinds of prejudices can overlook what develops in the child, what causes physical development until the age of seven when bodily development is relatively complete—the form continues to grow but the general structure is complete. Only such people can overlook how those forces that act formatively until seven years of age subsequently work more inwardly, particularly as inner growth. They act as living forces, making children stronger until fourteen years of age. They work between the ages of fourteen and twenty to strengthen those organs directed toward the environment, those organs that are capable of immersing themselves in their surroundings. In this time those inner spiritual forces act upon the human physical body. Inner spiritual forces act in quite differing ways upon the human body until seven, then fourteen, then twenty-one years of age. Forces that for an unprejudiced observer are quite clearly inner spiritual forces work on human organs to master them and develop them further.

These forces really exist. The forces that in a certain sense cause the crystallization of the second set of teeth out of human nature, a meaningful conclusion to the stage of human development ending at age seven, really exist. The forces that work mysteriously on that part of human beings that is connected with growth and the unfolding of human nature until age fourteen really exist. These forces are real; they are active. But after the completion of physical development (around the age of twenty), where are these inner spiritual forces that have acted upon our physical form? They still exist; they are still there. These inner forces fall asleep, just as the forces we use in our everyday life, our everyday work from waking to sleeping, fall asleep and become dormant while we sleep. The forces of human nature that blazed during childhood and youth, the forces that fired the developmental changes that transform children into adults, and everything connected with these changes, fall asleep around the age of twenty. Those who look at the whole human being know that at the very moment when human beings reach this point, the forces that acted in the child, in the youth, step back into the innermost part of human nature. These forces go to sleep.

We can awaken the forces that have brought forth the processes normally observed between the ages of fourteen and twenty, through which we slowly gain an understanding of our surroundings, through which those organs develop that can form only after puberty. These organs are not one-sidedly oriented toward sexual love, but are formed such that we can deepen our love of all humanity. This loving absorption in all humanity gives us true understanding of the world. The forces we use until the age of twenty-one for growing and forming the inner organs become inflexible, just critical intellect. A certain inner spiritual force stops working formatively. It becomes an imaginary inner force, a power of the soul, no longer so strong as it was earlier when it had to guide human formation. If we can find it sleeping in human nature, this power that once was a formative force but after the age of twenty no longer is, if we develop it so it exists with the same strength as before, then, acting now through love, it becomes Imaginative power. People attain a capacity to see the world not only through abstract concepts, but in pictures that are alive, just as dreams are alive, and that represent reality just as our abstract concepts do. The same force that previously acted upon the healthy developing human to form the capacity to love, can enable us to see such pictures of the world and to reach the first stage of supersensible knowledge. We can awaken this human capacity and plunge it deeper into our surroundings than normal thinking and normal sensing can go.

Then we can go further, since the forces that cause the important formative changes from approximately seven years of age, from the change of teeth, until sexual maturity, are also sleeping in us. These forces sleep deeper under the surface of normal soul life than the forces I just characterized as Imaginative. When we reawaken these idle formative capacities, when we call these spiritual powers out of their sleep, they become the forces of Inspiration. These teach us that Imaginative pictures are filled with spiritual content, that these pictures, which appear to be dreams but really are not, reflect a spiritual reality that exists in our surroundings, outside ourselves.

We can go even deeper, into the strongest forces sleeping in human nature, those that have worked upon human formation from birth until the change of teeth. These formative forces that were active in the first years of life have withdrawn themselves most deeply from external life. If we bring them forth again in later life and imbue them with Imagination and Inspiration, we will then have the Intuitive powers of supersensible knowledge. These are the powers that enable us to delve into the reality of the spiritual world in the same way that we can delve into the physical world through the senses and the will usually associated with the body.

In three stages, through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, we gain access to the supersensible world. These powers do not employ anything abnormal, but actually are the most normal of all things, namely the forces of healthy human development from birth until the early twenties. These forces then lie fallow, but we can bring them forth again. When they are no longer occupied with forming us, we can use them to open up the spiritual world.

I have now given you some idea of the source of those forces that open the way for spiritual science to enter the supersensible world. Those who seriously wish to follow this path will know how to differentiate what it can properly give from what simple conventional science, simple scientific understanding, can offer.

Why do I continually emphasize modern scientific understanding? It would not be so necessary to emphasize this scientific understanding and the attitude that derives from it, if modern popular thinking, including social thinking and social policies, were not so completely patterned after it. To be sure, we have here something that many people seldom consider. However, we must consider it if we wish to find something that will really lead to healing our ailing social conditions. We must be clear that scientific thinking so completely permeates all human thinking that when people begin to consider something else, they automatically revert to the modern scientific attitude and manner of thinking.

What is, in fact, the social political thinking of the second half of the nineteenth century right up to the present? What is it that fundamentally, even now, is presented to us as socialist theory? It is a social thinking patterned after mechanistic scientific thinking. Why does this social thinking appear to be so unfruitful, as I have often described it in these lectures? Because this social thinking, take for example the Marxist English Socialist thinking, is infested through and through with a conventional scientific attitude, an attitude that when used in this area simply cannot accomplish anything.

Now look at the most important characteristic of what I have referred to today as supersensible understanding in the sense of spiritual science. The most important characteristic is that this supersensible understanding uses those forces closely connected with what is human. What forces more closely connected with human nature could we possibly use than those that form human nature itself? How could we possibly use anything more human to achieve an ideal, to achieve anything we want to accomplish? How could we use forces for cognition more human than those that we can bring out of hiding the moment they are no longer needed to form human nature? There is a way of understanding in contrast to the modern scientific attitude and socio-political way of thinking, a life of abstract concepts connected only with the structure and function of the human head. This way of understanding is through those forces that people still retain after their formation is complete at the age of twenty or so. This way of understanding uses forces allowed to sleep, but which are more real because they work on human formation. What we can obtain from scientific concepts and happily use in the social sciences, and wish to use in social pedagogical tasks—these concepts and ideas, in fact, everything that we can obtain in this way for our souls, are only a reflection of reality in comparison to the content of supersensible knowledge. Every concept we can gain when our reason combines sense impressions and observations, everything that we know from our will impulses—all this is actually only a shadow, a reflection, in contrast to what is so tightly enmeshed with human growth and activity and existence as the forces that form us. Thus, the abstract character (the character of being “independent of human nature”) arises out of the scientific way of thinking that does not require people to use their will. We are proud of obtaining such knowledge that we can refer to as scientific and can call “objective.”

Concerning knowledge, spiritual science does not attempt to throw what is human out, but rather to draw it into the world. It attempts to come to its knowledge through just those forces that form people. We can observe that scientific concepts, and socio-political concepts patterned after the same methods, satisfy human intellectual curiosity. They satisfy the intellect, but clearly do not have the power to enliven, to infuse, to ignite human will. Were this scientific viewpoint and its onesidedness to become increasingly stronger and continually more dominant, in the end human willpower would completely atrophy. Nowadays we must motivate human willpower, atrophying under the influence of the scientific mentality, with something that can ignite it. This ability to stimulate willpower arises from people themselves because it can be drawn out of human nature as spiritual scientific knowledge.

This is what spiritual science wants to do, and what spiritual science, as we mean it here, can do. It wants to effect an understanding that is not simply there for the intellect alone, but flows into the feeling and the will.

Today, particularly in education, people repeatedly insist that we should not teach children knowledge simply for the sake of knowledge, that we should also teach them to be capable, to be able to work; we should develop the will. Here we have one of those points where the goodwill of our contemporaries becomes evident. Certainly much goodwill exists when people today say that we should not simply have “knowledge schools,” but schools that develop a capacity to work, schools that develop capabilities. But goodwill alone does not suffice. We need the capacity to illuminate this goodwill, to brighten it with true insight. We do not achieve this insight, however, by simply saying that we should create “schools of capabilities” instead of “schools of knowledge.” The core of this insight is that now we must move more and more from the instinctive to the conscious. It is necessary not only to affect the will instinctively, not only that the teacher instinctively affect the pupil. The important thing is that concepts, ideas and imagination be allowed to flow from the teacher to the child. However, these must be concepts that are not simply concepts in thought, but concepts that can stimulate the will, that can satisfy the whole person. We are not concerned that people often stress that only the will should be developed, or only the feeling. No, what we are concerned with is that we gain the possibility of working to obtain such an insight, such concepts that have the power in themselves to go into the will, to develop the inner fire of the will. This is what we need today to heal the present mentality, to properly use the will in the second social pedagogical area.

The first social pedagogical area is what the recently founded Waldorf School is intended to serve, namely that area encompassing the elementary grades.² Elementary education should prepare people for true social thinking today and in the near future. We shall see how much this is a question of spiritual science, a question of the path into supersensible worlds.

The other aspect of the social pedagogical question is to prepare people to learn from life. We do not fare well in life if we view it as a rigid and foreign object. We can place ourselves correctly in life only when every moment, every day, every week, every year becomes a source of learning for our further development. Regardless of how far we go in our schooling, we will have accomplished the most if, through this schooling, we have learned how to learn from life. If we find the proper way to place ourselves in relationship to everyone we meet, then they will become for us a source of further development through everything they are and through everything they consciously and unconsciously give us. In everything that we do, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, we experience ourselves such that everything we experience in our surroundings becomes a source of continuing further development. Life is a school for every healthy person.

However, neither of these social pedagogical realms, learning in school or learning from life, can meet the needs of society now and in the near future if they are not strengthened by what spiritual science can provide.

Today, people think we should educate children as “individuals.” We also find other fundamental thoughts represented in modern education. With one exception, I do not wish to go into the details of modern pedagogy. However, I do wish to mention that this pedagogy contains certain standards that are made clear to those who teach. The teachers are to educate according to these standards. Much goodwill lives in these standards also. People have done an exceptional amount of well-meant thinking in forming this pedagogy. However, what is necessary now and in the near future is a /iving pedagogy. What we need is a living pedagogy, derived from supersensible human understanding, that replaces an abstract pedagogy that sets up standards for teaching children.

This supersensible perception of human beings does not at all ignore sense-perceptible understanding—it takes it fully into account. The sense-perceptible view of human beings, with all its understanding of anatomy, physiology, and so forth, treats people as an abstraction. Supersensible perception adds the spirit-soul element, while at the same time taking sense-perceptible knowledge fully into account. It observes the whole person, with emphasis upon the development of the whole person. It can, therefore, concentrate upon the developing whole person at the time when the parents entrust him or her to the elementary school at about the age of seven. What developed in the child as a result of imitation requires the support of authority during this life-forming period. Only when we are able to look at people in such a way, can we see what truly lives in them. In that we observe such a change, we can see what is unfolding in people. If you notice in the right way, with sensitivity, what wants to develop in people at six or seven years of age, and if you have not become a teacher, but are a teacher, then an awareness for this most wonderful riddle awakens through the innermost living forces without the necessity of pedagogical standards—the developing person continuously offers him- or herself to your soul’s eye.

Here lies something that a true social pedagogical reformation, which must be the basis of a modern unified elementary school, must really take into account. Here we must say that it is essentially unimportant whether new teachers have really learned what is often taught as pedagogy, as special methods. What is important for future teachers is that, through their training, they have become capable of looking into the developing person. What is important is that they have acquired the skills that they can acquire through a thorough, real understanding of human beings. What is important is that they have become capable in the presence of each child and in each moment to newly form and re-form the educational task.

For the true teacher, pedagogy must be something living, something new at each moment. Everything that teachers carry in their souls as memories robs them of their originality. New insights into the nature of developing humans that allow the pedagogy to change and be alive in those people who teach must replace pedagogical norms. We could even say that the best pedagogy (stated radically) is one that the teacher continually forgets and that is continually reignited each time the teacher is in the presence of the children and sees in them the living powers of developing human nature. When an allencompassing interest in the secrets of the world, in the enigma of the world and in world views accompanies such an attitude, then within the teachers will live what enables them to give that part of themselves that should enter the being of the children.

How can the teacher’s inner nature become so alive in the way I have just described it? Certainly no longer through a way of thinking derived from science, but only when the teacher’s will is ignited through a science drawn from forces connected with human nature. The teachers who have absorbed what spiritual science knows about the supersensible nature of human beings, who have inwardly enlivened this, who in a living fashion carry within themselves a science founded upon those forces through which the child is to be educated—such teachers can make this knowledge into a living inner fire for teaching. The basis of such a pedagogical art is supersensible knowledge, that is, the same forces that from day to day, from week to week, from year to year bring about the growth and development of the child.

Think about it for a moment. Consider how close the sources of pedagogical art are to what grows in the child when supersensible knowledge controls and directs what the teacher brings to the child! We should not search for new abstract ideas nor clever new rules in what we refer to as social pedagogical effectiveness. What we should search for is that the living should replace the dead, the concrete should replace the abstract.

To demand such things today is much more necessary than people often imagine. It is remarkable that people cannot imagine that there is supersensible knowledge that acts upon sensible knowledge, that acts upon life and teaching, upon know-how and capabilities. Already people have begun to misunderstand the core of the Waldorf School, and thus they slander, often unconsciously, what we intend with the Waldorf School. People think the Waldorf School must be some kind of parochial school because those who stand at its cradle begin with spiritual science. They think that it is a school that teaches Anthroposophy to the children. They do not have any idea how deeply stuck they are in old ideas when they assume this, whether it be with a positive or negative attitude. We have absolutely no need to assert Anthroposophy, to assert it as a point of view by developing anthroposophical concepts and seeing to it that children learn these as they previously learned religion. That is not at all our task. We will continue with what we have already stated, namely that the Protestant and Catholic religion teachers shall teach the Protestant and Catholic religions. We will not set any obstacles in the way of the desire to give this religious instruction. We will keep our promises in this regard. We do not seek in any way to bring any new philosophical opinions into the school. We seek something else. Our viewpoint will result from spiritual science because it comes from human nature. We will pay attention to the way it develops human know-how, human capabilities, the way it directly flows into the human will. Our task lies in our pedagogical activities: how we act in a school, how we teach, how we plan the lesson and its goals, which teaching methods to use, how knowledge and philosophy affect the skill and capability of the teacher. These are our tasks.

For this reason, we will have to correct much that (out of goodwill, but without the necessary insight) people consider to be the goals and content of modern educational activity. For instance, people often say that we should emphasize visual aids.³ Yes, certainly, within boundaries, it is good to use illustrative material, that is, to teach children about things that we show them directly. But, we must not allow these materials to lead to a slide into the banality and triviality of superficial consideration. People always want to stoop to the level of the child, and then all kinds of trivialities result, like those we find when we read visual aid guides. We concerned ourselves with such things while forming the Waldorf School. There we could see how trivial the so-called visual aids are that are derived completely out of the materialistic attitude of our time. We could see how forced instruction is when the teacher stoops to the child’s level of understanding, when the teacher is not to teach the child anything other than what the child can easily comprehend.

Now, if you only teach children what they can understand, then you neglect what can be the most beautiful thing in human life. If you always want to stoop to the level of what the children can already comprehend, then you do not know what it means later in life, perhaps at the age of thirty or thirty-five, to look back upon what you were taught in school. You do not understand what it means to have been taught something that you did not fully comprehend because you were not yet mature enough. But it comes up again. Now you notice that you are more mature, because you now understand it. Such a re-living of what has been taught forms the real connection between the time in school and the whole rest of life. It is immensely valuable to hear much in school that we cannot fully comprehend until we re-experience it later in life. We rob the children of this possibility when, with banal instruction, we stoop to the level of the child’s understanding.

What then is the task of the teacher who wants to bring the children something they can absorb, but perhaps will understand only after many decades? Teachers must have the necessary inner life forces so that through their personality, through what they put into the teaching, they can give the children something they cannot yet fully understand. A relationship exists between the teacher and the children through which the teacher can bring things to the children. Things can be brought to the children through the way in which they live in the teacher, because the children feel the desire to experience the world that is aglow within the teacher. That is why the children can grasp them. It is tremendously important that the teachers become leaders in this way, that through the fire that lives in them, they become a wellspring for what the children will carry in their own lives. Compare this with how the banal instruction children receive dims with time.

There are many other examples to show that pedagogy must be something living, something stirred up in the teachers out of an understanding of human beings obtained through human capacities. More than anyone else, the teacher needs an understanding of humanity based upon a supersensible view of human beings. If, in teaching, we would use what comes from a supersensible world view and understanding of humanity, we could immediately remove all abstractions so that the teaching would come from the practical.

There are people today who think that they are practical, who think that they stand in practical life, but it is their “practicality,” which is really only routine, that caused the terrible misery and misfortune that resulted in the war, and in which we still find ourselves today. Instead of obtaining an insight into what supersensible knowledge could achieve for education, these people say supersensible knowledge has nothing to do with the true practicalities of life. They have conjured up these miserable times because they have always said this, because, in reproachable carelessness, they have thrown out the true supersensible content of practical life. We have scarcely caught our breath, and now these people want to continue this stupid practice by kicking to death every truly earnest desire for improvement. If those people who absolutely do not want to see what is necessary for our time are again victorious, then in a short time we will again have the same misery that started in 1914. Those people who wish to crush everything supersensible in the activities they so slander, which are in reality so practical, are exactly those people who have led us into this misery. That is what we need to see clearly today.

I would not have spoken these serious words had not the terrible croakings of doom again arisen where we want to create something quite practical, like the Waldorf School. We should have learned something from the terrible events of the last four to five years, and we should progress. We must keep a sharp eye on those who do not want to progress, who want to begin again where they left off in 1914. We need not worry that they will keep a sharp eye on us—that they will do for sure. But, we must also keep a sharp eye on them. All people must unite who have a sense that something must happen today that, on the one hand, really originates out of the true spirit, and, on the other hand, is capable of affecting serious practical life.

For such very practical reasons, what is often an empty slogan, particularly concerning pedagogical questions, must for once be handled with objective seriousness. We must take into account, for instance (we paid particular attention to such things in the seminar for the Waldorf School faculty), that around nine years of age something important ends and something new begins with children. Until the age of nine, children are strongly entwined with their surroundings. The imitative principle is still enmeshed in the authoritative principle. The possibility of developing the feeling of self first begins at the age of nine, so that, for instance, scientific facts, nature studies of the plant and animal world, can be brought to the child. At the same time, the stage between seven and nine years of age is such that we do well not to bring the children anything that is taught out of convention, that is not basic and does not obviously flow out of human nature.

We must gradually lead children into reading and writing. Anyone can see that the letters we have today are something conventional. (With Egyptian hieroglyphics, it was different.) That means we must teach writing starting from drawing. At first we do not pay any attention to the shapes of the letters, but draw forms. We must begin basic drawing and painting, along with music, in the lowest grades. We must derive the whole education from the child’s artistic capabilities. The children’s artistic capabilities touch their entire being. They touch the child’s will and feeling, and then, through will and feeling, the intellect. We then go on. We continue with drawing and painting to motivate the will through artistic instruction. We go on to writing and develop letters out of the drawn forms. Only then comes reading—it is even more intellectual than writing. We develop reading out of writing. I am giving these details so you can see that spiritual science is not off in the clouds but enters into all details of practical instruction. A living understanding of humanity, which must replace an abstract pedagogy, leads into all the details, into the ways in which we teach mathematics, writing, and languages.

So much for the special area of instructional pedagogy.

The social aspect of pedagogy encompasses all of practical living. After we have finished school, we go out into “real life,” but our conventional education creates a gulf between us and life. Thus we see that there is something instinctive in the great questions of humanity. Although these questions address the needs of life, there is no insight for solving them.

I would like to take note of another question that has concerned modern civilization for some time, the so-called feminist question, namely, what forms the gulf between men and women. People are correct in trying to close this gap, but they cannot close it when they do not really understand what is common between men and women. If they only pay attention to what they can learn about human beings in the physical world and from the modern scientific way of thinking, the difference between men and women remains extreme. We will first bridge the abyss between men and women when we bring the differences in perception and ways of working in the world into balance. We will attain this balance through what we can arrive at through the knowledge, will and feeling that exist in the forces that form the basis of human nature. What men do not have, but women do, gives men a certain inclination; and what women do not have, but men do, gives women a certain inclination. During the time when people are physically female, they are spiritually male, and during the time they are physically male, they are spiritually female. If what can come into our society from spiritual science would permeate our culture, then the ground would be prepared for such things as the so-called feminist question. We can apply this to numerous questions, but I only want to remark about one other.

People cry out for organization. It is obvious that they cry out for it since the complicated relationships of modern social life require organization. I have said much in my lectures about the nature of such structure. However, people think that we need only to organize things according to current scientific principles, according to modern socio-political thinking, without spiritual science. Lenin and Trotsky organize, Lunatscharsky organizes according to these principles. They have placed economic life into a mechanistic form, and they want to do the same with spiritual life. Neither the stories of various people who judge out of their impressions, nor what journalists and other people who have recently been in Russia tell, is important. What we can use are Lenin’s writings. They show anyone with insight what to expect: the organizational death of everything that is a true source of humanity, of what lies in the individual human being and in human nature. No greater foe of true human progress exists than what is now happening in the East.

Why is this? Because they absolutely ignore what can come from spiritual development, namely true social pedagogical life forces. We must organize, but we must be conscious that although we want to organize, people must live in this organization. People must live in this organization and have the opportunity to teach what the inner source of human nature is, what is hidden after people have grown, what we can again bring out of the sleeping powers of their human nature. Not everyone needs to be a clairvoyant and experience what can be experienced through the awakened powers of human nature, but everyone can be interested in what humanity can achieve through these living human forces.

When people take interest in such things, then a new capability awakens in them. This is a capability we can best characterize when we bring to mind an area where people already have somewhat weakened sensibilities. This capability can be likened to what a language is to all the people connected by it. To discover the spirit living in the language, those who speak one language must first understand the genius, the wonderful artistic structure of the language, even though they already speak it. They need to understand the spirit emanating from the language that permeates the people and forms the language into a unified whole. In that we learn to speak, we absorb, not consciously, but instinctively and unconsciously, with every word and with every connotation, something that reveals to us the genius of the language in a mysterious way. Social life is something that lives in many instincts. Language has always been one of the most wonderful social instruments. Only, in modern times, as we go from East to West, language has become increasingly abstract. People feel less and less what the sounds of the language say to the heart and to the head, and particularly the connections that the language forms to speak to the heart and to the head. People feel less and less the mysterious way in which the genius of the language makes impressions upon them.

Many other things that touch people as does the genius of language will become effective if a general human development becomes more widespread through the activity of the elementary school—acting not as a parochial school, but through rationally formed instruction. Then when people meet one another, they can unite through speech. Every conversation, every relationship to another person, becomes a source for the further development of our soul. What we do in the world that affects other people becomes a source of our own further development. We can first develop the elements of communication between people if we meet other people with those feelings aroused in us. We can develop this communication if we do not follow abstract modern science, but take up the living fire within us. This living fire can come to us from a science that is connected to what in human nature allows people to grow until twenty years of age, and from then on can lead to a development of supersensible knowledge.

Even though I have described the three forms of the social organism since spring, the spiritual sphere, the rights-political sphere and the economic sphere, I must emphasize that these are three external forms. Inside these three external forms will live the intimate inner connections forged from one human soul to another. People will recognize each other more clearly than they do today. If, in place of antisocial desires, those social motives that are the basis of true social life are present, then the modern scientific way of thinking can at last become fully useful for humanity. Through this scientific way of thinking we will be able to properly master the external lifeless nature that appears as technology and other things. The ethical, moral forces that can be kindled by the spiritual will derived from spiritual science will take care that the results of technology are useful to human beings. An inner structure that carries people and forms human life will come into the external forms of the social organism. Without this inner structure we cannot develop a fruitful external social form.

That is what I wanted to mention to you today, that spiritual science as we think of it here is not in any way abstract, is not something floating in the clouds, is not, as some people claim, metaphysical. It is something that streams directly into human will and makes people more adept and more capable of living. This remains unrecognized by those who refuse to see the present need for our spiritual science. They will also refuse to see that something like the Waldorf School has been formed, not arbitrarily, but out of truly practical life.

Can we expect much from those people setting the tone today? This spring and summer I repeatedly mentioned in my social lectures (I only mention this as characteristic of much of the modern intellectual attitude) that among the issues of the working class is that, in the future, work must not be a commodity. In a neighboring city I spoke about the “commodity character” of work. I think that people need only the tiniest bit of common sense to understand the general intent in the words “commodity character.” This morning I received a newspaper published in that neighboring city. The lead editorial closes with the sentence, “I am confused by the sentence that ‘work must be freed from its true character’”⁴ Yes, that's possible today. Today it is possible for people who are unable to understand something so clearly related to modern culture as “commodity character” to make judgments about such things. Someone like this could not in an entire life have possibly heard of the “commodity character of human work.” How do such people live in the present time? When it is possible to become so out of touch with reality, it is no wonder that we cannot get together in modern social life.

This is not only possible for people such as the writer of this editorial, it is also possible for those people who think they know everything about practical life. It is possible for people who, at every opportunity, look down upon what appears to them to be idealistic. They do not speak about real life any differently than people who see a U-shaped piece of iron and are told it is a magnet. “No,” they answer, “this is used to shoe horses.” These modern people who wish to shut supersensible knowledge out of practical life are like the person who sees a horseshoe-shaped magnet only as a horseshoe. They do not think anything can be true that does not directly meet their limited powers of understanding.

Today there are many more people than we think who hinder social progress. There are many people who do not want to understand that we cannot simply say that the last four or five years have brought something terrible to the people of Europe—something more terrible than ever before existed in historical times. To this we must add that now things must occur out of a depth of thought that people have never before reached in the course of what we call history. We have come to a time in which people think completely abstractly. Most abstract are the political opinions and programs that existed at the beginning of the twentieth century and that grew out of a modern scientific education. People do not want to understand how abstract, how foreign are the means they wish to use to come to grips with life. People think that they are practical. For example, people see today that in world trade money runs through their fingers, that the German mark is worth less day by day. And from day to day we do exactly those things that, of course, cause the value of the mark to fall. “Practical” people have again taken the helm. So long as people do not see that truly practical life does not lie where they, in 1914, looked for it, but in the understanding of the ideals of life, so long will nothing get better. People today are not modest enough to admit that things will get better only if they come to a deepening in their insight. Goodwill will not do it alone, that is the cancer of our times. It will be necessary that people see more and more what the true basis of spiritual cognition is. Spiritual cognition, because it is based upon the development of the same powers that work in the formation of healthy human beings, can place them in social pedagogical life. What we need today is spirituality—not a naive spirituality, not a spirituality lost in the clouds, not a metaphysical spirituality, but true spirituality that affects practical life, true spirituality that can master the problems of life. We also need practical insight into life; we need to be in life, but in such a way that our view of life kindles a desire to bring this spirituality into life.

From a spiritual-scientific point of view, people must understand one thing, otherwise no progress will be possible in our unfortunate times. The axiom must be:

Seek the truly practical material life, but seek it such that it does not numb you to the Spirit working in it.

Seek the Spirit, but seek it not in supersensible lust, out of supersensible egotism; seek it because you want to become selfless in practical life, selfless in the material world.

Turn to the old maxim: Never Spirit without matter, never matter without Spirit!

Do this so that you can say, “We want to perform all material deeds in the light of the Spirit, and we want to seek the light of the Spirit in such a way that it develops warmth within us for our practical deeds.”

Spirit brought by us to matter,
Matter wrought by us to its revelation
Driving the Spirit out;
Matter receiving from us Spirit revealed,
Spirit forged by us back into matter—
These create that Living Being,
Bringing humanity to true progress,
Progress only longed-for
By the best desires in the depths of human souls.

• 1. Translators’ note: Lectures of 5/11/19, 5/18/19, 6/1/19, contained in A Social Basis for Primary and Secondary Education (GA 192), Waldorf Institute, Adelphi University, New York, 1975.
• 2. Translators’ note: In the Germany of 1919, many children finished formal schooling with the eighth grade and then entered an apprenticeship.
• 3. Translators’ note: The reader should be aware that the “visual aids” and “illustrative materials” meant here are to be understood as actual materials in the classroom, as distinct from a verbal or written description of the object of discussion. Prior to this time illustrative material was rarely used in the classroom, and it was a somewhat controversial innovation in 1919.
• 4. Translator’s note: Steiner used the German word Warencharakter (commodity character); the editor understood him to say wahren Charakter (true character). Their pronunciation is nearly identical.

All Rudolf Steiner's work in the sphere of practical human affairs is founded upon knowledge of Man as a being of body, soul and spirit.

In The Threefold Commonwealth, his fundamental work in the field of social life, published in 1919, Dr. Steiner shows that man has a threefold relationship to the social order. He has the task of developing his own soul and spirit, his individuality; he has the right and the obligation to live in peace with his fellow-men; and he needs certain material things for his bodily and spiritual life. The true form of social order is, therefore, one which “orders” aright these three relationships in social life. The spiritual requires freedom for its full development; the man-to-man relationships call for laws which embody simply what is fair and just, and before which all members of the community have equal rights and obligations; the economic life needs full scope for individual ability together with the impulse of brotherly trust working through an organisation of “economic associations.” In such associations the practical experience of all those persons engaged in the economic life could flow together with a force capable of applying a practical Economic Science to the new problems created by the transition (partial as yet) from national economies to World-Economy.

In 1922, Dr. Steiner, in response to a request from students of Economics, gave, in the fourteen lectures contained in this book, advice for the formation of an Economic Science which would enable mankind to master the complicated facts of world-economics. In these lectures he shows that the economic process is an organic one in constant movement and that it can be known in its reality only by a method of thinking which immerses itself in the phenomenon and creates living mobile pictures of all its changing phases. The lectures themselves manifest a new way of economic thinking and demonstrate the method by which the economic life can be mastered by the human spirit in association. It is, the author says, the task of the economic scientist to make this contribution “to the healing of our civilisation and to the reconstruction of our human life.”

Because the subject is dealt with in this fundamental way, no previous knowledge of Economics is necessary for an understanding. What is needed on the part of the reader is the goodwill to apply an activity of thinking free from pre-conception and bias. The method of presentation allows the reader to think for himself and stimulates him to do so. The diagrams, which have had to be printed in their completed form, were, in fact, built up in the course of the lecture, and the student who actually does this for himself in the course of his reading will gain a fuller understanding of them.

Economic problems are but a part of the social problem of how people can live together in such harmonious relationships that each may have scope for the exercise of individual capacities while uniting with others to satisfy the spiritual and bodily needs of the whole community. Dr. Steiner, therefore, so treats the problems of Economics that what belongs to the economic and what to the legal and spiritual members of the threefold social organism is clearly seen.

The advice for the solving of social problems which the author gives in these lectures, and in his other social works, takes the form of general ideas which can be acted upon in freedom under changing conditions of time and space. Readers who experience from these works a moral stimulus to their social aims may wish to seek in his Philosophy of Spiritual Activity enlightenment upon the way in which general ideas can be translated into free human deeds.

T. G. J.

A. O. B.

Considering the seriousness of the times, it seems to me that if I were to speak about Pentecost today in the way it is ordinarily spoken of, it would be unchristian—although such unchristian performances are quite the accepted thing. All who have been speaking here for the renewal of our education and school life, have spoken in the real spirit of Pentecost—endorsing as they have, so earnestly, our movement for the threefolding of the social organism. For in the liberation of the spiritual life, in the emancipation of the schools, lies the truest spirit of Pentecost for our present day—that Pentecost spirit which has entirely disappeared from the ordinary so-called religious and confessional streams of this age.

It is our sincere hope that an emancipation of the spiritual life, such as we are striving to achieve, will bring about its renewal—a thing of which mankind is so sorely in need. But one will only be able to comprehend what must be done to our schools and to our education in order to bring about a renewal of the spirit, a pouring out of the true Pentecost spirit, if one realizes how deeply the anti-Pentecost spirit has trickled into public life, into men's so-called spiritual intercourse with one another.

If one speaks in these times as one must on an anthroposophical basis, then one even—I underline it three times—even hears this reproof: that the word “German” and the word “Christian” or “Christ” are never mentioned in the course of one's remarks.

My dear friends, if we cannot find within ourselves the answer to such foolish chatter we have not yet get to the heart of the anthroposophical world-conception! It is the direct result of our distorted pedagogy; it illustrates what absurdities have trickled into our souls through our education. We must above all things gain a knowledge of the connection between the perverted chatter of our age and our perverted educational life; this knowledge must pour down in manifold fiery tongues upon the heads of our contemporaries.

A great deal is being said in our time about the unimportance of the word, and that “in the beginning was the deed”. My dear friends, an age like ours will even find a false use for the Gospel; the word has become mere chattered phrase and the deed, thoughtless brutality. An age like ours turns away from the Word with reason, because in the word that it knows it can only find phrase—and the deed that it knows is only thoughtless brutality.

There is a deep connection between our educational life and this fact which I have mentioned. We bear within us two sources of perverted humanity: a perverted Hellenic and a perverted Romanism. We do not understand Hellenism as it related to its own time and place. We can, hardly comprehend why the noble Socrates and Plato tried with such courage to cure the Greeks of their unconquerable love of illusion. The Greeks always wanted to escape from the seriousness of life, and sought their satisfaction in illusions. Socrates and Plato, the Greek lawgivers, had to point with great severity to the reality of the spirit, to save the Greeks from falling more and more into the failing of their race, that of withdrawing comfortably by means of illusions from the seriousness of life. The Greeks allowed “the loafer Socrates” to go on talking about the seriousness of life as long as he seemed harmless. But as soon an they realized what was really contained in his words they gave him hemlock to drink.

Socrates spirit of earnestness is not the spirit of this age. We inherit rather that spirit of Hellenism that poisoned Socrates; and we revel in it. We even consent to the poisoning of the pearl of world-literature, the beginning of the Gospel of St. John, when we allow the word “Word”—of which the Old Testament said that when man lets it become one of his illusions heaven and earth will fall—we allow it to be taken literally. St. John's Gospel begins, “In the beginning was the Word”. The man of today is content to take the word “Word” as a mere phrase. But something stands written there that is destined to scatter all his illusions which he drags into the phrase. The heaven end earth of our illusions would collapse if we were earnestly willing to understand the “Logos” that shines forth from this sentence, and that should be experienced in it.

Thus our culture has tried to ameliorate the severities of life either by mystic comfort or by brutal action. That is what we must see today, what we must realize above all things. Today we must drive out of men's souls from the first moment of education up through the highest schools, what Socrates and Plato sought to expel from Hellenism when they said to the Greeks: “Beware of illusions; the spirit alone has reality! There is living reality in ideas, which is not what you, with your elusive phrases, want to see in thee?”

We will get no further if we keep chattering about ethics and religion! For the Gospel is itself a fact in the evolution of the world. It has become today mere babble; and therefore it is accompanied by thoughtless, brutal action. We must fill our souls with what can really inspirit us when we speak. We must find a way to make the heart speak behind the lips. We must find a way to penetrate our words with our entire being; otherwise the word becomes a seducer, tempting us with illusion, alluring us from the earnestness of reality. We must put away forever the spirit which lures us to go church in order to be lifted there out of the earnestness of life, and to hear this gratifying phrase trickled out to us: that the Lord God will make it all right, He will deliver us from our evils. We must look within ourselves, within our own souls, for forces which are divine forces, which have been implanted in us during the evolution of the world in order that we shall use them, in order that we shall he able to receive God into our individual souls. We should not be listening to all this preaching about an external God, which allows our souls to lie in indolent repose on Philistine sofas, of which we are so fond when it is a question of spiritual life. Our education must find away out of the “Greek Phrase”, as one may call it today. It must also find a way out beyond the “Roman phrase”.

The “spirit of law” which our age still worships today was right for the Romans. For what was this spirit of law? A deep meaning lies hidden in the legend of the founding of Rome. Brutes were held together in order to combat the worst animal-human instincts. That is what the Roman laws were for, to herd wild animals together. But we should realize that we have become men, and we should not worship that spirit of law which arose from a legitimate Roman instinct to tame brutish human passions. The Roman spirit that still prevails in us today as our “spirit of right” is universally of such a character as to intend that wild human passions shall not rule in freedom, but shall be held in full restraint.

Christian! the complaint is that that word is not used in the lectures we are giving. But we continually forget a very Christian saying of Paul that reads as follows: “Sin came through law, not law through sin. “If there were no law, sin would be dead”. Of course that may be worth nothing for our time, because men have become unchristian. But it is a saying of which one must learn the dear significance. This is the true Christian spirit: to take out of the State—which men regard today as All-containing, All-embracing, and which is our inheritance from Rome—to take out of it the spiritual life and the economic life, and to make them free. But men do not want the Christian spirit, and therefore they want to make themselves feel comfortable by using “Christ” and “Christian” as often as possible as phrases.

Likewise they want to hear the word “German” as a mere phrase as often as possible. A true German spirit prevails in Goethe. The recent un-German spirit of middle Europe has in its enlightened representative, the Berlin Academy of Science, coined a phrase which I have mentioned here before: the glory of these men, the spiritual leaders of today, consists in this, they regard themselves as “the scientific bodyguard of the Hohenzollerns”! The man who coined that phrase has also given a lecture, in the scientific phraseology of the present day, entitled “Goethe and no End”, in which he endeavored to trample to the ground Goethe's whole natural-scientific spirit. He took great pleasure in saying: “Goethe's Faust character might better be inventing an air pump to keep Gretchen upright, than all the silly things he does in that book”. That is in the spirit of the time—trampling on the true German spirit which never takes the word “German” in vain—just as the “modern” Christian spirit (and that means unchristian spirit) has been always to require the words “Christ” and “Christian”, and to disregard this other saying; “Thou shalt not speak the word God is vain”. One should have a feeling for what is Christian, and not be constantly wanting to have one's ears filled with chatter about Christianity.

That is “the spirit of Whitsuntide” today. One can hardly say that if it were not cherished and cultivated it would find much fruitful ground upon which to fall. One has plenty of opportunity to see how this Whitsuntide spirit is everywhere misunderstood. The following fact, for instance, that has actually come to light, in a remarkable illustration of the spirit of our time (if I may descend for a moment to an everyday matter): Our Union for the Threefolding of the social organism started forth to make seed-words grow into deeds, and in order to be understood snatched up the words of a certain person for quotation. Then this person talked also on his side, about socialization, using words which could very well be used if socialization was being talked about, and which at the same time could very well be quoted by our Union for the Threefolding of the social organism, because as words, if they were the thought-seeds of actions, then would actually mean what we want to say. But then, what happened? From the side from which these words originally came, the course of action which should naturally follow these words was violently attacked. What, does this indicate, was under the surface of the man's thought? It was this: Woe to you if you regard our words as anything else but chatter and phrase! The moment you take our words seriously, we are your enemies! That is the outcome of on educational system that has grown up in this age under the wing of the State. That on the one side. On the other hand is this pleasing denunciation: We are in complete agreement with what Steiner says, his whole ides for fighting existing capitalism; we agree with his Threefold Commonwealth; but we are fighting him because we will not be preached to by a spirit-seer!

It does not seem unreasonable to ask ourselves: What can be attempted in an age that wants nothing else but phrases or thoughtless brutal action, that refuses everything else, but that nevertheless bears within it the seed out of which real men can be developed? People do not want to have to think; they prefer thoughtless class war. They utter beautiful phrases and do not want their thoughts to become deeds. And if someone takes their phrases seriously he is violently attacked.

We must ask ourselves noel, seriously: ! Have men who are born in the midst of such a spirit the right to pour out phrases—oily phrases—about the Pentecost wonder? My dear friends, the slime that is poured out today about the Pentecost wonder comes from the dame glands as the poison with which some want to choke everything today that comes from the spirit, poison by which they encourage in themselves on the one hand unreal phrase, and on the other hand thoughtless, brutal action. The unreel phrase is the religious chatter of the world; the brutal unspiritual act is militarism, the fundamental evil of our time. Until one realizes how thoroughly these two things are ingrained in our perverted educational life, one cannot think fruitfully about what ought to be done. Everything else is simply a quack remedy.

What must be done, my friends, must be done out or reality. For reality carries the spirit within it; whereas a denial of the spirit makes everything an absurdity. And if in our time anyone tries to indicate spiritual realities, he is branded a “visionary”, and “spirit-seer”. It is because a feeling for reality is universally lacking.

The comparison of the social organism with the human or any other organism, has also become a phrase, in our time, and avery cheap one at that. If one wants to use a comparison without resorting to phrases, one must present the fundamental knowledge for it as it is given in my book Riddles of the Soul. What sense is there today in speaking of the threefold social organism until its spiritual foundation, the threefold nature of the human organism, consisting of nerve-sense faculties, rhythmic faculties, and metabolic faculties, is presented to men as real natural-scientific knowledge? But men are so indolent that they will not allow the conceptions they have acquired from their perverted school-training of the present day to be corrected by that which originates in true reality.

Our official science, that is, the science that is accepted everywhere as authoritative, cherishes another hoary conception. Even modern science kneels in idolatrous worship before everything that is thrust forward as highest culture. To what else, then, should it have recourse when it wants to explain something especially mysterious, than to something to which just at this time kneels the lowest? Thus, the human nervous system has become for science a collection of “telegraphic lines”; it sees the whole nervous activity of men as a remarkably complicated telegraph system. The eye perceives; the skin perceives. Then what has been perceived on the outside is carried to the telegraph station called “the brain”. And sitting in the brain is some being or other—of course modern science would not have anything to do with a spiritual being—anyway, through some kind or being that has become a phrase because one acknowledges no reality there, the perception announced by the sensory nerves is transformed through the motor nerves into movements of will. And this distinction between sensory and motor nerves is stuffed into our young people, and upon it the whole conception of man is built.

For years I have been fighting this absurd distinction between sensory and motor nerves, first of all because the distinction is nonsense. For, the so-called motor nerves exist for no other reason than that for which the sensory nerves exist. A sensory nerve, a sense-nerve, is the means by which we are to perceive what is going on in our sense-organization. And a so-called motor nerve is not a “motor” nerve but is also a sensory nerve; it only exists so that I shall perceive my own movements, which originate in something quite other than the motor nerves. Motor nerves are inner sensory nerves for the perception of my own will-impulse. The sensory nerves exist in order that I may perceive the external things that are happening to my sense apparatus. And in order that I may not be merely an unconscious being walking, hitting, grasping, without myself knowing anything about it, the so-called motor nerves exist thus not for the exertion of will, but for the perception of what my will is doing. The whole idea of a distinction has been invented by modern science out of the distorted intellectual knowledge of our time, and it is truly scientific nonsense. That is one reason why I have been fighting it for years.

But there is another reason why this nonsense must be uprooted, this superstition about motor and sensory nerves, between which there is no other difference than that one is sensitive to what is outside the body and the other to what is inside the body. This is the other reason.

No one in any kind of social science can acquire a correct understanding of man in his relation to work if he builds up concepts on this false differentiation between sensory and motor nerves. For one will get most curious notions of what human work is, of what happens in man then he works, when he brings his muscles into movement, if one does not know that the man's bringing his muscles into movement does not depend upon his so-called motor nerves but upon the immediate connection of his soul with the outer world. I can do no more then just indicate this fact to you, because today men do not yet have the slightest understanding for it. Education has not yet produced even a primitive capacity for the understanding of such things because it still works on the basis of this mad distinction between sensory and motor nerves. When I confront a machine I must confront it as a whole man; I must set up a relation above all things between my muscles and this machine. This relation is all that a man's work really depends upon. It is this relation that one must understand if one wants to know the social significance of work,—this very special relation of men to work. What is our concept of work today?

The process that goes on in man when he is, as we say, “working” is no different, whether he is exerting himself at a machine, or chopping wood, or engaging in sport for pleasure. He can wear himself out just as thoroughly, he can consume just as much working-power, in some sport that is a social superfluity as in chopping wood which is social necessity. And the illusion of a difference between sensory and motor nerves is the origin psychologically of man's conception of work today—while in reality one can only gain a true conception of work if one considers, not how a man exerts himself in work, but in what sort of relation to his social environment he is placed by his work. I believe you do not really comprehend that, because the concepts one might have today of these things are so distorted by our education that it will be a long time before one can find any transition from the concept of work that is socially absurd and from the concept of sensory and motor nerves that is scientifically absurd. It is in these very things that we must look for the reason why our thinking in so impractical. How can humanity think practically about practical things when it is a victim of this absurd concept: that we have a telegraphic apparatus strung up in us by which wires go to someplace or other in the brain and are then switched on to other wires—sensory and motor nerves! It is from this unscientific science of ours, which arises from a distorted school system, and to which people are intrigued into pinning their faith—it is from this that the impossibility arises of thinking socially.

That is what we should recognize today as the Pentecost spirit. It would be wiser to pour that out in single streams on the men of the present day, than to use the kind of quack ointment that it is thought today will better this thing or that. When one says today that mankind must learn anew and think anew, people believe at most that one is employing that same phrase that they themselves employ—and that is easy to understand because people at once translate what one says into phrases and utopias. But does it not make a difference whether some popular orator says “Mankind must learn new lessons”, or whether someone says it who knows that through the habit of artificial thinking mankind has created such depths of false thoughts that they even reach down into the structure of the human nervous system, so that today men have a deeply rooted superstition about sensory and motor nerves because their authorities impose it upon them. It must be made clear to the world that one is speaking from a basis of reality—and saying very different things about this reality—when one talks on the ground of the anthroposophical movement about “thinking anew” and “learning anew”; it should be the task of the Anthroposophical Society to make that clear. For today the phrase has won such power that as far as the words themselves are concerned anyone who is unable to distinguish between reality and phrase can refer you, for instance, to the editorial of today's Stuttgart Daily and say: Look there, there is also preaching about “learning anew”. But it is not a question of comparing words, for then we fall into word-idolatry; today we must see what the reality is, and protect ourselves fro the danger of falling into phrase idolatry. How many times have I regretfully had to disagree when such phrases as this have been uttered: Look there, someone has again spoken from the pulpit “quite theosophically”—as people say. These things are so bad because they show how little capacity exists today for differentiating between a knowledge of reality and a smug use of phrases. With the Pentecost festival this admonition should pour down upon human souls: “Away from you phrases back to reality!” We talk today in the field of science, the field of art, the field of religion—in fact, we talk everywhere—in phrases which stick in the throat and do not include the whole man; just as man's belief today is that his sense impressions stay somewhere up in his brain and do not also register his motor activities. Everything is connected in the most intimate way, and until there is a change in those thought habits which official science has created in our time, which scientific popery has imposed upon us, there will be o real Pentecostal renewal—for all other renewal is only on the surface and does not pour forth, as it must, from real inner depths. If our school life and education are really to experience a renewal we must become awake to such things as have been discussed here, and protect mankind from the diseases which so easily can arise in it today, because of its inheritance from Romanism.

The love of illusion that is so widespread today must be fought against. The man of today feels comfortable when he can delude himself about reality, when he can say to himself: Not Christ in me, Who arouses my strength, Who liberates powerful forces within me—not that do I profess; but the Christ Who is external to me, and Who mercifully frees me from my sins without my having to do anything about it out of my own earnestness or my own powers!

My dear friends, again and again in numerous letter I have had this Christ-Jesus creed held up to me, in contract to what Anthroposophy must do and wants to do. And again and again I have been confronted by the request to “popularize” in trivial phrases, “so that people can understand it”, that which today must be stamped with severe accuracy out of the reality of the spirit because the time demands it. But the moment anthroposophical truths were cut up into trivial phrases they would become just phrases, such as all the phrases that are so cheap in the present day; they would be brought down either to trivialities of the street or to the Philistinism of modern science. Again and again I have found the courage not to do either—either to reduce anthroposophical teaching to the trivial phrases of the street (which is called “popularizing”) or to talk so that the scientific people would understand me. I have received these two admonitions many times. My dear friends, I should then have to talk so that I would find an echo in the scientific senselessness of the present day. It would be especially agreeable to me when people behave as a professor in Tübingen did recently out of the scientific conviction of the present time. It seems to me, truth reigns in external events, for that affair is the best proof of how necessary it is for the spiritual life to be completely transformed. Especially, if one wants to find a transition to the true Pentecost spirit, from babbling words to seed-bearing words, then one must earnestly again and again examine one's old habitual concepts in order to see what it is that one does not want to make new concepts for—what it is that can be chattered about perhaps while still clinging to one's old concepts, but not comprehended by them.

Apropos of' the value or words today, there is no great sense in pointing out that in certain circles the proletariat has sufficient goodwill to understand the Threefold Commonwealth ideas even better then the middle-class understands them. If the middle class would only have the same “goodwill” is what many would like to say today. The proletariat laughs at this urging the middle-class to have “goodwill”—and he is justified in laughing. He is better prepared to understand than a man of the middle-class. But it is on quite a different basis that he is prepared to understand these things, and he laughs when when anyone says one appeal to the goodwill of the middle-class in order to set understanding; he laughs especially when one says one could expect a result from this appeal. For he knows quite well that his better understanding comes from something quite different: that in the morning if he does not work he finds himself in the street: he is bound up with the social order, I might say, at points only—not throughout a straight line as is the middle-class citizen of today: he understands out of his humanness because the present social order has brought it about that he has other than human interests, for he is nothing else the morning he is thrown out on the street, but just a man. That is what his better understanding springs from.

As to the middle-class citizen, especially the state-official: the state takes him in hand as soon as possible—not too early, because then it is still considered indelicate, and so the state leaves him to mothers and wet-nurses. But as soon as he gets beyond this first indelicate period he is taken at once into the care of the state and trained, prepared—not to be a man, but to be a state-official. Then the strings are tied, so that he is connected with the social order not at points, like the proletarian, but by a long line; through strings on all his interests, he is fastened up to the social order that exists through the state and that is supported by the state. He is trained in all his behavior to be the correct expression of the social order. Then he is fed, and he is satisfied. He is not only fed, but he is so taken care of that he does not have to take care of himself. And then, when he is no longer able to work, the state sees that he gets a pension so that without having to do anything about himself he is properly supported by the Powers that trained him in the first place to be their loyal expression. This lasts until death. Then he is still taken care of, this time by a religion which gets its salvation not from the inner forces of the soul, but from a mercy that comes in from the outside; this religion sees to it that his soul is “pensioned” after death. That is the precise content of state wisdom and religious wisdom. No wonder that a man of the middle-class, citizen of both state and heaven, hangs on to that with which he is bound up so thoroughly.

There is the contrast: personal interest on the one side, but then also personal interest on the nearest corner of the other side. It is in opposition to the personal interest on the other side that that a number of men attain today that which mankind must attain in this age of the consciousness soul, and of which I have often spoken: establishing oneself as an individual human being. The proletarian has only an opportunity of doing that, of establishing the fact that he is first of all an individual, when he has not been drawn into a contract with all the others. The more he is drawn in, the worse it is for him.For here on this side are men who similarly are set up in their positions by the proletarist: they are the the men who have any kind of official position in the labor unions. Even if their positions are called by other names, they succumb easily to the same grand manners as the middle-class citizens, and they fight whatever arises as a possible hindrance to these airs. And so they gradually acquire the habits of the middle-class.

One talks today in the proletarian world of labor unions. In England about a fifth of the whole laboring population is economically organized. That is relatively many. Thus the present English laboring class, in the modern spirit of organizing, has grown quite neatly into the middle-class way of thinking. In Germany only an eighth are organized, the others are unorganized workers. And it is the unorganized workers today who stand on the ground of personality; they are the real driving powers, it is they who have preserved the consciousness of what it means to remain just a man, without the pensions—without even, the pension which I have rationed for one's later spiritual life. These men who stand in the external economic sphere upon their own individuality are, I might say, the psychic channel for that which must arise today as an historical necessity, for that which makes the proletarian demand of today at the same time a world-historical demand.

The modern economic order has harnessed the proletariat to factories and capitalism, where it is easier for them to understand what the demand of the time is, than for the middle-class man who hangs on with all his strings to his maintenance and his pension, and who does not want to think. If he were to think, if he were to analyze the age correctly, it would not be possible to speak as a Tübingen professor did recently, who brought up this argument during the discussion after one of my lectures: It has just been said that the proletarian's “existence worthy of a man” is undermined because the proletarian is paid wages for his work; is not Caruso paid wages when he sings, and at the end of the evening is given 30 or 40 thousand marks for his work? Or—the selfless gentleman continued—do I not also receive wages?—I feel none of this “unworthy of a man” business when I pocket my salary! Nor does Caruso feel it when he collects his 30 or 40 thousand marks… That is the gist of what he said. And he went on to say: the only difference is this, that in one case the wages are more, in the other, lees, but that is of no importance—in reality it is all the same!

My dear friends, that is the spirit which blossoms out of the educational life of today! It is the same spirit that says: We are becoming a poor nation , we will not be able to pay for schools and educations, the state will have to step in and pay for them. Now, to one who thinks so shortsightedly, one will have to reply: But what does the state do when everybody is poor, and it must suddenly become the Croesus who will pay the debts that all of, us cannot pay? First, the state takes away in the form of taxes whatever everybody has: it seems to me it can hardly manufacture as a Croesus what the people themselves do not have. That is what these classes of people have to learn. It is also what those persons must learn to understand who are supported by the state out of the pockets of those who stand economically on the basis of their human individuality. As long as they have not learnt to understand it through the necessity of life, it is impossible to put it into their minds. And so it seems to me, a great number of people today want to conjure up an age in which one can also be thrown on the street if one is not willing to bring about another social order through an impulse of thought. It could very easily happen that the state pensions of which I have spoken could no longer be paid—in which event, I believe, the people would not so much, either, of those other spiritual pensions that are paid today to the soul after death by the religious community that has become so dependent upon the material powers.

But now when something arises that is not willing to be mere phrase, but insists upon being seed-thoughts for action, people cannot accept it as anything other than phrase. They cannot perceive that a real concept of work depends upon actual knowledge of life, even of single details such as the scientific absurdity existing in the distinction between motor and sensory nerves.

It is necessary today that at least a few men see into these depths. Today it is absolutely necessary that individuals should not let themselves be fooled into saying: We will socialize the outer economic life, but we will not touch the schools, especially the high schools and colleges. They must remain as they are. That is the very worst thing that could happen, for the state of affairs that has prevailed until now will, if it remains as it is, will only become worse. Socialize economic life, and leave the spiritual life as it is, and in a short time out of your apparent socialization you will have a much greater tyranny and much worse conditions of life than ever before. Today of course the economic pressure which exists is the cause of frightful eruptions in the social organism. Is this now to be succeeded by place-hunting, by the worst kind of bureaucracy? Do men who have now (although a little late) finally learnt that they cannot depend upon “throne and alter”, actually believe that it would be any safer to depend in the same way upon the state treasury and state budget? Capitalism has known how to bring the altar around gradually to a respect for power that really no longer exists but that lives on in phrase, into corporation idolatry and corporation place-hunting.

What mankind needs for a renewal of the spirit is the courage to realize that the spiritual life of humanity has become today religious chatter on the one hand , and on the other , thoughtless, brutal action, militarism. The typical man of this modern capitalistic age feels most himself when he is engaged in cutting his coupons, averting his eyes while he does it from what really takes place through that action. On the one hand the gospel made into chatter about love of neighbor and brotherliness, and he sits there comfortably with his scissors, cutting it all to pieces: he does not need to see the reality of what he is doing, because on the other hand he knows that he does not have to protect his business himself: the state does that by manufacturing swords. We have experienced this covenant between business life and state life in modern times: it is precisely what brought the world catastrophe upon us. This “state” of which men have been so proud: what has it been else then the great Protector of economic life as it is carried on under capitalism? My dear friends, one would like to hope that the patriots of the past, whose patriotism in their sense one would not question, ( for they were “good” patriots, they coined the word from a patriotic phrase, and it was very disastrous in the age just past to point out that this patriotic phrase had a very real foundation, that the state reverenced by patriots was after all just a protector of banknotes?)—one would like to hope that these patriots do not suddenly “unpatriotize” themselves and now that their gold is probably bettor protected by the Entente powers, speedily trim their patriotism! I will not say anything in particular about such a possibility, but I should like to draw your attention to the ease with which the patriotic phrase can be transformed into its opposite. There are plenty of examples about us.

These are the things that must be said today, while celebrating Whitsuntide, in regard to the necessity of renewing school and educational life. For the unctuous talk that has been given to mankind should he poured out no longer. Men must accustom themselves to words that point to the realities of the present day. Then it will be possible for the real Pentecost spirit to descend among us, for little tongues of fire to reach into all that arises in the future out of the emancipated spiritual life, into the lowest school as well as the highest, so that in the future the liberated spirit, which is the real Holy Spirit, can bring about the spiritual evolution of mankind.

One is talking perhaps of something that the religious chatterer of today does not think of as exactly “Christian”. But mankind will have to decide whether the Christian talk of the man of today originates in that spirit which Peter denied his Lord three times, or whether it crises out of the spirit that said, “What I have revealed to you is not merely confined to one age, but will stand through all ages. And I will not cease to declare the truth to you; I will be with you until the end of the earth, time.” Those who can hear only the spirit of the past today even in Christianity, will be the phrase makers, the chatterers. Those who accept the living spirit today even for the transformation and rebuilding of the social order,' will be those perhaps in whom one will able to see the true Christ.

May this age grow out of a truly comprehended Pentecost spirit.

What I have had in mind in the course of these reflections has been to cast light upon the form that social thinking should take today. I should like now to add something to what we have already discussed that may make it possible for you to lift these things to a higher level. This is really necessary just because of the special demands of the spirit of our epoch. Everything that I have presented to you and will still present, I hope you will consider, if I may repeat this request, not as a criticism of the existing conditions of the times, but simply to provide material suitable for giving direction to our judgment that may provide the foundation for a general survey of conditions characterized by the necessary insight. The spiritual-scientific point of view cannot be that of providing a social critique but solely that of calling attention to these things without pessimism or optimism. Yet this fact compels us, naturally, to use words that will be understood by some persons to be intended as criticism of one or another of the social classes. Such is not the case. When we speak here of the bourgeoisie, it is as if we were speaking of an inevitable historical phenomenon, and not for the purpose of raising any objection to what has simply been unavoidable according to certain spiritual-scientific points of view. I beg you to understand in the same way also what I shall present to you today.

Let us take as our point of departure the comprehensive motive force that underlies in powerful form the present social demands of the proletariat, just as it underlies all or many human movements. This force is more or less clearly expressed, but it is also instinctive, unconscious, confused, and unclear' though nonetheless fundamental in these movements. This consists in the fact that a certain ideal exists for bringing about a social order that will be satisfying in all its aspects. If we wish to describe in a radical way what is thus basic in these things, there is reason to say that an endeavor is made to think out and to realize a social order that will bring about a paradise on earth, or at least that happy state worthy of the human being that is looked upon by the proletariat population at the present time as something to be desired. This is called the “solution of the social problem.” What I have just said is inherent in the instinct behind what is called the solution of the social problem.

Now, in considering the expression “solution of the social problem,” it is necessary that the spiritual scientist, who should not surrender himself to illusions in any field but should fix his attention upon realities, shall in this case also indulge in no illusions. The essential fact in this field is that those who are striving for these things do not proceed from a standpoint free of illusions, but from a point of view confronted by a great number of such illusions, especially the fundamental illusion that it is possible to solve the social problem.

The fact that in our epoch there is no consciousness of the difference between the physical plane and the spiritual world, but the physical plane is looked upon in a certain instinctive way as the only world, is connected with the other fact that it longs to create a paradise on this physical plane. Because of this conception our epoch is compelled to believe that the human being is condemned either never to achieve justice, the harmonizing of his impulses and needs, or else to find these things within the physical earthy existence.

The physical plane, however, manifests itself to one who observes the world imaginatively, and thus takes cognizance of actual reality, in such a way that he must declare there is no perfection in this world but only imperfection. Thus, it is impossible to speak at all of an absolutely complete solution of the social problem. You may endeavor in any way you please, on the basis of all the profoundest knowledge, to solve the social problem, yet it will never be solved in the sense in which many persons expect the solution in our day. But this need not lead anyone to say that if the social problem is simply not to be solved, we should permit the old nonsense to continue on its course. The truth is that the course of things resembles the action of a pendulum: the force for the upward swing is gained in the downward swing. In other words, just as the opposite force is accumulated by the downward swing and is then used in the upward swing, such is the case also in the rhythmical succession characterizing the historic life of humanity. What you may consider for a certain epoch as the most perfect social order, or even as any social order at all, wears out when you have once brought it to realization, and leads after a certain time once more to disorder. The evolutionary life is not such that it steadily ascends, but its course consists in ebb and flow; it progresses with a wave movement. The best that you may be able to establish, when once realized on the physical plane, gives rise to conditions that lead to its own destruction after the necessary length of time. The state of humanity would be entirely different if this irrevocable law in the historic course of events were adequately recognized. It would not then be supposed possible in the absolute sense of the word to establish a paradise on earth, but people would be compelled to give attention to the cyclic law of humanity's evolution. As we exclude from consideration an absolute answer to the question, “What should be the form of social life?” we shall do the right thing by asking ourselves what must be done for our epoch? What are the exact demands of the motive forces of our fifth post-Atlantean epoch? What actually demands to be made a reality? With the consciousness that what is brought to realization will inevitably be destroyed in turn in the course of the cyclic reversals, we are compelled to see clearly that we can think socially also only in this relative way when we recognize the impelling evolutionary forces of a definite epoch. It is imperatively necessary to work in harmony with reality. We are working against reality when we suppose that we shall be able to accomplish anything by means of abstract and absolute ideals.

For the spiritual scientist, therefore, who desires to fix his attention upon reality and not illusion, the question takes the limited form of what bears the impulse within it to be brought to realization within the actual situation of the immediate present?

Our explanations of yesterday also were intended to be considered from this point of view. You interpret me quite wrongly if you suppose that I mean an absolute paradise will be brought about through the fact, let us say, that what is produced by labor will be separated from labor. On the contrary, I consider this, on the basis of the profound laws of the evolution of humanity, only as something that must necessarily occur at the present time. What is anchored in all the instincts of man, toward which the proletariat conception of life especially is striving, even if they sometimes push things to the extreme of such demands as those I enumerated to you yesterday as the demands of bolshevism—behind what people have in their consciousness there lies, of course, what they instinctively will to bring to realization. Anyone who directs his effort toward reality does not pay attention to programs proposed to him, not even that of the Russian Soviet Republic, but he endeavors to see what is still in instinctive form today behind these things that people express outwardly with stammering tongues. This is what really matters. Otherwise, if we do not view the matter thus, we shall never deal with these things in the right way. What men are instinctively striving for is absolutely inherent in the fundamental character of our fifth post-Atlantean epoch, which is essentially different from the fourth epoch, the Greco-Latin, and likewise from the preceding third, the Egypto-Chaldean. Men of today, in their social relationships—not as individuals, but in social group relationships—must will something absolutely definite.

Instinctively they do actually will this. They will today what could not have been willed in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, or even up to the fifteenth century of our Christian era. They will today an existence worthy of the human being, that is, the fulfillment as a reflection in the social order of what they vaguely sense in this epoch as the ideal for humanity. Men will today instinctively that what the human being is in himself shall be reflected in the social structure.

During the third post-Atlantean epoch, the Egypto-Chaldean, this was different, and different likewise still earlier during the second epoch. In the second epoch, the ancient Persian, the human being was still entirely in his inner nature; man was then still a being of wholly inner nature. He did not then demand instinctively to find duplicated in the external world what he possessed inwardly as his needs. He did not need a social structure that would enable him to recognize in external things what he possessed inwardly as impulse, instincts and needs. Then came the third post-Atlantean epoch, the Egypto-Chaldean, and the human being demanded that the part of his being that was connected with his head should appear to him in the mirror of external social reality. So we observe that, from the third post-Atlantean epoch on, from the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, the endeavor was made to achieve a theocratic social arrangement in which everything pertaining to theocratic social institutions was in some way permeated by religion. The rest remained still instinctive. What was connected with the second man, the breast and breathing man, and what was connected with the metabolic man, remained instinctive. The human being did not yet think at all of seeing these reflected in the mirror of the external order. In the ancient Persian epoch there was also only an instinctive religion, guided by those initiated in Zarathustrianism. But everything that the human being developed was still inward and instinctive. He did not yet feel any need to seek things in external reflection in the social structure. He began during the period that ended approximately with the founding of the ancient Roman kingdom, the actual year was 747 B.C., to demand that what could live as though in his head should be found again in the social order.

Then came the epoch that began in the eighth century, 747 B.C., and ended in the fifteenth century A.D., the Greco-Latin epoch. Man then demanded that two members of his being, the head man and the rhythmic, breathing, breast man should be reflected externally in the social structure. What constituted the ancient theocratic order, but now only in an echo, had to be reflected. As a matter of fact, the real theocratic institutions bear a close resemblance to the third post-Atlantean epoch and this includes even the institutions of the Catholic Church. This continued, and something new was added to it that was derived especially from the Greco-Latin epoch. The external institutions of the res publica, those institutions that have to do with the administration of the external life so far as justice and injustice and such things come into consideration were added. Man now demanded as regards two members of his being that he should not only bear these within himself but should see them reflected externally as in a mirror.

For instance, you do not understand Greek culture if you do not know that the situation was such that the merely metabolic life, which is expressed externally in the economic structure, still remained instinctive, inner and without the need of external reflection. The tendency to demand an external reflection for this appeared first in the fifteenth century of the Christian era. If you study history in its reality, not in the form of legends fabricated within our so-called science of history, you will find confirmed even externally what I have told you on the basis of occult knowledge about the Greek slave class and slavery, without whose existence the Greek culture we so greatly admire would be unthinkable. This can be conceived as existing in the social structure only when we know that this whole fourth post-Atlantean epoch was dominated by the striving for an external system of institutions in the field of law and religion, but not yet for any other than an instinctive economic order.

It is our own epoch, the time that begins in the fifteenth century of the Christian era, in which the demand was first made to see the whole three-membered human being as a picture also in his external social structure.

We must, therefore, study the three-membered human being today since, for the first time, he develops a threefold instinct to have in the external structure, in the community structure, what I have mentioned to you, that is, firstly, a spiritual sphere, which has its own administration and its own structure, secondly, a sphere of administration, of security and order—a political sphere—that is likewise self-sufficing, and, thirdly, an economic sphere, because our epoch demands for the first time this economic sphere in external organization. The demand to see the human being brought to realization and pictured in the social structure arises as an instinct in our epoch. This is the deeper reason why it is no longer a mere economic instinct that is at work. The economic class that has just been created, the proletariat, strives toward the goal of setting up the economic structure externally just as consciously as the fourth post-Atlantean epoch set up the administrative structure of the system of laws, and the third post-Atlantean epoch, the Egypto-Chaldean, the theocratic structure.

This is the inner reason. Only by giving attention to this inner reason can you judge rightly the conditions of the present time, and you will then understand why I had to present to you this threefold social order a week ago. It has certainly not been invented as programs are invented today by innumerable societies, but it is asserted on the basis of those forces that can be observed if we enter into the reality of evolution. We must come to the point, for time is pressing in that direction, when the impelling evolutionary forces within the development of humanity shall really be understood concretely and objectively. Time is pressing in that direction. People still struggle against this. It is really astonishing even if we observe those who make the furthest advance. A short time ago a book was published entitled Letters of a Lady to Walther Rathenau Concerning the Transcendence of Coming Events. All sorts of things are, of course, discussed in this book. For example:

It is the intention of this pamphlet to publish the essential intuitional contents of epistolary writings. Personal communications have been excluded since they have no immediate relationship to this. The result is the elimination of the fragmentary letter form, and thus also the constant repetition of the customary salutations and conclusions. A lady endowed as a seeress communicates here to the author of the book, Of Things To Come, her unusual experience and knowledge in regard to the new soul of the time and the new birth of the world. The powers of the future struggling today for a higher form of life manifest themselves here in an individual human destiny as the experienced reality of the new soul powers.

It is strange that many things are here spoken of, but one observes something curious. The lady discovers that man can develop higher spiritual faculties and that genuine realities can be perceived only by means of these. The book really comes to an end with this. Its last chapter is entitled, Cosmic Conclusions Regarding the World Soul and the Human Soul. But the book proceeds no further than to the insight that a person can possess higher faculties and not to the point of telling what he actually perceives by means of these higher faculties. It is as if one should say to a person, “You have eyes,” but then not bring him to the point of seeing anything of reality with them. A strange attitude is taken by certain persons with reference to spiritual science. They actually shrink back in terror even if we merely begin to speak of what can be seen. One should like to say to an author such as this lady, “You admit that higher faculties may evolve in the human being. Spiritual science exists in order to report what one sees precisely in connection with important matters if these higher faculties are evolved.” But people shrink back from this and do not want to listen.

You see how urgently the time impels us to reach the point where spiritual science wills to arrive, and how meanwhile there are jumbled together in people those things of which I spoke in the latest issue of the magazine, “Das Reich,” edited by Alexander von Bernus, in my article entitled Luciferic and Ahrimanic Elements In Our Contemporary History, in the Life of Man. This is all in such a tangled mass in the human soul that even those who admit that it is possible to see a spiritual reality as a genuine reality that can be beheld regard as a fantastic person anyone who speaks concretely of such a spiritual reality.

I have referred to this lady simply because she is not a unique phenomenon. What appears in her appears in many individuals. It is actually a characteristic of the time that even though people feel impelled to look beyond the ordinary external reality, they still withdraw and refrain from doing so. In this book for example, attention is called to a certain relationship between human beings and cosmic forces. But one should not try, let us say, to explain to these people the content of my book, An Outline of Occult Science, in which these relationships are expounded. They then shrink back. But we do not gain an insight into social matters, which must be considered as I have told you, if we simply admit that it is possible to see and do not consider what can be seen. It is of enormous importance to realize this. Otherwise, we shall always make the mistake already pointed out in the first sentences I uttered today of making an absolute principle out of something that is valid concretely for the individual single case—so that the question is asked, for example, in regard to the social problem, “How must human institutions be set up throughout the world?” But this question is really not presented to us. Human beings in various parts of the earth differ from one another, and in the future this differentiation will increase. Utterly unreal thoughts are expressed by one, therefore, who supposes that it is possible to proceed socially in the same way in Russia, China, South America, Germany or France. Such a one expresses absolute thoughts where individual and relative thoughts alone correspond with reality. It is extremely important that this fact be clearly seen.

During recent years, when it was so important that these things should be understood in the appropriate places, it has been a source of great distress to me that they have simply been misunderstood. You will recall that I drew a map here two years ago that is now becoming a reality, and I did not show this map only to you. I presented the map at that time to explain how the impelling forces are moving from a certain side, since it is a law that, if we know these impelling forces, if we take cognizance of them, if we grasp them in our consciousness, they may be corrected in a certain way and given a different direction. It is important that this should be comprehended.

But no one in a responsible position has taken cognizance of these things, or taken them earnestly in the real sense of the word. Present events certainly show that they should have been taken earnestly.

Now the fact that must be taken into consideration in connection with these things is that, in regard to certain fundamental laws of world evolution, nothing is actually known in a comprehensive way such that this knowledge is brought into external application anywhere except within certain secret societies of the English-speaking peoples. This is something that it is important to observe. Secret societies among other peoples are fundamentally only a matter of empty phrases. Secret societies among the English-speaking peoples, on the contrary, are sources from which truths are acquired in certain ways by means of which things can be guided politically. I may speak of them some time, but it would take us too far afield today. Thus we may say that those forces flowing from these secret societies into the politics of the West move actually in accordance with history. They reckon with the laws of historic evolution. It is not necessary that in external matters everything shall be correct even to the dotting of the last “i”. What matters is whether the person proceeds in accordance with historic evolution in an objective sense, or whether he proceeds as a dilettante following his arbitrary notions.

The politics of Central Europe, for example, were predominantly amateur politics, utterly without relation to any historical law. The politics that were not amateurish, that followed the facts—or, if I may use the crass expression, professional politics—were those of the English-speaking peoples, the British Empire and its annex, America. This is the great difference, and this is the significant point that must be clearly seen. Its importance lies in the fact that what was known in those circles is actually flowing into the world of reality. It also flows into the instincts behind those persons who occupy positions as political representatives, even if they act only out of political instincts. Behind these are the forces to which I am now referring. You need not inquire, therefore, whether Northcliff or even Lloyd George is initiated to one degree or another into these forces. This is not what counts. The decisive question is whether or not there is a possibility that they may conduct themselves in accordance with these forces. They need to take up in their instincts alone what runs parallel with these forces. But there is such a possibility; this does happen, and these forces act in the general direction of world history. This is the essential point, and it is possible to act successfully within the interrelationships of world history only when one really takes up into one's knowledge what is going on in this manner in the world. Otherwise, the other person, who is acting knowingly in accordance with world history, or causing such action, always has the power, while the one who knows nothing of it is powerless. It is in this way that power may master powerlessness. This is an external occurrence. But the victory of power over powerlessness in these things depends, in the last analysis, upon the difference' between knowing and not knowing. It is this that must be clearly grasped.

It is important also to see that the chaos now in its initial stages in the East and in Central Europe demonstrates how terrible everything was that pretended to bring political order into this chaos but has now been swept away. But what is happening now in Central and Eastern Europe demonstrates that nothing but dilettantism permeates public life in this region. In the West, among the English-speaking population of the world, there is dominant everywhere by no means dilettantism, but—if I may be permitted to use the crass expression—an expert consideration of these things.

This is what will determine the form of the history of the coming decades. No matter what lofty ideals may be set up in Central and Eastern Europe, no matter how much good will may be manifested in one or another set of programs, nothing will be accomplished in this way if people are not able to take their departure from the motive forces that are derived in the same or even in a better way from the other side of the threshold of consciousness, just as the motive forces of the West, of the English-speaking peoples, are taken in the last analysis from the other side of the threshold of consciousness.

Those friends who have heard these things discussed that I have presented to you for years precisely as I am doing today, have always made a mistake in this connection and it is generally difficult to persuade even our best friends to abandon it. This is the mistake of thinking, “But what good does it do to say to people that one thing or another has its origin in certain secret centers of the West? Surely it is necessary to convince them first that there are such secret societies.” It has often been thought that the most important thing would be to awaken the conviction that such secret societies exist, but this is not what should receive primary consideration. You will meet with little response if you undertake to convince statesmen of the calibre of a Kuhlmann, let us say, that there are secret societies in possession of such impelling forces, but that is by no means the important point. Indeed, it is a blunder when this is considered fundamental. The fact that this is considered fundamental is due to the affectation of mystery brought over from the bad habits of the old Theosophical Society and still to be found even among anthroposophists. If anyone utters the word secret or occult and is able to refer to anything whatsoever that is secret or occult, what an altogether special distinction he thus confers upon himself! But this is not something that can produce favorable results when we are dealing with external realities. What matters is that we shall show how things occur and simply point out what anyone can understand with his sound common sense. Within those societies dealing with such occult truths as have a bearing upon reality, the principle was observed, for example, that after the Empire of the Russian Czar had been overthrown for the benefit of the Russian people, a political course would have to be pursued that would provide an opportunity to undertake socialistic experiments in Russia. People will not undertake them in Western countries because in those regions they are not considered advantageous or desirable.

So long as I simply assert that this has been stated in secret societies, it may be doubted. But, if it is pointed out that the whole direction of politics is such that this principle evidently underlies it, people are then within reality with their ordinary sound common sense. The important matter is that a feeling for reality should be awakened.

What has been developed in Russia is, fundamentally, only a realization of what has been purposed in the West. The fact that up to the present time only unskillful socialistic experiments are carried out by non-Englishmen, that things come to realization by all sorts of roundabout paths, is so well-known by these societies that they suffer no serious headaches because of them. They know that the important thing is to bring these countries to the point where socialistic experiments become unavoidable. If these are then conducted in connection with ignorance of the nature of a social order, one then actually forms the social order related to these lands and makes oneself the director of the socialistic experiment.

You see, the holding back of a certain kind of occult knowledge that is carefully practiced in these centers gives rise to enormous power. The opposite side cannot save itself in any way from this power except by acquiring this knowledge and confronting this power with it.

In this field there can be no discussion of guilt or innocence. Here we must speak simply of the inevitable, of things that must come to pass because they already exist under the surface, because they are at work in the realm of forces that are not yet phenomena. They are already forces, however, and will become phenomena.

Surely I need scarcely emphasize that I hold fast to what I have always asserted. The real being of the German people cannot perish. This real being of the German people must search for its path but it is important that it shall be able to find its path, that it shall not follow false roads in its search, and shall not search in ways where there is no knowledge. Do not interpret, therefore, what I shall now say in such a sense as to make it in the least contradictory of what I have asserted over a period of years. Things always have two sides and what I have indicated to you is, in large measure, a matter of the will. It is possible for this to be paralyzed if forces are brought into play also from the opposite side but these forces must rest upon knowledge, not upon an amateurish lack of it.

You see the essence of the thing is that if no resistance is raised from the East, and by the East I mean the whole region lying from the Rhine eastward even into Asia, British world domination will develop after the destruction of the Roman-Latin French element in the way intended by those forces that I have indicated once more today, as I have frequently done already, as lying behind the instincts. For this reason it is important that, in dealing with what Woodrow Wilson says, we shall not employ merely that kind of thinking generally developed in people today. Rather, what appears only in the instincts even in such a person as Woodrow Wilson should be grasped by means of a deeper knowledge. When formulated into all kinds of maxims, this infatuates people, and when it comes from Wilson's mind, infatuates for the sole reason that his mind is possessed in a certain way by subconscious forces.

The really important fact is that in groups in the West who keep their knowledge secret the greatest pains are taken to see that things shall develop in such a way as to insure under all circumstances the mastery of the West over the East. Whatever people may say today on the basis of their consciousness, the goal striven for is to establish a caste of masters in the West and a caste of economic slaves in the East, beginning with the Rhine and extending eastward all the way into Asia. This does not mean a caste of slaves in the ancient Greek sense, but a caste of economic slaves organized in a socialistic way to take up all sorts of impossibilities in the social structure that then shall not be applied among the English-speaking peoples. The essence of the matter is to make the English-speaking peoples into a population of masters of the world.

Now this is rightly thought out from that side in the most comprehensive sense. I now reach the proper place for the explanation of something that I beg you really to receive in full awareness of the fact that if such assertions are made today, they are made under the pressure and urgency of contemporary events and must really not be received except in an earnest sense. What I am here asserting is most carefully kept secret by the centers in the West to which I have often referred. It is considered obvious in the West that the people of the East shall not be permitted to know anything of these matters that these Western persons possess in the form of knowledge, as I have already said, through methods I may later discuss. They possess these things as knowledge in such a way that, since the others are not to know of them, world mastery shall be established through their help. This is the only possible method for attaining their ends.

Beginning with this fifth post-Atlantean epoch, definite forces will become prominent in the evolution of humanity. Human evolution is, of course, moving forward. Within the limits of the brief span of time that comes under the survey of anthropology or history in the field of external materialistic science, it is never possible to form a judgment regarding the forces manifest in the evolution of humanity. Little in the external process of development has undergone any change within this limited span of time. On the basis of this knowledge no one knows, for example, how utterly different things looked, even in the second epoch, not to mention the first or others still farther back. This can be known only through spiritual science. Only through spiritual science, likewise, is it possible to indicate the forces that will develop in future in a wholly elemental manner out of the nature of man. The fact that such forces, which will transform life on earth, will develop out of the human being is known in those secret centers. It is this that is concealed from the East by people in the West who intend to retain it themselves. It is known, moreover, that these capacities, possessed by man today only in their very first beginning, will be threefold in their nature. They will evolve out of the nature of man in the same way in which other capacities have come into existence in the course of humanity's evolution.

This threefold capacity, of which every knowing person within these secret circles speaks—these three capacities that will evolve in human nature, I must make intelligible to you in the following way. First, there are the capacities having to do with so-called material occultism. By means of this capacity—and this is precisely the ideal of British secret societies—certain social forms at present basic within the industrial system shall be set up on an entirely different foundation. Every knowing member of these secret circles is aware that, solely by means of certain capacities that are still latent but evolving in man, and with the help of the law of harmonious oscillations, machines and mechanical constructions and other things can be set in motion. A small indication is to be found in what I connected with the person of Strader in my Mystery Dramas.

These things are at present in process of development. They are guarded as secrets within those secret circles in the field of material occultism. Motors can be set in motion, into activity, by an insignificant human influence through a knowledge of the corresponding curve of oscillation. By means of this principle it will be possible to substitute merely mechanical forces for human forces in many things. The number of human beings on the earth today in actual fact is 1,400,000,000. Labor is performed however, not only by these 1,400,000,000 persons—as I once explained here—but so much labor is performed in a merely mechanical way that we say the earth is really inhabited by 2,000,000,000 persons. The others are simply machines. That is, if the work that is done by machines had to be done by people without machines, it would be necessary to have 600,000,000 more persons on the earth. If what I am now discussing with you under the name of mechanistic occultism enters into the field of practical action, which is the ideal of those secret centers, it will be possible to accomplish the work not only of 500,000,000 or 600,000,000 but of 1,080,000,000 persons. The possibility will thus come about of rendering unnecessary nine-tenths of the work of individuals within the regions of the English-speaking peoples. Mechanistic occultism will not only render it possible to do without nine-tenths of the labor still performed at present by human hands, but will give the possibility also of paralyzing every uprising attempted by the then dissatisfied masses of humanity.

The capacity to set motors in motion according to the laws of reciprocal oscillations will develop on a great scale among the English-speaking peoples. This is known in their secret circles, and is counted upon as the means whereby the mastery over the rest of the population of the earth shall be achieved even in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Something else is known also in those circles. It is known that there are two other capacities that will likewise develop. One, which I shall venture to call the eugenic capacity, will evolve primarily among people of the East, of Russia and the Asiatic hinterland. It is also known in those secret circles of the West that this eugenic occultism will not evolve out of the inborn potentialities of the English-speaking peoples, but only of the inborn potentialities belonging precisely to the Asiatic and the Russian populations. These facts are known in the secret circles of the West. They are taken into account and are looked upon as constituting certain motive forces that must become active in future evolution.

By the eugenic capacity I mean the removal of the reproduction of human beings from the sphere of mere arbitrary impulse and accident. Among the peoples of the East there will gradually develop a brilliantly clear knowledge as to how the laws of population, the laws of peopling the earth, must run parallel with certain cosmic phenomena. From this information they will know that, if conception is brought about in accord with certain constellations of the stars, opportunities will thus be given for souls that are either good or evil in their natures to obtain access for earthly incarnation. This capacity will be acquired only by those individuals who constitute the continuation of races, the continuation in the blood stream, of the Asiatic population. They will be able simply to see in detail how what works today chaotically and arbitrarily in conception and birth can be brought into harmony with the great laws of the cosmos in individual concrete cases. Here abstract laws are of no avail. What will be acquired is a concrete single capacity in which it will be known in individual cases whether or not a conception should occur at a particular time.

This knowledge, which will make it possible to bring down from the heavens the impelling forces for the moralizing or demoralizing of the earth through the nature of man himself, this special capacity evolves as a continuation of the blood capacity in the races of the East. What evolves as a capacity there I call eugenic occultism. This is the second capacity—the capacity that will prevent the evolution of humanity as regards conception and birth from taking its course according to arbitrary impulses, and more or less accidentally. I beg you to consider the enormous social consequences, the enormous social motive forces that enter here! These capacities are latent. It is well known in those secret circles of the English-speaking peoples that these capacities will evolve among the peoples of the East. They know that they themselves will not possess these capacities within their own potentialities bestowed upon them through birth. They know that the earth could not reach its goal, could not pass over from earth to Jupiter—indeed, they know that the earth would within a relatively short time diverge from the path leading to its goal if only the forces belonging to the West should be employed. It would gradually come about that only a soulless population could evolve in the West, a population that would be as soulless as possible. This is known. For this reason these people endeavor to develop within their own circles, through their capacities, mechanistic occultism. The endeavor is also made to establish a mastery over those peoples who will develop eugenic occultism. Every instructed person in the circles of the West says, for example, “It is necessary that we rule over India for the reason that only through the continuation of what comes out of Indian bodies—when this unites with what tends in the West in a wholly different direction, in the direction of mechanistic occultism—can bodies come into existence in which souls will be able to incarnate in future who will carry the earth over to its future evolutionary stages.” The English-speaking occultists know that they cannot depend upon the bodies that come out of the fundamental character of their own people, and so they strive to possess the mastery over a people who will provide bodies with the help of which the evolution of the earth may be carried forward in the future.

The American occultists know that they can never carry over into the future what they will to carry over unless they nurture what will develop in the form of bodies for the future within the Russian population through its eugenic occult potentialities, unless they gain the mastery of this, so that a social union can gradually come into existence between their own decadent race characteristics and the germinating psychic race characteristics of European Russia.

I must speak to you also regarding a third capacity, which is latent today but which will evolve. This is what I venture to call the hygienic occult capacity. Now we have all three: the materialistic occult capacity, the eugenic occult capacity, and the hygienic occult capacity. This hygienic occult capacity is well on its way and will not be long, relatively speaking, in arriving. This capacity will come to maturity simply through the insight that human life, in its course from birth to death, progresses in a manner identical with the process of an illness. Processes of illnesses are, in other words, only special and radical transmutations of the quite ordinary, normal life process taking its course between birth and death, except that we bear within ourselves not only the forces that create illness but also those that heal. These healing forces, as every occultist knows, are precisely the same as those that are applied when a person acquires occult capacities, in which case these forces are transmuted into the forces of knowledge. The healing power innate in the human organism, when transmuted into knowledge, gives occult forms of knowledge.

Now, every knowing person in the Western circles is aware that materialistic medicine will have no basis in the future. As soon as the hygienic occult capacities evolve, a person will need no external material medicine, but the possibility will exist of treating prophylactically in a psychic way to prevent those illnesses that do not arise through karmic causes because karmic illnesses cannot be influenced. Everything in this respect will change. This seems at present like a mere fantasy, but it is actually something that will soon come about. Now, the situation is such that these three faculties will not come into existence equally among all the peoples of the earth. Indeed, you have already seen the differentiation. This differentiation has to do, naturally, only with the bodies and not with the souls, which always pass, of course, from race to race, from people to people. But with the bodies this differentiation has much to do. From the bodies of the English-speaking peoples the possibility of developing eugenic occult capacities in the future through birth can never arise. It is precisely in the West that these will be applied, but the manner in which they will be applied will be that a mastery will be established over the Eastern lands, and marriages will be brought about between people of the West and people of the East. Thus use will be made of what can be learned only from the people of the East.

The potentiality of hygienic occult capacities is present in special measure among the people of the Central countries. English-speaking people cannot acquire the hygienic occult capacities through their inborn potentialities, but they can acquire these capacities in their development in the course of time between birth and death. These can become acquired characteristics during that time. In the case of the population occupying the area approximately eastward from the Rhine and all the way into Asia, these capacities will be present on the basis of birth. The population of the Central countries cannot acquire the eugenic occult potentialities through birth, but may acquire them in the course of their lives if they become apprentices of the people of the East. It is in this way that these capacities will be distributed. The people of the East will have not the least capacity for material occultism; they will be able to receive this only when it is given to them, when it is not kept secret from them. It will always be possible to keep it secret, especially when the others are so stupid as not to believe in things that are asserted by a person who is in a position to see into them. In other words the people of the East and those of the Central countries will have to receive material occultism from the West. They will receive its benefits, its products. Hygienic occultism will develop primarily in the Central countries, and eugenic occultism in the Eastern lands. It will be necessary, however, for intercommunication to exist between people. This is something that must be taken up into the impelling forces of the social order of the future. It makes it imperative for people to see that they will be able to live in future throughout the world only as total human beings. If an American should wish to live only as an American, although he would be able to achieve the loftiest material results, he would condemn himself to the fate of never progressing beyond earthly evolution. If he should not seek social relationships with the East, he would condemn himself to being bound within the earthly sphere after a certain incarnation, haunting the sphere of the earth like a ghost. The earth would be drawn away from its cosmic connections, and all these souls would have to be like ghosts. Correspondingly, if the people of the East should not take up the materialism of the West with their eugenic occult capacities that pull down the earth, the Eastern man would lose the earth. He would be drawn into some sort of mere psychic-spiritual evolution, and he would lose the earthly evolution. The earth would sink away under him as it were, and he would not be able to possess the fruit of the earthly evolution.

Mutual confidence among men in a profound inner sense is what must come about. This is manifest through their remarkable future evolution.

Within the intelligent minds of those centers of the West, a purpose exists to foster things only in the way in which they can foster them. It is not the business of Westerners to pay particular attention to what is evolving in the East from the viewpoint of the Eastern person; what evolves among others must simply be left to those others.

This is something that must be inscribed deeply upon our souls, that we arrive at a point here where guilt or innocence or similar concepts lose their significance, where the fact to bear in mind is that we must take these things in with the utmost earnestness, in the profoundest sense of the word, for the reason that these things embody a knowledge that alone is capable of passing over into the guidance of humanity in the future.

These things are of great importance, and it is important that we should view them in a certain way. Just consider that I have told you that three kinds of occult capacities will evolve and will intertwine over the entire earth, differentiated according to different peoples, in harmony with those of the West, of the Central countries, and of the East. I have said, indeed, that they will so intertwine that the people of the West will possess the potentialities of material occultism from birth, but will be able to acquire hygienic occultism; that those of the Middle countries will possess through birth primarily the potentiality for hygienic occultism, but will be able to acquire for themselves—if it is given to them—a material occultism from the West and a eugenic from the East; that those of the East will possess from birth the potentiality for eugenic occultism, but will be able to acquire for themselves from the Middle countries hygienic occultism.

These capacities appear differentiated, distributed among the humanity of the world, but at the same time in such a way that they intertwine. Through this intertwining will the future social bond of community life be determined throughout the world. But there are hindrances against the development of these capacities. These hindrances are manifold in character, and their action is really complicated.

For example, in the case of the people of the Central countries and the Eastern lands it is an important hindrance to the evolution of these capacities, especially their evolution in a knowing way, when strong antipathies against the people of the Western countries are active within them. Then these things cannot be viewed objectively. This is a hindrance in the evolution of these capacities.

But the potentiality of developing another occult capacity is also even strengthened in a certain way if it is developed out of a certain instinct of hatred. This is a strange phenomenon. We often ask ourselves, and we are dealing here with something that must be considered quite objectively, why such senseless abuse has been practiced in the Western countries. This also comes out of the instinct tending toward these capacities. For what constitutes the profoundest impelling forces in Western occultism is fostered by nothing more powerfully than by the development of feelings that are untrue but are sensed as in some way holy, and that can represent the people of the East and especially those of the Central countries as barbarians. The potentialities of material occultism, for example, are fostered by the attitude of mind constituting the so-called crusading temperament in America. This consists in the feeling that America is called to spread over the whole earth freedom and justice and I know not what other beautiful things. Of course, the people there believe that. What I am saying here has nothing to do with fault finding. The people believe that they are engaged in a crusade, but this belief in something false constitutes a support working in a certain direction. If a person should consciously make an untrue statement, he would not have this support. For this reason, what is now happening is tremendously helpful on the one side and a hindrance on the other in the development of those capacities that we must assert to be still latent at the present time in the case of most individuals who bear within themselves the will toward evolution in the future and are destined to influence profoundly the social structure of humanity.

Just think how everything that is happening at the present time is rendered luminous and transparent with understanding and insight when you fix your attention upon those backgrounds, and realize clearly that the subconscious instincts dealt with in our reflections lie back of everything that is constantly uttered today in a conscious way.

The most important fact in this connection, however, is that it is precisely the English-speaking peoples who, by reason of quite special evolutionary processes, possess occult centers where these things are known.

It is also known what capacities they will possess in future as members of the English-speaking population, and what capacities they will lack. They know how they must arrange the social structure in order that they may be able to subject to their purposes what is deficient in them.

It is the instincts that work in the direction of such things, and these instincts have already exerted their influence. They have exerted an enormous influence, a highly significant influence.

One especially useful means that can be set in motion by Western occultism when things are to be directed into the wrong channels consists in so influencing the East that it shall continue to hold fast in future to its ancient inclination toward the development of religion alone without science. The leaders of Western secret circles will take pains to see that nothing shall exist in their own regions constituting mere religion or mere science, but that there shall be a synthesis of both, the reciprocal influence of knowledge and faith. They will also take pains to see that this science shall work only in secret, that it shall permeate, for example, only the more important affairs of humanity and the political guidance of the world through the achievement of world dominion by the British. Contrariwise, if the East refrains as completely as possible from permeating religious conceptions with science, this will be enormously helpful in the spread of this world dominion.

Now just consider how everything Russian favors precisely this Western effort. The aspiration to be pious still continues in Russia, but not an aspiration to permeate the content of this piety with a science of the spirit. The aspiration remains in a certain way within an unclear mysticism, which would constitute an excellent means for supporting the dominion over the East that is willed by the West.

From another point of view, what is undertaken is to render science, which belongs to the earth, as theistic as possible. Just here the future of the English-speaking peoples has been most fruitful in recent times. They have achieved something tremendous by spreading throughout the world, in a fundamental sense, their scientific trend, that is, science void of religion, atheistic science. This has become the ruling power over the whole earth. Goetheanism, which is the opposite of this, quite consciously its opposite, could not develop even in the country of Goethe himself. It is an almost unknown affair in Goethe's own land! The dominating intellect in science today is kept completely harmonious with what is intended to become publicly manifest as the external expression of that science practiced by those circles in secret. They are, however, practiced there as a synthesis between science and religion. Thus there is atheistic science for the external world, but for the inner circles that are to guide the course of world events there is a science that also constitutes religion, and a religion constituting science.

The East can be kept in hand best of all if a religion without science can be maintained there. The Central countries can be kept in hand best if there can be grafted upon them a science void of religion, since religion cannot be grafted upon them. These things are aided in full consciousness by those who constitute the knowing ones within the circles we have mentioned, and instinctively by the others. Since the ruling powers of the Central countries, surviving from ancient times, have been swept away, there is nothing at present in the Central countries that can be put in their place. This makes it extraordinarily difficult, too, to form a correct judgment of the whole state of things at present in its world-historical setting. The whole world has been occupied with the question of guilt and of causes in connection with this war catastrophe. But all things will be illuminated only when we consider them against the background of the effective forces that do not come to manifestation in the external phenomena. Precisely for the reasons that have been set forth today, it is not possible to form opinions in regard to these things according to the categories, the thought categories, within which judgments are generally formed when the question of guilt or innocence is raised.

I am fully aware that at the present time, when Wilson has actually been called the Pope of the twentieth century, not in a disparaging but in an approving sense on the ground that he is justifiably the lay Pope of the twentieth century—I am well aware that even in the Central countries a confused judgment will gradually develop in regard to the course of this “war,” as it is called, for the reason that the correct statements of the questions are overlooked. Every document will confirm what I am saying, but they must be viewed in the light of what underlies them. It is most of all necessary to be able to form a judgment, which cannot be reached in this case by anyone except the person who can throw some light upon these things from beyond the threshold. I fear that the events now occurring day by day, we might say, will cause increasingly false methods of judgment to become prevalent, that an increasingly small number of persons will be inclined to deal with the questions in such a way as to produce fruitful results. I suppose that people will have curious ideas when they are informed now, for example, by the press—this might or might not be true—that the abdicated German Kaiser says, “I was really not even present when the war began; I was really not present at all. This was done by Bethman and Jagow! They did this.” (You have probably read this in the most recent papers.)

It is, naturally, unheard of that such a statement has been made by this mouth, obviously unheard of! But secretly influenced judgments, which are pushed into false ways by such things, are present everywhere. You see, what it-is necessary to bear in mind in this connection is that we must really give thorough consideration to the facts in order to be able to state the right questions. If we realize this, we shall then see that we should not view so superficially as is generally done the profound, tragic necessity lying at the bottom of this catastrophe. Even the superficial events must not be viewed superficially.

I will call your attention to an instance and you will see immediately why I select such an individual detail. Some time ago I undertook to make it clear to you that many sequences of events, sequences of facts, took place in Germany that beyond doubt might really have led to the war but were then broken off and did not lead to the war, whereas what actually led to the war did not have any real connection with these other things. I will not repeat today what I have already said to you in this connection. I should like, however, to have you consider one thing in order that you may see how in the course of world history, things that serve as external symptoms coincide, we might say, whereas the great affairs of which I have spoken to you today are behind these.

The question might be raised whether the whole war catastrophe, as it has come about since July or August 1914, might under certain circumstances have taken a different course. I shall not enter at present into the question whether or not this catastrophe as such could have been avoided—we shall have to turn to another page for that—but I will raise the question whether this catastrophe might have taken a different course.

Now, it might have taken a different course. This is entirely conceivable although there is nothing more than a methodological value in such statements after the event. It is entirely conceivable, both on the basis of the events and also on the basis of the occult backgrounds, that the whole catastrophe might have taken a different course. We have to form judgments according to a series of strata. What I am saying is valid only as regards a certain stratum of the facts. Within this stratum of the facts, something like the following might be arrived at in our judgment. We might say that it is conceivable that the war might have begun in 1914 in such a way that the German army would have marched toward the East and there would have been a time of waiting to see whether a beginning of war in the East would have led likewise to war in the West. It is conceivable that the main body of the German army might have been led against Russia and a mere defensive position taken up in the West, and that the Germans would then have waited to see whether or not the French, who were not bound in such a case by any treaty, would have attacked. The French would have had no obligation imposed upon them by a treaty at that moment if there had been no declaration of war in the East but the Germans had simply waited for the Russian armies actually to attack. They would certainly have attacked; there can be no doubt that they would have attacked. I do not deny that a different hypothesis might have been valid five years earlier, pointing in a different direction, but this was no longer possible in 1914. Within this stratum of the facts it is possible to conceive that the war might have taken its main direction toward the East. This might have been possible.

Yet, as things were, it was impossible. In spite of everything, it was still actually impossible for the reason that there was no plan of campaign with reference to the East. The idea had never been conceived that the event, the casus belli, could take place in any other way than that Germany would be provoked into an attack against Russia, and that the condition attaching to the treaty between Russia and France would thus apply to France, so that Germany would have to wage a war on two fronts. Under the influence of the axiom that had taken form in the German system of strategy from the beginning of the twentieth century, every consideration began with the idea that this war on two fronts could not be conducted in any other way than offensively. The only plan of campaign existing was to force France into a separate peace by means of a sudden invasion toward the West through Belgium—this was certainly an illusion, but such illusions existed—and then to hurl the masses of the army toward the East.

Now, I beg you to consider the nature of such a plan of strategy. Every detail for every day is calculated. There is an exact calculation as to how long it is permissible to wait from the day when the Russian general mobilization occurs until the first command is given for German mobilization, which cannot then be delayed but must continue further, because the Russian general mobilization constitutes the first impetus. On the day. thereafter, the second day thereafter, and the third day thereafter, this must take place. If there is a delay for a single day after the Russian general mobilization, the entire plan is thrown into confusion and can no longer be carried out. It is this that I beg you to consider. Such a thing as this therewith took its course, which was actually decisive at a moment when there was absolutely no Central European policy. This is naturally the essential point: there was no Central European policy. For von Bethman still continues today to talk nonsense. People were in despair when Bethman uttered his most unbelievable and impossible statements in the German Reichstag, and he continues still to utter them. There was absolutely no policy, but only strategy, but a strategy developed on the basis of one perfectly definite contingent event. Here it was not possible to change anything. Here nothing could be changed even with respect to the hour.

In other words, I beg you to reflect that it was not necessary according to the external causative circumstances for anyone in Germany to wish for a war; it had to occur in any case. It was not at all necessary to wish for it. I beg you to give attention to this fact. It had to begin for the simple reason that, the moment Russia issued the order for general mobilization, the thought arose in the mind of the German Commander-in-Chief, quite automatically and inevitably, “Now I must mobilize.” From that point on, everything proceeded automatically. This by no means occurred for the reason that it had been willed. It occurred for the reason that it had been prepared years before.

The attack through Belgium against France was to follow quite automatically upon the Russian general mobilization because this was considered the only rational thing to do. The Kaiser could not be told this for the reason, as I have already related to you, that people knew he was so indiscreet that, if this were said to him today, the whole world would know it tomorrow. The fact that the attack was to be through Belgium he learned first at the actual time of mobilization. Such things as this have happened many times. I beg you to give consideration to these things, and you will then say to yourselves that it was certainly not at all necessary for anyone inside Germany to will it. The war had to occur. I say this, however, on the condition that we shall remain within this stratum of facts. You may naturally pass over to a different stratum of the facts, but there you become involved in complicated questions.

The facts are such that something great that becomes a catastrophe for humanity, reminds us of the story of the good Rector Kaltenbrunner that I related to you in connection with Hamerling. Recall how I related this to you. I said to you that, if we let our minds rest upon the poetic personality of Robert Hamerling and understand him, we shall say to ourselves that what is effective in this personality is due in great measure to the fact that he went to Trieste at a certain definite time as a teacher in a German secondary school and that he was able to go from there on vacations to Venice. In other words, that he came to the shore of the Adriatic. The whole inner structure of soul of this Hamerling is due to the fact that he was able to live in Trieste on the Adriatic, as a teacher in a secondary school. This was the only thing he could do according to the preceding course of his development. How did he happen to go there? I told you that while he was a substitute teacher in Graz, he wrote an application for a position that had become vacant in Budapest. Now, just consider this. He sent an application there. If the official had received this and approved it, Hamerling would have spent the whole ten years in Budapest. His entire poetic personality would have been eliminated; it would not have existed. Anyone who knows this personality knows that this is true. How did it come about that he did not go to Budapest, but to Trieste? The good Rector Kaltenbrunner to whom the application had first to be delivered forgot all about the matter and left the application in his desk drawer so long that the position in Budapest was filled. After the position was filled and Hamerling said, “Good Heavens! I should have been so happy to get that position in Budapest!” the good Rector Kaltenbrunner blushed and said, “Bless my soul! I completely forgot your application. It is still lying in my desk drawer.” So Hamerling was saved from going to Budapest. The next time that Hamerling applied for a position in Trieste, the good Rector Kaltenbrunner, in the light of the preceding occurrence, did not forget to pass on the application. Hamerling came to Trieste and thereby became the Hamerling. Now I ask you whether the good Rector Kaltenbrunner gave Hamerling his place in the world as a poet. Yet there is no other primary cause among the external phenomena to explain this except that Hamerling became the real Hamerling through the fact that the good Kaltenbrunner, Rector in Graz in Steiermark, blundered. The simple fact is that it is possible to get under the surface of things only when we practice symptomatology. This guides us to the correct estimate of the external phenomena and to seeing what stands behind the symptoms. This is the really important point. This is what I should like to arrive at more and more.

When we survey the catastrophe of the present time, it is by no means a simple matter to find our way out of all the confusion. Just consider the great difficulty we face. Suppose that Lord Grey should undertake to prove, on the basis of the external documents alone, that he was entirely free of blame in connection with the outbreak of the war. Of course, this is the easiest thing in the world to prove. On the basis of the external documents it is possible to present the most convincing evidence that the British Government was not in any way to blame for the outbreak of this war. But what matters in all cases is the question as to how much weight attaches to this evidence. You can get under the surface of these things only if you state the question as I have stated it here before you for a number of years. “Would it have been possible, for example, for the British Government to prevent the invasion of Belgium?” Then you must say, “Yes, it would have been able to do so.” That is just what I demanded in my Memorandum, that unadorned facts should be presented to the world. These would naturally have brought it about that the gentleman who has now deserted and gone to Holland would even then have been obliged in some way to vanish. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that my Memorandum has received so little favorable response even in the case of those who could have formed a judgment of it. But I demanded that the events should be narrated from minute to minute—unadorned, without any coloring—the events that occurred at the same time in Berlin and in London between 4:30 Saturday afternoon—Saturday afternoon, you know, mobilization was ordered in Berlin at about 4:30, between 4:30 on Saturday afternoon and 10:30 that night. These decisive events, into which nothing enters of all those things about which the world has talked, afford the proof if they are simply narrated, that it would have been possible for the British Government to prevent the invasion of Belgium. It was not prevented. For that reason at 10:30 Saturday night, the only command to which His Majesty had aroused himself, contrary to the will of German strategy, this only command, that the army should be halted, that it should not be made to march toward the West but should be made to take a defensive position in the West—this sole order was countermanded at about 10:30 Saturday night, and the old strategy was adhered to. But the events must, then, be truly related from minute to minute, the facts merely narrated, which occurred between Saturday afternoon at 4:30 and Saturday night at approximately 10:30. From this there will then naturally result an entirely different picture. Most important of all it will lead to the correct formulation of questions.

It is to be feared that the public in all parts of the world will permit itself to be influenced by what is discovered in the archives, but the particular decisive facts that occurred between 4:30 on Saturday afternoon and 10:30 Saturday night, will probably never find their way out of the archives to the world. They have apparently never even been written down; that is, they have actually been written down but in such a way that the writings will never be found in the archives.

You see it is discretion in forming judgments that must also be attained. If this discretion in forming judgments can be gained it will be a great help toward the development of those latent capacities of which I have spoken to you today, which must develop in the future of humanity, differentiated in a threefold way in the various parts of the world. You will then discover that what I described to you a week ago as the only justifiable solution of the social problem so far as we can speak today in the sense indicated of such a solution, was by no means developed from mere intellectual ideas as an abstract program.

When, some three years ago, at the request of a group of friends who were disturbed by the social aftermath of the Great War, I published my book The Threefold Commonwealth, the immediate result, from my point of view, was the profound misunderstanding it met with on every side. This was because it was promptly classed among the writings that have attempted, in a more or less Utopian manner, to advocate institutions which their creators envisaged as a sort of nostrum against the chaotic social conditions thrown up in the course of man's recent development. My book was intended not as a call for reflection about possible institutions, but as a direct appeal to human nature. It could not have been otherwise, given the fundamentals of spiritual science, as will be apparent from the whole tone of my lectures so far.

In many cases, for example, what I included solely to illustrate the central argument was taken to be my main point. In order to demonstrate how mankind could achieve social thinking and feeling and a social will, I gave as an example the way the circulation of capital might be transformed so that it would no longer be felt by many people to be oppressive, as frequently happens at present. I had to say one or two things about the price mechanism, the value of labour, and so on. All this solely by way of illustration. Anyone who seeks to influence human life as a whole must surely hearken to it first, in order to derive from it the human remedies for its aberrations, instead of extolling a few stereotyped formulae and recommending their indiscriminate application.

For anyone who has reacted to the social life of Europe in the last thirty or forty years, not with some preconceived attitude or other but with an open mind, it is clear above all that what is needed in the social sphere today is already prefigured in the unconscious will of mankind in Europe. Everywhere we find these unconscious tendencies. They exist already in men's souls, and all that is needed is to put them into words.

That is what made me give in to my friends and write the book I have mentioned. My purpose was to attempt, out of the sense of reality which—in all modesty we can say this—spiritual science instils in man, to observe what has been going on in Europe in recent years, beneath the surface of events and institutions, among all ranks and classes of society. What I wanted to say was not: I think that this or that is correct, but rather: This or that is secretly desired by the unconscious, and all that is required is for us to become conscious of the direction in which mankind is really trying to go. The reason for many of our social abuses today is precisely that this unconscious movement contradicts in part what mankind has worked out intellectually and embodied in institutions. Our institutions, in fact, run counter to what men today desire in the depths of their hearts.

There is another reason why I do not believe there is any real point today in simply advocating some particular Utopian institution. In the historical development of mankind in the civilized world we have entered a phase where any judgment about relationships among and between men, however shrewd, can be of no significance unless men accept it—unless it is something towards which they are themselves impelled, though for the most part unconsciously.

If we wish to reflect at all upon these things at the present time, therefore, I believe we must reckon with the democratic mood which has emerged in the course of man's history, and which now exists in the depths of men's souls—the democratic feeling that something is really valuable in the social sphere only if it aims, not at saying democratic things, but at enabling men to express their own opinions and put them over. My main concern was thus to answer the question: Under what conditions are men really in a position to give expression to their opinions and their will in social matters?

When we consider the world around us from a social standpoint, we cannot help concluding that, although it would be easy to point to a great deal that should be different, the obstacles to change are legion, so that what we may know perfectly well and be perfectly willing to put into practice, cannot be realized! There are differences of rank and class, and the gulfs between classes. These gulfs cannot be bridged simply by having a theory of how to bridge them; they result from the fact that—as I stressed so much yesterday—the will, which is the true centre of man's nature, is involved in the way we have grown into our rank or class or any other social grouping. And again, if you look for the obstacles which, in recent times, with their complicated economic conditions, have ranged themselves alongside the prejudices, feelings and impulses of class consciousness, you will find them in economic institutions themselves. We are born into particular economic institutions and cannot escape from them. And there also exists, I would say, a third kind of obstacle to true social co-operation among men; for those who might perhaps, as leaders, be in a position to exert that profound influence of which I have been speaking, have other limitations—limitations that derive from certain dogmatic teachings and feelings about life. While many men cannot escape from economic limitations and limitations of class, many others cannot rise above their conceptual and intellectual limitations. All this is already widespread in life and results in a great deal of confusion.

If, however, we now attempt to reach a clear understanding of everything which, through these obstacles and gulfs, has affected the unconscious depths of men's souls in recent decades, we become aware that in fact the essentials of the social problem are not by any means located where they are usually looked for. They reside in the fact that there has arisen in the recent development of civilized man, alongside the technology which is so complicating life, a faith in the supreme power of the monolithic state. This faith became stronger and stronger as the nineteenth century wore on. It became so strong and so fixed that it has never been shaken even in the face of the many shattering verdicts on the organization of society that multitudes of people have reached.

With this dogmatic faith that thus takes hold of men, something else is associated. Through their faith, people seek to cling to the proposition that the object of their faith represents a kind of sovereign remedy, enabling them to decide which is the best political system, and also—I will not say to conjure up paradise, but at least to believe that they are creating the best institutions conceivable.

This attitude, however, leaves out of account something that obtrudes itself particularly on those who observe life realistically, as it has been observed here in the last few days. Anyone who, just because he is compelled to mould his ideas to the spiritual world, acquires a true sense of reality, will discover that the best institutions that can be devised for a particular period never remain valid beyond that period and that what is true of man's natural organism is also true of the social organism.

I am not going to play the boring game of analogies, but by way of illustration I should like to indicate what can be discovered about society from a study of the human organism. We can never say that the human organism—or, for that matter, the animal or plant—will display only an upward development. If organisms are to flourish and to develop their powers from within themselves, they must also be capable of ageing and of dying off. Anyone who studies the human organism in detail finds that this atrophying is going on at every moment. Forces of ascent, growth and maturation are present continuously; but so too are the forces of decomposition. And man owes a great deal to them. To overcome materialism completely, he must direct his attention to just these forces of decomposition in the human organism. He must seek, everywhere in the human organ, ism, the points at which matter is disintegrating as a result of the process of organization. And he will find that the development of man's spiritual life is closely linked to the disintegration of matter. We can only understand the human organism by perceiving, side by side with the forces of ascent, growth and maturation, the continuous process of decay.

I have given this simply by way of illustration, but it really does illustrate what the impartial observer will discover in the social organism too. It is true that the social organism does not die, and to this extent it differs from the human organism; but it changes, and forces of advancement and decline are inherent in it. You can only comprehend the social organism when you know that, even if you put into practice the wisest designs and establish, in a given area of social life, something that has been learnt from conditions as they really are, it will after a time reveal moribund forces, forces of decline, because men with their individual personalities are active in it. What is correct for a given year will have changed so greatly, twenty years later, that it will already contain the seeds of its own decline. This sort of thing, it is true, is often appreciated, in an abstract way. But in this age of intellectualism, people do not go beyond abstractions, however much they may fancy themselves as practical thinkers. People in general, we thus discover, may admit that the social organism contains forces of dissolution and decline, that it must always be in process of transformation, and that forces of decline must always operate alongside the constructive ones. Yet at the point where these people affect the social order through their intentions and volition, they do not recognize in practice what they have admitted in theory.

Thus, in the social order that existed before the Great War, you could see that, whenever capitalism formed part of an upward development, it resulted in a certain satisfaction even for the masses. When in any branch of life capitalism was expanding, wages rose. As the process advanced further and further, therefore, and capitalism was able to operate with increasing freedom, you could see that wages and opportunities for the employment of labour rose steadily. But it was less noticed that this upward movement contained at the same time other social factors, which move in a parallel direction and involve the appearance of forces of decline. Thus with rising wages, for instance, conditions of life would be such that the rising wages themselves would gradually create a situation in which the standard of life was in fact raised relatively little. Such things were, of course, noticed, but not with any lively and practical awareness of the social currents involved.

Hence today, when we stand at a milestone in history, it is the fundamentals, not the surface phenomena of social life that we must consider. And so we are led to the distinct branches that go to make up our social life.

One of these is the spiritual life of mankind. This spiritual life—though we cannot, of course, consider it in isolation from the rest of social life—has its own determinants, which are connected with human personalities. The spiritual life draws its nourishment from the human individuals active in any period, and all the rest of social life depends on this. Consider the changes that have occurred in many social spheres simply because someone or other has made some invention or discovery. But when you ask: How did this invention or discovery come about? then you have to look into the depths of men's souls. You see how they have undergone a certain development and have been led to find, in the stillness of their rooms, so to speak, something that afterwards transformed broad areas of social life. Ask yourselves what is the significance, for social life as a whole, of the fact that the differential and integral calculus was discovered by Leibniz. If from this standpoint you consider realistically the influence of spiritual life on social life, you will come to see that, because spiritual life has its own determinants, it represents a distinctive branch of social life as a whole.

If asked to define its special quality, we would say: Everything that is really to flourish in the spiritual life of mankind must spring from man's innermost productive power. And we inevitably find that the elements that develop freely in the depths of the human soul are what is most favourable for social life as a whole.

We are, however, also affected by another factor, one that has become increasingly apparent in recent decades. It is the impulse—subsequently absorbed into a faith in the omnipotence of political life—for civilized humanity, out of the depths of its being, to become more and more democratic. In other words, aspirations are present in the masses of humanity for every human being to have a voice in determining human institutions. This democratic trend may be sympathetic or unsympathetic to us—that is not a matter of primary importance. What matters is that the trend has shown itself to be a real force in the history of modern man. But in looking at this democratic trend, we are particularly struck, if our thinking is realistic, by the way in which, out of an inner pressure, out of the spiritual life of Middle Europe ideas evolved, in the noblest minds, about the political community of men.

I do not mean to suggest that today we must still attach any special value to the “closed commercial state” put forward by one of the noblest of Germans. We need pay attention less to the content of Fichte's thought than to his noble purpose. I should, however, like to emphasize the emergence in a very popular form, at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, of what we may call the search for concepts of natural law. At that time, certain eminent and high-minded men devoted themselves to the question: What is the relation of man to man? And what in general is man's innermost essence, socially speaking? They believed that, by a right understanding of man, they would also be able to find what is the law for men. They called this “the law of reason” or “natural law.” They believed that they could work out rationally which are the best legal institutions, the ones under which men can best prosper. You need only look at Rotteck's work to see how the idea of natural law still operated for many writers in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In opposition to this, however, there emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century in Europe the historical school of law. This was inspired by the conviction that you cannot determine the law among men by a process of reason.

Yet this historical school of law failed to notice what it is that really makes any excogitation of a rational law unfruitful; they failed to see that, under the influence of the age of intellectualism, a certain sterility had invaded the spiritual life of mankind. Instead, the opponents of natural law concluded that men are not competent to discover, from within their souls, anything about law, and that therefore law must be studied historically. You must look, they said, at man's historical development, and see how, from customs and instinctive relationships, systems of law have resulted.

The historical study of law? Against such a study Nietzsche's independent spirit rebelled in On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. He believed that, if we are always looking solely at what has exercised mankind historically, we cannot be productive and evolve fruitful ideas for the present; the elemental forces that live in man must revolt against the historical sense, in order that, from these forces, there may develop a constitution of social relationships.

Among leading personalities there developed in the nineteenth century, at the height of intellectualism, a battle over the real foundations of law. And this also involved a battle over the foundations of the state. At least, it was generally assumed so at the time. For the state is, ultimately, no more than the sum total of the individual institutions in which the forces of law reside. The fact that the ability to detect the foundations of law had been lost also meant, therefore, that it was no longer possible to attain clarity about the real nature of the state. That is why we find—not simply in theory, but in real life as well—that, during the nineteenth century, the essence of the state became, for countless people, including the masses, a problem that they had to solve.

Yet this applied more particularly, I would say, to the upper and more conscious reaches of civilized humanity. From underground, the democratic attitude I have described was tunnelling its way towards the surface. Its appearance, if properly understood, leads us to conceive the problem of the nature of law in a way that is much deeper and much closer to reality than is usual today. There are many people today who think it self-evident that, from within the individual, you can somehow arrive at what is actually the law in a given sphere. Modern jurists, it is true, soon lose sight of the ground when they attempt to do so; and what they find, when they philosophize in this way or indeed think they are reflecting in a practical way upon life, is that law loses its content for them and becomes an empty form. And then they say: This empty form must be given a content; the economic element must be decanted into it.

On the one hand, then, there exists a definite sense of man's powerlessness to reach a concept or feeling of law from within himself. On the other hand, we do continually attempt to derive the nature of law from man himself. And yet the democratic attitude jibs at any such attempt. What it says is that there is no such thing as a general abstract determination of law; there is only the possibility that the members of a particular community may reach an understanding and say to one another: “You want this from me, I want that from you,” and that they will then come to some agreement about their resulting relations. Here, law springs exclusively from the reality of what men desire from one another. There cannot therefore be any such thing as a law of reason; and the “historical law” that has come into being can always do so again if only we find the right foundation for it. On this foundation, men can enter into a relationship in which, through mutual understanding, they can evolve a realistic law. “I want to have my say when law is being made”—so speaks the democratic attitude. Anyone, then, who wishes to write theoretically about the nature of law cannot spin it out of himself; he just has to look at the law that appears among men, and record it. In natural science too, our view of the phenomenal world does not allow us to fashion the laws of nature out of our head; we allow things to speak to us and shape natural laws accordingly. We assume that what we try to encompass in the laws of nature is already created, but that what exists in the legal sphere has to be created among men. This is a different stage of life. In this realm, man stands in the position of creator—but as a social being, alongside other men—so that a life may come about that shall infuse the meaning of human evolution into the social order. This is precisely the democratic spirit.

The third thing that presents itself to people today and calls for social reorganization is the complicated economic pattern which has developed in recent times, and which I need not describe, since it has been accurately described by many people. We can only say: This economic pattern certainly results from factors quite different from those controlling the other two fields of the social organism—spiritual life, where all that is fruitful in the social order must spring from the individual human personality (only the creativity of the individual can make the right contribution here to the social order as a whole), and the sphere of law, where law, and with it the body politic, can only derive from an understanding between men. Both factors—the one applicable to spiritual life and the other to political and legal life—are absent from economic life.

In economic life, what may come about cannot be determined by the individual. In the nineteenth century, when intellectualism enjoyed such a vogue among men, we can see how various important people—I do not say this ironically—people in the most varied walks of life, gave their opinion about one thing and another—people who were well placed in economic life, and whose judgment one would have expected to trust. When they came to express an opinion about something outside their own speciality, something that affected legislation, you often found that what they said, about the practical effect of the gold standard for example, was significant and sensible. If you follow what went on in the various economic associations during the period when certain countries were going over to the gold standard, you will be astonished at the amount of common sense that was generated. But when you go further and examine how the things that had been prophesied then developed, you will see, for instance, that some very important person or other considered that, under the influence of the gold standard, customs barriers would disappear! The exact opposite occurred!

The fact is that, in the economic sphere, common sense, which can help one a very great deal in the spiritual sphere, is not always a safe guide. You gradually discover that, as far as economic life is concerned, the individual cannot reach valid judgments at all. Judgments here can only be arrived at collectively, through the co-operation of many people in very different walks of life. It is not just theory, but something that will have to become practical wisdom, that truly valid judgments here can arise only from the consonance of many voices.

The whole of social life thus falls into three distinct fields. In that of spiritual life, it is for the individual to speak. In the democratic sphere of law, it is for all men to speak, since what matters here is the relationship of man to man on a basis of simple humanity—where any human being can express a view. In the sphere of economic life, neither the judgment of the individual, nor that which flows from the un-sifted judgments of all men, is possible. In this sphere, the individual contributes, to the whole, expert knowledge and experience in his own particular field; and then, from associations, a collective judgment can emerge in the proper manner. It can do so only if the legitimate judgments of individuals can rub shoulders with one another. For this, however, the associations must be so constituted as to contain views that can rub shoulders and then produce a collective judgment.—The whole of social life, therefore, falls into these three regions. This is not deduced from some Utopian notion, but from a realistic observation of life.

At the same time, however—and this must be emphasized over and over again—the social organism, whether small or large, contains within itself, together with constructive forces, also the forces of decline. Thus everything that we feed into social life also contains its own destructive forces. A constant curative process is needed in the social organism.

When we look at spiritual life from this standpoint, we can even say, on the lines of the observations put forward here in the last few days: in Oriental society, the life of the spirit was universally predominant. All individual phenomena—even those in political and in economic life—derived from the impulses of spiritual life, in the way I have been describing. If now you consider the functioning of society, you find that for a given period—every period is different—there flow forth from the life of the spirit impulses that inform the social structures; economic associations come into being on the basis of ideas from spiritual life, and the state founds institutions out of spiritual life. But you can also see that spiritual life has a constant tendency to develop forces of decline, or forces from which such forces of decline can arise. If we could see spiritual life in its all-powerful ramifications, we should perceive how it constantly impels men to separate into ranks and classes. And if you study the reasons for the powerful hold of the caste system in the Orient, you will find that it is regarded as a necessary concomitant of the fact that society sprang from spiritual impulses. Thus we see that Plato still stresses how, in the ideal state, humanity must be divided into the producer class, the scholar class and the warrior class—must be divided, that is, into classes. If you analyse the reasons for this, you will find that differences of rank and class follow from the gradation which is implicit in the supreme power of spiritual life. Within the classes, there then appears once more the sense of human personality, which experiences them as prejudicial to the social system. There thus always exist, within spiritual life, opportunities for the appearance of gulfs between classes, ranks, even castes.

We now turn to the field of politics, and it is here especially that we must look for what I have been calling the subjection of labour, in the course of man's development, to the unitary social organism. It is precisely because theocracy, coming from Asia, developed into a political system that is now dominated by concepts of law, that the problem of labour arises. In so far as each individual was to attain his rights, there developed a demand for labour to be properly integrated into society. Yet as law cast off its links with religion and moved further and further towards democracy, there insinuated itself more and more into men's lives a certain formalized element of social thinking.

Law developed in fact from what one individual has to say to another. It cannot be spun out of a man's own reasoning faculty. Yet from the mutual intercourse of men's reasoning faculties—if I may so put it—a true life of law arises. Law is inclined, therefore, towards logic and formalized thought. But humanity, on its way down the ages, goes through phases of one-sided development. It went through the one-sided phase we call theocracy, and similarly, later on, it goes through the one we call the state. When it does so, the logical element of social life is cultivated—the element of excogitation. Just think how much human ratiocination has been expended on law in the course of history!

In consequence of this, however, mankind also proceeds towards the capacity for abstraction. You can sense how human thinking, under the influence of the principle of law, becomes increasingly abstract. What mankind acquires in one sphere, however, is extended at certain periods to the whole of human life. In this way, I would say, even religion was, as I have indicated earlier, absorbed into the juridical current. The God of the Orient, universal legislator and giver of Grace to men, became a God of judgment. Universal law in the cosmos became universal justice. We see this especially in the Middle Ages. As a result, however, there was imported into men's habits of thought and feeling a kind of abstraction. People tried increasingly to run their lives by means of abstractions.

In this way, abstraction came to extend to religion and spiritual life, on the one hand, and economic life, on the other. Men began to trust more and more in the omnipotence of the state, with its abstract administrative and constitutional activity. Increasingly, men regarded it as progressive for spiritual life, in the shape of education, to be absorbed completely into the sphere of the state. Here, however, it could not avoid being caught up in abstract relationships, such as are associated with the law. Economic activity, too, was absorbed into something that was felt to be appropriate when the state is in control. And at the time when the modern concept of the economy was formed, it was the general opinion that the state should be the power above all which determined the proper organization of economic activity. In this way, however, we subject the other branches of life to the rule of abstraction. This statement itself may sound abstract, but in fact it is realistic. Let me demonstrate this with regard to education.

In our age, where common sense is so commonplace, men can come together in a committee, in order to work out the best pedagogic procedures. When they meet together in this way and work out how education should be organized and just what should be covered by this class or the other in the timetable, they will—and I say this without irony—work out first-rate things. I am convinced that, so long as they are fairly sensible—and most people are nowadays—they will draw up ideal programmes. We live—or did live at least, for some attempt is being made to escape—in the age of planning. There is certainly no shortage of programmes, of guiding principles in any given area of life! Society after society is founded and draws up its programme: a thing is to be done in this way or that. I have no objection to these programmes, and indeed I am convinced that no one who criticizes them could draw up better ones. But that is not the point. What we work out, we can impose on reality; only reality will not then be suitable for men to live in. And that is what really matters.

And so we have reached a kind of dead end in the matter of programmes. We have seen recently how, with the best and noblest of intentions for the development of mankind, a man drew up one of these programmes for the entire civilized world, in fourteen admirable points. It was shattered immediately it came into contact with reality. From the fate of Wilson's fourteen abstract points—which were the product of shrewd intellects, but were not in accordance with reality, not quarried from life itself—an enormous amount can be learnt.

In education and teaching, it is not programmes that matter, for they after all are only a product of politics and law. You can, with the best of intentions, issue a directive that this or that must be done; in reality, however, we are dealing with a staff composed of teachers with a particular set of capacities. You have to take these capacities into account in a vital way. You cannot realize a programme. Only what springs from the individual personalities of the teachers can be realized. You must have a feeling for these personalities. You will need to decide afresh, each day, out of the immediate life of the individual, what is to happen. You will not be able to set up a comprehensive programme: this remains an abstraction. Only out of life itself can something be created. Let us imagine an extreme case: In some subject or other, there are available only teachers of mediocre ability. If, at a time when they were free of teaching and had nothing to do but think, these teachers were to work out pedagogic aims and issue regulations, even they would no doubt come up with something extremely sensible. But the actual business of teaching is another thing altogether; all that matters there is their capabilities as whole men. It is one thing to reckon with what derives solely from the intellect, and quite another to reckon with life itself. For the intellect has the property of overreaching; fundamentally, it is always seeking to encompass the boundless nature of the world. In real life, it should remain a tool in a specific concrete activity.

Now if we reflect particularly on the fact that what takes place between human beings, when they confront each other as equals, can turn into law—then we must say: The things humanity develops are all right when they are the outcome of contemporary abstraction; for that is how men do feel. Men establish legal relations with one another, based on certain abstract concepts of man, and they arrive at these legal relations through the circumstance that they stand together on democratic ground. Yet it will never be possible in this way to create for the whole of humanity something that springs directly from the life of the individual; but only what is common to the whole of humanity. In other words: to be quite honest, there cannot well up, from a democratic foundation, what ought to spring from the individuality of man within spiritual life.

We must, of course, realize that a belief in the predominance of law and politics was a historical phenomenon, and that it was historically legitimate for modern states, at the time when they came into being, to take over responsibility for the schools, since they had to take them away from other authorities who were no longer administering them properly. You should not try to correct history retrospectively. Yet we must also perceive clearly that in recent years there has developed a movement to shape the life of the spirit once again as something independent, so that it contains within itself its own social structure and its own administration; and also that what takes place in individual classes can stem from the vital life of the teacher and not from adherence to some regulation or other. Despite the fact that it has been regarded as a step forward to hand over spiritual life, and with it schools, to the state, we must make up our minds to reverse this trend. Only then will it be possible for the free human personality to achieve expression within spiritual life, including the sphere of education. Nor need anyone be afraid that authority would suffer in consequence! Where a productive influence is exercised by the human personality, the individuals concerned yearn for a natural authority. We can see this at work in the Waldorf School. Everyone there is pleased when one person or the other can be his authority, because he needs what the individual talents of that person have to offer.

It then remains possible for politics and law to function on a democratic basis.

Here again, however, the fact is that, simply through its tendency to abstractness, the state contains within itself the germ of what are later to become forces of decline. Anyone who studies how, by virtue of the existence of this tendency, what men do in the political and legal sphere cannot help becoming increasingly cut off from any concrete interest in a particular aspect of life, will also realize that it is precisely political life which provides the basis for the abstractness that has become increasingly apparent in connection with the circulation of capital. The formation of capital nowadays is much criticized by the masses. But the campaign against it, as conducted at present, reveals an ignorance of the true situation. Anyone who wanted to abolish capital or capitalism would have to abolish modern economic and social life as a whole, because this social life cannot survive without the division of labour, and this in turn implies the formation of capital. In recent times, this has been demonstrated particularly by the fact that a large part of capital is represented by the means of production. The essential point, however, is that in the first place capitalism is a necessary feature of modern life, while on the other hand, precisely when it becomes nationalized, it leads to the divorce of money from specific concrete activities. In the nineteenth century, this was carried so far that now what actually circulates in social life is as completely divorced from specific concrete activities, as the bloodless ideas of a thinker who lives only in abstractions are divorced from real life. The economic element that is thus divorced from specific activities is money. When I have a certain sum in my pocket, this sum can represent any given object in the economy or even in spiritual life. This element stands in the same relation to specific concrete activities as a wholly general concept does to specific experiences. That is why crises must inevitably arise within the social order.

These crises have been extensively studied. A theory of crises is prominent in Marxism, for example. The mistake lies in attributing the crises to a single chain of causes, whereas in fact they are due to two underlying trends. There may be too much capital, in which case the excess that is circulating gives rise to crises. It may also happen, however, that too little capital is available, and this also leads to crises. These are two different types of crisis. Such things are not examined objectively, even by political economists today. The fact is that, in the real world, a single phenomenon may have very varied causes.

We can see, therefore, that, just as spiritual life tends to develop forces of decline arising from differences of class, rank and caste, so too the life that is moving towards abstractions—and rightly so—includes a tendency, on the one hand to develop the constructive forces that are part of a legitimate formation of capital, but on the other hand to give rise to crises because capitalism results in abstract economic activity, in which a capital sum can be used indifferently for one purpose or another.

When people realize this, they become social reformers and work out something that is designed to produce a cure. But now you come up against the fact that, although the individual does shape economic life by contributing his experiences through the appropriate associations, he cannot as a single individual determine the shape of economic life. That is why, when we go beyond the political and legal and the spiritual spheres, I have posited the association as a necessity of economic life.

In this connection, I was struck by the fact that, when I was speaking in Germany to a fairly small group of working-men about associations, they said to me: We have heard of very many things, but we don't really know what associations are; we haven't really heard anything about them. An association is not an organization and not a combination. It comes into being through the conflux of the individuals within the economy. The individual does not have to adopt something handed out from a central body, but is able to contribute the knowledge and ability he has in his own field. From a collaboration in which each gives of his best, and where what is done springs from the agreement of many—only from such associations does economic life in general derive.

Associations of this kind will come into being. They are certain to arise, I have no doubt of that. To anyone who tells me this is Utopian, my reply is: I know that these associations spring only from subconscious forces in man. We can, however, foster them by the reason and make them arise more quickly, or we can wait until they arise from necessity. They will link together those engaged in production and commerce, and the consumers. Only production, distribution and consumption will have any part in them. Labour will come more and more under the aegis of law. On the question of labour, men must reach an understanding in a democratic manner. In consequence, labour will be insulated from the only force which can be effective in economic life—that which is the resultant of a collective judgment in associations linking producers and consumers, together with distributors.

In the sphere of economic life, therefore—in the associations—goods alone will have a part to play. This will, in turn, have an important consequence: we shall cease entirely to have any fixed notions of the price and value of an article. Instead, we shall say: the price and value of an article is something that changes with the surrounding circumstances. Price and value will be set by the collective judgment of the associations. I cannot go into this at length here; but you can follow it up in my book The Threefold Commonwealth.

I have been trying to outline how, from our observation, we become aware that social life falls into three regions, shaped by quite distinct and different factors: spiritual life, legal and political life, and economic life. Within the recent development of civilization, these three have been achieving some degree of independence. To understand this independence, and gradually to allocate to each field what belongs to it, so that they may collaborate in an appropriate manner, is the important task today.

Men have reflected in very different ways on this tripartite articulation of the social organism. And, as my Threefold Commonwealth began to attract attention here and there, people pointed out various things in it that were already foreshadowed by earlier writers. Now I do not wish to raise the question of priority at all. What matters is not whether it was a particular individual who discovered something, but how it can become established in life. If a lot of people were to hit on it, one would be only too pleased. One point must be noted, however: when Montesquieu in France outlines a sort of tripartite division of the social organism, it is merely a division. He points out that the three sections have quite different determinants, and that we must therefore keep them separate. This is not the tenor of my book. I do not try to distinguish spiritual life, legal life and economic life, in the way that you would distinguish in man the nervous system, the respiratory system and the metabolic system, if at the same time you wanted to insist that they are three systems, each separate from the other. In itself, such a division leads nowhere; you can advance only by seeing how these three different systems function together, and how they best combine into a single whole by each operating on its own terms. The same is true of the social organism. When we know how to establish spiritual life, political and legal life, and economic life on the terms that are native to each, and how to let them run off their native sources of power, then the unity of the social organism will also follow. And then you will find that certain forces of decline are released within each of these fields, but that they are countered through collaboration with other fields. This suggests, not a tripartite division of the social organism, as in Montesquieu, but a threefold articulation of it, which yet comes together in the unity of the social organism as a whole, by virtue of the fact that, after all, every individual belongs to all three regions. The human personality—and that is what is all-important—inhabits this triform social organism in such a way as to unite the three parts.

Especially in the light of what I have been saying, then, we find that what we must aim at is not a division but an articulation of the social organism, in order that a satisfying unity may be attained. And in a more superficial way, you can also see that, for over a century, mankind in Europe has tended to seek such an articulation. It will come about, even if men do not consciously desire it; unconsciously, they will so conduct themselves, in the economic, spiritual, and political and legal spheres, that it will come about. It is demanded by the actual evolution of humanity.

And we can also point to the fact that the impulses which correspond to these three different aspects of life entered European civilization at a particular moment in the shape of three quintessential ideals, three maxims for social life. At the end of the eighteenth century in Western Europe, a demand spread abroad for liberty, equality and fraternity. Is there anyone who bears with the development that has taken place in modern times, who would deny that these maxims contain three quintessential human ideals? Yet on the other hand it must be admitted that there were many people in the nineteenth century who argued ingeniously against the view that a unified social organism or state can exist if it has to realize these three ideals all together. Several persuasive books were written to demonstrate that liberty, equality and fraternity cannot be completely and simultaneously combined within the state. And one must admit that these ingenious arguments do evoke a certain scepticism. In consequence, people once again found themselves face to face with a contradiction imposed by life itself.

Yet it is not the nature of life to avoid contradictions; life is contradictory at every point. It involves the repeated reconciliation of the contradictions that are thrown up. It is in the propagation and reconciliation of contradictions that life consists. It is, therefore, absolutely right that the three great ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity should have been put forward. Because it was believed in the nineteenth century, however, and right down to our own times, that everything must be centrally organized, people went off the rails. They failed to perceive that it is of no importance to argue about the way in which the means of production be employed, capitalism developed, etc. What matters is to enable men to arrange their social system to accord with the innermost impulses of their being. And in this connection we must say: We need to comprehend, in a vital way, how liberty should function in spiritual life, as the free and productive development of the personality; how equality should function in the political and legal sphere, where all, jointly and in a democratic manner, must evolve what is due to each individual; and how fraternity should function in the associations, as we have called them. Only by viewing life in this way do we see it in its true perspective.

When we do so, however, we perceive that the theoretical belief that it is possible to accommodate all three ideals uniformly in the monolithic state has led to a contradiction within life. The three ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity can be understood in a vital way only when we realize that liberty has to prevail in spiritual life, equality in the political and legal sphere, and fraternity in the economic sphere. And this not in a sentimental manner, but in a way that leads to social systems within which men can experience their human dignity and their human worth. If we understand that the unified organism can come into being only when out of liberty spirit develops in a productive way, when equality functions in the political and legal sphere and fraternity in the economic one, in the associations, then we shall rise above the worst social dilemmas of the present.

For man gains a spiritual life that is rooted in truth only out of what can freely spring from him as an individual; and this truth can only make its appearance if it flows directly from men's hearts. The democratic tendency will not rest easy until it has established equality in the political and legal sphere. This can be achieved by rational processes; if not, we expose ourselves to revolutions. And in the economic field, fraternity must exist in the associations.

When this happens, the law—which is founded on a human relationship in which like meets like—will be a vital law. Any other kind of law turns into convention. True law must spring from the meeting of men, otherwise it becomes convention.

And true fraternity can found a way of life only if this derives from economic conditions themselves, through the medium of the associations; otherwise, the collaboration of men within groups will establish not a way of life, but a routine existence, such as is almost invariably the case at the present time.

Only when we have learnt to perceive the chaotic nature of social conditions that spring from the predominance of catchwords instead of truth in the spiritual sphere, convention instead of law in the political and legal sphere, and routine instead of a way of life in the economic sphere, shall we be seeing the problem clearly. And we shall then be following the only path that affords a correct approach to the social problem.

People will be rather shocked, perhaps, to find that I am not going to approach the social problem in the way many people think it ought to be approached. What I am saying now, however, is based solely on what can be learnt from reality itself with the aid of spiritual science, which is everywhere orientated towards reality. And it turns out that the fundamental questions of social life today are these:

How can we, by a correct articulation of the social organism, move from the all too prevalent catch-word (which is thrown up by the human personality when its creative spirit is subordinated to another) to truth, from convention to law, and from a routine existence to a real way of life?

Only when we realize that a threefold social organism is necessary for the creation of liberty, equality and fraternity, shall we understand the social problem aright. We shall then be able to link up the present time properly with the eighteenth century. And Middle Europe will then be able, out of its spiritual life, to reply, to the Western European demand for liberty, equality, fraternity: Liberty in spiritual life, equality in political and legal life, and fraternity in economic life.

This will mean much for the solution of the social problem, and we shall be able to form some idea of how the three spheres in the social organism can collaborate, through liberty, equality and fraternity, in our recovery from the chaotic situation—spiritual, legal, and economic—which we are in today.

The End.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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