The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear friends,

Today I would like to bring before you a few important considerations connected with the matters that we have now for a long time regarded as our task. When we reflect on the way in which spiritual science, as here intended, is able to consider and to give answers to the questions of life, we must above all take careful heed to the fact that this spiritual science, and indeed for that matter the whole present and the future time, makes new and different demands on man's powers of comprehension and of thought. He has to think in a different way from what he is accustomed to, in accordance with the habits of thoughts of the immediate past and of the present—especially the habits of thought arising from science and its popularization. You are well aware that all that spiritual science has to say concerning any sphere of life and hence too what it has to say on the social question, indeed especially what it has to say on the social question, is the expression of the results of research—results that have not been obtained on any merely rationalistic or abstract path, but that have been sought and found in the realm of spiritual reality. They can be understood, as we know, with the help of a sound and healthy human intelligence—they can, however, only be discovered when one rises above the ordinary consciousness, such as is comprised within rational thinking, abstract thinking, natural scientific research and so forth—rises above this ordinary consciousness to the Imaginative, Inspired, and Intuitive consciousness. What comes to light on the path of Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition—this it is, formulated in concepts and ideas that are capable of expression, that fills the content of the science which Anthroposophical research has to give.

We have to accustom ourselves—and this is what makes it so hard for many of our contemporaries to tread the necessary path from the usual thinking of today to the Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy—we have to accustom ourselves to quite a new and different conception of wherein the finding of truth consists. Today men ask so lightly: can this or that be proven? The question is justified of course. But, my dear friends, we have also to look at the question from the standpoint of reality. If we mean: can what the spiritual researcher brings forward be proved in accordance with the conceptions and ideas that we have already acquired, in accordance with the customary ideas which we have imbibed through our education, through our everyday life?—If we mean this, we are making a great mistake; for the results of spiritual research are drawn from reality.

Let me make clear to you by a quite trivial, simple comparison, how the ordinary thinking that runs on purely abstract lines may fall into error. One thought is supposed to follow from another. The error is that if people see: As a thought it does not follow—they concluded that it must be false, while all the time from the point of view of reality it still may be perfectly true. The consequences in reality are not always the same as the consequences in mere thought; the Logic of Reality is a different thing from the Logic of Thought.

In our time, the metaphysical legalistic way of thinking has taken such hold upon men that they are wont to think that everything must be comprehended with the Logic of Thought. But that is not the case. Listen to this, for example. Take a cube measuring—let us say—30 centimeters each way. Now if someone were to say to you: “This cube, measuring 30 centimeters each way, is raised up a meter and a half above the floor”—if you were not yourself in the room where the cube is, you would be able with your pure thought-logic to say one thing: you would be able to conclude from what was said to you: The cube must be standing on something. There must be a table there of the corresponding height, for the cube can certainly not hover in the air. This, then, you can conclude even when you are not present there, even when you have no experience of it.

But now let us suppose: A ball is lying on the cube; something is lying upon it. That you cannot conclude by thinking, that you must see. You must behold it. And yet the ball, too, corresponds to reality. The reality is thus filled with things and entities that have of course a logic in themselves, a logic, however, that does not coincide with the pure thought-logic; the logic of sight is a different thinking from the logic of mere thought.

This necessitates, however, my dear friends, that we should at length learn that we cannot only call proof the so-called logical sequences to which modern thinking has grown accustomed. Unless we learn this, we shall never arrive at a true understanding of things. In the domain in which I have been speaking to you now for some weeks—in the domain of social life, of the structure of human society, many new demands result simply from the fundamental premises that I have set before you concerning the three-fold division of society which will be necessary for the future. One such result is, for example, a quite definite system of taxation. But this system of taxation, once more, can only be found by calling to our help the logic of things seen. The mere logic of thought is insufficient. It is this that makes it necessary that men should listen to those who know something of these things, for when the thing has once been said, then the healthy human intelligence, my dear friends, will always suffice; it can always corroborate and “control” what the spiritual researcher says. The healthy human understanding, however, is something very different from the logic of thought, which is developed especially through the way of thinking that is prevalent today, soaked and steeped as it is in the natural-scientific point of view. From all this you will understand that spiritual science is not intended merely to make us receive a certain collection of ideas and then think that we can handle these ideas much as we would handle information we acquire through natural science or the like. That is absolutely impossible and is not to be imagined for a moment. If we think that we are making a great mistake. Spiritual Science makes a man think in an altogether new way. It makes him comprehend the world in an altogether different way than he has done before, it makes him learn not merely to perceive other things than before, but to perceive in a new way. When you enter into spiritual science you must always bear this in mind, you must be able to ask yourself again and again: Am I learning to look at the world in a new way through my receiving of Spiritual Science—not clairvoyance but Spiritual Science—am I learning to look at the world in another way from what I have done hitherto? For indeed, my dear friends, one who regards Spiritual Science as a collection of facts, a compendium of knowledge, may well know a great deal, but if he still only thinks in the same way as he thought before, then he has not received Spiritual Science. He has only taken up Spiritual Science if the manner, the form, the structure of his thinking has changed, if in a certain respect he has become another man than he was before. And this can only come about through the might and the power of the ideas which we receive through Spiritual Science.

Now if we are to think about the social question, it is absolutely essential that this change, which can only come about through Spiritual Science, should enter our thinking, for only in this light can that be understood to which I directed your attention yesterday. Yesterday I spoke to you of the economists of the schools, the present-day exponents of the theories of economists. I pointed out to you how utterly helpless they are in the face of realities. Why are they so helpless? Because they are bent on understanding with the Natural-Scientific type of thinking something that cannot thus be understood. We shall have to make up our minds to conceive the social life, not with the kind of thinking that is brought up on Natural Science but in an altogether different way. Only then shall we be able to find fruitful social ideas—fruitful in life, capable of realization.

I have already once drawn your attention to a thing that may well have astonished one or another among you; yet it needs to be deeply thought over. I said: The logical conclusion which one will tend to draw from such and such ideas, maybe from a whole “world-conception” are by no means always identical with that which follows from such a world-conception in real life. I mean the following: A man may hold a certain number of ideas or even an entire world-conception. You may envisage this world-conception clearly according to the ideas it contains and you may then perhaps draw further conclusions from it—conclusions which you will quite rightly presume to be logical, you may imagine that such conclusions, which you can logically draw from a world-conception, must necessarily follow from it. But that is by no means the case. Life itself may draw altogether different conclusions. And you may be highly astonished to see how life draws its different conclusions. What do I mean by this? Let us assume a world-conception which appears to you highly idealistic, and—we may assume—rightly so. It contains wonderfully idealistic ideas. You yourself will probably admit only the logical conclusions of your world-conception but if you sink this into another mind, if you take into account the reality of life even where it leads you across the chasms that separate one human being from another—the following may happen: and only Spiritual Science can explain the necessity of such a sequence. You instruct your son or daughter or your pupil in your idealistic world-conception, and they afterwards become thorough scamps and rascals. It may well happen in the reality of life that rascality will follow as the consequence from your idealistic philosophy!

That of course is an extreme case, though one that might well happen in real life. I only wish to bring it home to you that other conclusions are drawn in real life than in mere thought. Hence it is that the men of today are so far removed from reality, because they do not see through such things as these; they are not really willing to bring to consciousness what was formerly done instinctively. The instincts of past ages felt clearly enough that this or that would arise from one thing or another in real life. They were by no means inclined only to presume the consequences that follow by the logical thought. The instincts themselves worked with a logic of their own. But today men have come into a kind of uncertainty, and this uncertainty will naturally grow ever greater in the age of the evolution of the Spiritual Soul unless we make the counterbalance, which is: consciously to receive into ourselves the Logic of Reality. And we do receive it the moment we earnestly consider in its own essence and process the Spiritual that lives and moves behind the realities of sense.

I will tell you a practical case to illustrate what I have just explained in a more theoretic way. It will serve at the same time to illustrate another thing, namely how far we can go wrong, if we merely look at the external symptoms. In my lecture this week, I spoke of the symptomatic method in the study of history. Altogether, the symptomatic method is a thing that we must make our own, if we would pass from the outer phenomena to the underlying Reality.

A Russian author and philosopher of the name of Berdiayeff recently wrote an interesting article on the philosophical evolution in the Russian people in the second half of the nineteenth century and until the present day. There are two remarkable things in this essay of Berdiayeff's. One is that the author takes his start from a peculiar prejudice, proving that he has no insight into those truths, with which you must by now be thoroughly familiar—I mean the truth that in the Russian East, preparing for the Sixth Post-Atlantean Age (the age of the evolution of the Spiritual Life), altogether new elements are on the point of emerging, though today they are only there in embryo. Berdiayeff being ignorant of this fact, his judgment on one point is quite incorrect. He says to himself (and as a Russian philosopher he must surely know the facts), he says: It is strange that in Russia as against the Western European civilizations we have no real sense (especially in philosophy) for what in the West they call the Truth. Russians have been much interested in the philosophy of the West, yet they have no real feeling for it inasmuch as it strives towards “The Truth.” They only take up the truths of philosophy inasmuch as they are serviceable for life, inasmuch as they are directly useful to some conception of life. The Socialist, e.g., is interested in philosophy because he imagines that this or that philosophy will provide him with a justification for his socialism. Similarly the orthodox Believer will interest himself in some philosophy, not, like a Western man because it is the Truth, but because it gives him a justification or a basis for his Orthodox Belief. And so on. Berdiayeff regards this as a great failing in the Folk-Soul of modern Russia. He says: In the West they are far in advance of us. They do not imagine that Truth must follow life; they really believe that Truth is Truth; the Truth is there, and life must take its direction from it. And Berdiayeff actually adds the extraordinary statement (albeit not extraordinary for the men of the present day, who will take it quite as a matter of course, but extraordinary for the Spiritual Scientists) he adds the statement: The Russian socialist has no right to use the expression “bourgeois science,” for bourgeois science contains the truth; it has at last established the concept of Truth, and that is a thing that cannot be refitted. It is therefore a failing on the part of the Russian Folk-Soul to believe that this Truth too can be transcended!

Berdiayeff shares this curious opinion, not only with the whole world of professors, but with all their faithful followers, to wit, the whole bourgeois of Western and Middle Europe, the aristocracy especially so, and the rest. Berdiayeff simply does not know what is now germinating in the Russian Folk Soul, which comes to expression for this very reason in a frequently tumultuous and distorted form. He does not know that in this conception of Truth from the standpoint of life, crooked as it may be today, there lies a real seed for the conception of the future. In the future it will right itself, of that we may be sure. When once what is preparing today as a germinating seed will have unfolded, I mean the directing of all human evolution towards the spiritual life, then indeed will that which men call the “Truth” today have an altogether different form. Today I have drawn your attention to some peculiar facts in this respect. This Truth, my dear friends, will among other things bring to man's consciousness what the men of today cannot realize, that the logic of facts, the logic of reality, the logic of things seen is a very different thing from the mere logic of concepts. And this transformed conception of the Truth will have some other interesting qualities. That is the one thing which you see emerging in Berdiayeff's essay. It is remarkable enough, for it shows how little such a learned author lives in the real trend and meaning of the evolution of our time, which he might well perceive in his own nation above all, but cannot recognize, laboring as he does under this prejudice.

The other thing must be considered in quite a different direction. Berdiayeff, as the whole spirit of his essay shows, witnesses the rise of Bolshevism with great discomfort. Well, in that respect, the one man or the other, according as he is a Bolshevist or the reverse, will say that Berdiayeff is right or wrong. I do not propose to dilate just now upon this question. I will describe the facts, I will not criticize. But this is the important thing: In the sixties, so says Berdiayeff, there was already the tendency to regard Truth and Philosophy as dependent on life, and at that time materialism found entry into Russia. Men believed in Materialism, because they found it useful and profitable for life. Then, in the seventies, Positivism, such as is held by Auguste Comte for example, came into vogue. And after that, other points of view, for example that of Nietzsche, found entry into Russia among the people known as the Intelligentsia. And now Berdiayeff asks the question: What kind of philosophy do we find among the Intelligentsia of the Bolsheviks? For, indeed, a certain philosophy is prevalent among them. But how this particular philosophy can go with Bolshevism, that Berdiayeff is quite at a loss to explain. He simply cannot understand how Bolshevism can regard as its own philosophy—curiously enough—the doctrine of Avenarius and Mach.

And, truth to tell, my dear friends, if you had told Avenarius and Mach that their philosophy was to be accepted by such people as the Bolsheviks, they themselves would have been still more astonished and angry than Berdiayeff. They would have been most indignant (both of them, as you know, are now dead) if they had lived to see themselves as the official philosophers of Bolshevism. Imagine Avenarius, the worthy bourgeois, who of course had always assumed that he could only be understood by people who—well, who wore at any rate decent clothes, people who would never do violence to anyone in the Bolshevist manner, in short, good “respectable” people, in the sense in which one used the expression in the sixties, seventies and eighties. And it is true, if we consider only the content of the philosophy of Avenarius, we are still more at a loss to understand how it happened. For what does Avenarius think? Avenarius says: Men labor under a prejudice. They think: within, in my head, or in my soul or wherever it is, are the ideas, the perceptions, they are there subjectively; outside are the objects. But, says Avenarius, this is not correct. If I were all alone in the world, I should never arrive at the distinction between subject and object. I am led to make the distinction only through the fact that other people are there too. I alone beheld a table, I should never come to the idea that the table is out there in space and a picture of it here in my brain. I would simply have the table, and would not distinguish between subject and object. I only distinguish between them because, when I look at the table with another man, I say to myself: He sees the table, and I too perceive it. The perception is in my head too. I reflect that what he senses I am also sensing. Such are partly theoretical considerations (I will not go into them more fully, you would say: All these things do not interest us) within which Avenarius' thought lives and moves. In 1876 he wrote his book Conception of the World According to the Principle of Least Action. For on such premises as I have here explained to you, he shows how the concepts we have as human beings have no real value, but that we only create them for the sake of mental economy. According to Avenarius, the concept “Lion,” for example, or the concept that finds expression in a “Natural Law” is nothing real, nor does it refer to anything real. It is only uneconomical if in the course of my life I have seen five or six or even thirty lions and am now to conceive them each and severally. I therefore proceed in a more economical way, and make myself a single concept “Lion,” embracing all the thirty. Thus all our forming of concepts is a mere matter of subjective mental economy.

Mach holds a similar view. It was Mach of whom I told you how he once got into an omnibus where there was a mirror. As he got in, he saw a man coming in from the other side. Now the appearance of this man was highly antipathetic to him, and he said to himself: “What a weedy-looking schoolmaster.”—only then did he perceive that there was a mirror hanging there and that he had simply seen himself. Mach tells the story to indicate how little one knows oneself, even in one's external human form how little self-knowledge man has. He even tells of another occasion when he passed a shop window which acted as a mirror and thus again met himself and was quite annoyed to come across such an ugly-looking pedant.

Mach proceeded in a rather more popular fashion, but his idea is the same as that of Avenarius. He says: there are not subjective ideas on the one hand, and objective things on the other. All that exists in reality is the content of our sensations. I, to myself, am only a content of sensation, the table outside me is a content of sensation, my brain is a content of sensation. Everything is a content of sensation, and the concepts men make for themselves only exist for the purpose of economy. It was about the year 1881; I was present at a meeting of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna where Mach gave his lecture on the Economy of Thought, entitled: “Thought as a Principle of the Least Action.” I must say, it made quite a terrible impression upon me, who was then a mere boy, at the very beginning of the twenties. It made a terrible impression on me when I saw that there were men so radical in their ideas, without an inkling of the fact that on the paths of thought there enters into the human soul the first beginning of a manifestation of the super-sensible, the spiritual. Here was a man who denied the reality of concepts to such an extent as to see in them the mere results of a mental activity bent upon economy.

But in Mach and Avenarius—you will not misunderstand my words—all this takes place entirely within the limit of thoroughly “respectable” thinking. We should naturally assume that these two men and all their followers are worthy folk of sound middle-class opinion, utterly removed from any even moderately radical, let alone revolutionary ideas, in practice. And now all of a sudden they have become the official Philosophers of the Bolsheviks! No one could have dreamt of such a thing. Perhaps you may read Avenarius' booklet on the “Principle of Least Action.” It may interest you, it is quite well written. But if you were to tackle his “Philosophy of Experience,” I fancy you would not get very far, you would find it appallingly dull. Written as it is in an absolutely professorial style, there is not the slightest possibility of your drawing even the least vestige of Bolshevism as a conclusion from it. You would not even derive from it a practical world-conception of the most gentle radicalism.

I am well aware, my dear friends, of the objection which those who take symptoms for realities might now bring forward against me. An easy-going, hard-and-fast Positivist, for instance, would say: The explanation is as simple as can be! The Bolshevists took their Intellectuals from Zurich. Avenarius was a professor in Zurich, and those who are now working as intellectual leaders among the Bolsheviks were his pupils. Moreover there was a University lecturer there, a pupil of Mach's Adler, the man who afterwards shot the Austrian statesman Count Stügh. Many followers of Lenin, perhaps even Lenin himself, were well-acquainted with Adler. They absorbed these ideas and carried them to Russia. It is therefore a pure coincidence.

Needless to say I am well aware that a cock-sure hard-and-fast Positivist can explain the whole thing in this way. But did I not tell you the other day how the whole poetic character of Robert Hamerling can be shown to have arisen from the unreliability of the worthy Rector Kaltenbrunner, who forgot to forward Hamerling's application for a post in Budapest, as a result of which someone else got the post instead. If only Kaltenbrunner had not been so slack, Hamerling would certainly have gone as a schoolmaster to Budapest in the 1860's instead of to Trieste. Now if you consider all that Hamerling became through spending ten years of his life on the shores of the Adriatic at Trieste, you will see that his whole poetic life was a result. This was the external fact. The worthy Rector Kaltenbrunner, headmaster of the Grammar School at Graz, forgot to forward his application and was therefore the occasion of Hamerling's going to Trieste. You see, these things must not be taken as realities but as symptomatic of inner things which come to expression through them.

Thus what Berdiayeff conceives in this way—that the Bolsheviks chose as their idols the worthy middle-class philosophers Avenarius and Mach—does indeed take us back to what I said at the beginning of the present lecture: The reality of life, the reality of things seen is very different from the merely logical reality. Of course you cannot deduce from Avenarius and Mach that they could have become the official philosophers of the Bolsheviks. But, my dear friends, even what you can deduce by logic is only of importance as an external symptom. In effect, we only get at Reality by a research which goes straight for it. And in the Reality the Spiritual Beings work.

I might tell you many things which would indeed enable you to perceive it as a necessity, in reality of life, that such philosophies as that of Avenarius and Mach lead to the conclusion of the most revolutionary socialism of our time. For behind the scenes of existence it is the very same spirits who instill into men's consciousness philosophies after the style of Avenarius or Mach, and who instill once more into men's consciousness that which leads on to Bolshevism for example. Only in Logic you cannot derive the one thing from the other. But the Reality of Life performs this derivation. I beg you inscribe this deep into your hearts, for here too you will have something of what I am constantly emphasizing. It is needful to us to find the transition from the mere tangle of logical ideas, within which the people of today in their illusions imagine the realities of life to be imbued, to the true reality. If we look at the symptoms, and know how to value them, the thing does indeed become far more earnest. Here I will draw your attention to something to which another who is not a Spiritual Scientist will not pay so much attention; for he will take it more as a phrase, as something more or less indifferent. Mach, you see, who is a Positivist, and a radical one at that, comes to the idea that all things are really sensations. This doctrine, which young Adler also expounded in his lectures at Zurich, whereby he will undoubtedly have gained many adherents for himself, and for Mach and for Avenarius—this doctrine declares that everything is sensation, and that we are quite unjustified in distinguishing the physical from the psychical. The table outside us is physical and psychical in precisely the same sense as my ideas are physical and psychical: and we only have concepts for the sake of mental economy.

Now the peculiar thing in Mach was that instinctively, every now and then, he withdrew from his own world-conception—from his radical, positivist world-conception. He withdrew a little, saying to himself: These then are the results of truly modern thought. It is meaningless to say that anything exists beyond my sensation or that I should distinguish the physical and the psychical. And yet I am impelled again and again whenever I have the table before me, to speak not merely of the sensation, but to believe that there is something out there, quite physically. And again when I have an idea, a sensation or a feeling, I have not merely the perception of the phenomenon which takes place, but though by my scientific insight I realize that it is quite unjustified—still I believe that here within me is the soul, and out there is the object. I feel myself impelled again and again to make this distinction how does it come about? Mach said to himself: however does it come about that I am suddenly impelled to assume; in here is something of the soul, and out there is something external to the soul. I know that it is no true distinction, yet am I continually compelled to think something different from what my scientific insight tells me.

This is what Mach says to himself, every now and then when he withdraws a little from these things and considers them again. You will find it in his books. And he then makes a peculiar remark; he says: sometimes one has a feeling that makes one ask:—Can it be that we human beings are just being led round and round in a circle by some evil spirit? And he answers: Sometimes I really think so.

I know, my dear friends, how many people will read just such a passage, taking it as an empty phrase. Yet it is truly symptomatic. For here, every now and then, there peers over the shoulder of the human soul something that is real fact. It is indeed the Ahrimanic spirit who leads men round and round in a circle, making them think in the way of Avenarius and Mach. And at such moments Mach suddenly becomes aware of it. And it is the same Ahrimanic spirit who is working now, in the Bolshevist way of thought. Hence it is no wonder, my dear friends, that the logic of realities has produced this result. You see, however, that if we would understand the things of life, we must look into them more deeply. Truly this is of no small importance, especially for the domain of social life, today and in the near future. For the conclusions that must be drawn are not such as were drawn by Schmoller or Brentano, Wagner, Spencer, John Stuart Mill or whoever it may be. No, in the domain of social life, real conclusions must be drawn, i.e., conclusions according to the logic of realities. This is the bad thing, that in the social agitations and movements of today, and in all that they have produced, merely logical deductions—i.e., illusions—are living. Illusions have become external reality. I will give you two examples. The one is already well-known to you, you will only need to see it in the light in which I shall now place it.

The Marxian Socialists (and as I have often told you, this includes almost the whole of the proletariat today), the Marxian Socialists declare, under the influence of Marx: Economic life, economic oppositions, and the class oppositions that arise from them—these things are the true reality. Everything else is an ideological superstructure. What man thinks, what he creates in poetry and art, what he thinks about the State or about life in general, all this is a mere result of his economic mode of life. And for this reason the proletariat of today declares:—We need no National Assemblies to bring about a new social order. For in the National Assemblies there will be the bourgeois folk once more and they will have their say out of their economically-determined bourgeois minds. We have no use for that. We can only do with those who will voice the thoughts of Proletarian minds. It is they who must re-mold the world today. To this end we do not first need to summon National Assemblies. Let the few Proletarians who happen to be on top exercise a dictatorship. They have proletarian ideas, they will think the right thoughts. Not only Lenin and Trotsky in Russia, Karl Liebknecht in Berlin repudiates the National Assembly. He says: After all, it will be no more than a reassembly of the talk-shop—meaning the Reichstag, the Houses of Parliament.

What is the underlying reason, my dear friends? It is the same reason on account of which, in the main, I was driven out of the Socialist Working Men's College in Berlin sixteen years ago, as I told you recently when giving you the history of my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. In that College I had to lecture among other things on scientific matters; I conducted practical lessons in public speaking. But I also had to teach History. And I taught it in the way in which I assumed, objectively, that it should be taught. This was certainly satisfying to those who were my pupils, and if it could have been continued—if it had not been brought to an artificial end—I know it would have borne good fruit. But the Social-Democratic leaders discovered that I was not teaching Marxism or the Marxian conception of history. Nay more, they discovered that I even did such curious wild things as I will now relate (which incidentally were very well-received by the workers who were my pupils). I said, for instance, on one occasion: The ordinary historian cannot make anything of the story of the seven Roman kings, they even regard it as a myth. For the succession of the seven kings, as described by Livy, shows a kind of rise and decline. Up to Marcius, the fourth, it rises to a kind of climax. Then it declines to decadence in the seventh, Tarquinius Superbus. And I explained to my pupils that we were here going back to the most ancient period in Roman evolution, the period before the Republic, and that the change to the Republic had in fact consisted in this: that the ancient atavistic spiritual regularities had passed into a kind of popular chaos; whereas, in the more ancient period, as we can see quite tangible in the history of the Egyptian Pharaohs, the social institutions contained a certain wisdom, discoverable by Spiritual Science. It is not for nothing that we are told how Numa Pompilius received influences from the Nymph Egeria, to order the social life. Then I explained how men did indeed receive Inspirations for the social institutions which they were to make; and how in truth it was not merely the one monarch following the other as in later times, but these things were determined according to the laws received from the Spiritual World. Hence the regularity in the succession of the Egyptian Pharaohs and even of the Roman kings, Romulus, Numa Pompilius, and so on down to Tarquinius Superbus.

Now you may take the seven principles of man which I summed up in my Theosophy and regard them one after another from a certain point of view. You will find these seven principles in the succession of the Roman kings. Here, at this present moment, I am only hinting at the fact, and among you I need do no more. Nevertheless it is a thing which, rightly expressed, can well be described as an objective truth, throwing real light on the peculiar circumstances which the ordinary materialistic historian cannot understand. Today indeed, the “genuinely scientific” historians simply regard the seven kings as non-existent, and describe them as a myth.

So you see, I really went so far as this. And in other matters, too, I spoke to them in this way. If it is done rightly, it gives the impression of answering to the realities. Still it is not the “Materialistic Conception of History.” For that would mean that we should have to investigate what were the economic conditions in ancient Roman times, what was the relation of the tillage of the soil to the breeding of cattle and to trade and the life; and how the cities were founded, and what was the economic life of the Etruscans, and how the Etruscans traded with the young Roman people; and how under the influence of these economic elements, conditions took shape under Romulus, Numa Pompilius, Tullus Hostilius, and so on, in succession.

You see, even this would not have been effected quite so simply. But here again the true Reality came to my assistance. Of course, such an audience did not consist merely of young people. There were many among them who had already absorbed the Proletarian thought to a considerable extent and who were well-equipped, well-armed with all these prejudices. Such people are by no means easy to convince, even when one is speaking of things remote from their domain of knowledge. On one occasion I was speaking about Art. I had described what Art is, and its influence, and suddenly from the back of the hall a lady cried out, interrupting: “Well, and Verism, isn't that Art?”

So you see, these people were not prone to take things simply on authority. It was a question of finding a way to them; not of finding the way to them by all manner of sly devices, but out of a sense of Reality and Truthfulness. And so it came about that one had to say—not only could, but had to say—“You folk are primed with ideas of the ‘Materialist Conception of History,’ which believes that all things depend on the economic conditions, and that the spiritual life is but an ideology, spreading itself out on the basis of the economic conditions, and indeed, Marx expounded these things with clear and sharp insight. But why did all this come about? Why did he describe and believe all this? Because Marx only saw the immediate and present age in which he lived. He did not go back to former ages. Marx only based himself on the historic evolution of man since the sixteenth century, and here in deed and truth there came into the evolution of mankind an epoch during which over a large part of the world the spiritual life became an expression of the economic conditions, though not exactly as Marx describes it. True, Goetheanism is not to be derived from the economic life; but Goethe was regarded even by these people as a man remote from the economic life.

Thus we might say that this was the mistake, that which held true only for a certain space of time, notably for the most recent time of all, was generalized. Indeed, only the last four centuries could be truly understood by describing them in the sense of the Materialist Conception of History.

Now this is the important thing: We must not proceed by the mere logic of concepts; for by the logic of concepts very little can be said against the carefully and strictly guarded propositions of Karl Marx. We must proceed by the logic of life, the logic of realities, the logic of things seen. If we do so, the following will be revealed. Beneath this evolution which has taken place since the 16th century in a way that can well be interpreted through the materialist conception of history—beneath this Evolution there is a deeply significant Involution. That is to say, there is something that takes its course invisibly, supersensibly, beneath what is visible to the outer senses. This is seeking to come forth to the surface, to work its way forth out of the souls of men; and it is the very opposite of Materialism. Materialism only becomes so great and works so in order that man may rear himself up against it, in order that he may find the possibility to seek the Spiritual out of the depths of his own Being during this age of the Spiritual Soul, and thus attain Self-consciousness in the Spirit. Thus the task is not, as Karl Marx believes, simply to look at the outer reality and read from it the proposition that economic life is the real basis of ideology; but the task is rather this: We must say to ourselves, the outer reality since the 16th century does not reveal the true reality. The true reality must be sought for in the spirit; we must find, above all, that social order which will counter-balance and overcome what appears outwardly or is outwardly observable since the 16th century. The age itself compels us, not merely to observe the outer processes but to discover something that can work into them as a corrective. What Marxism has turned upside down must be set right again.

It is extraordinarily important for us to know this. In this instance the logic of realities actually reverses the mere sharp-witted dialectics of Karl Marx. Alas, much water will have yet to flow down the Rhine before a sufficient number of people will realize this necessity, to find the logic of reality, the logic of things seen. Yet it is necessary—necessary above all on account of the burning social questions.

That is the one example. For the other, we may take our start from some of the things I told you yesterday. I said: It is characteristic how men have observed, ever since Ricardo, Adam Smith and the rest, that the economic order entails this consequence: That in the social life of man together, human labor-power is used like a commodity, brought on to the market like a commodity, treated like a commodity after the laws of supply and demand. As I explained yesterday, this is the very thing that excites and acts as motive impulses in the proletarian world-conception. Now one who merely thinks in the logic of concepts, observing that this is so, will say to himself: we must therefore find an economic science, a social science, a conception of social life, which reckons with this fact. We must find the best possible answer to the question: “Seeing that labor power is a commodity, how can we protect this commodity, labor power, from exploitation?” But the question is wrongly put, wrongly put not only out of theory, but out of life itself. The putting of questions wrongly is having a destructive, devastating effect in real life today. And it will continue to do so if we do not find the way to reverse it. For here once more the thing is standing on its head and must be set upright again, we must not ask: How shall we make the social structure so that man cannot be exploited, in spite of the fact that his labor power is brought on to the market like any other commodity, according to supply and demand.

For there is an inner impulse in human evolution which works in the logic of realities, although people may not express it in these words. It corresponds to reality and we can state it thus: Even the Grecian Age, the Grecian civilization which has come to mean so much for us, is only thinkable through the fact that a large proportion of the population of Greece were slaves. Slavery, therefore, was the premise of that ancient civilization which signifies so very much to us. So much that the most excellent philosopher, Plato, considered slavery altogether as a justified and necessary thing in human civilization. But the evolution of mankind goes forward. Slavery existed in antiquity and as you know, mankind began to rebel against it, quite instinctively to rebel against men being bought and sold. Today we may say it is an axiom: The whole human being can no longer be bought and sold; and where slavery still exists, we regard it as a relic of barbarism. For Plato, it was not barbarism; it went without saying that there were slaves, just as it did for every Greek who had the Platonic mind, nay every Greek who thought in terms of the state. The slave himself thought just the same, it went without saying that men could be sold, could be put on the market according to the laws of supply and demand, though of course not like mere cattle. Then, in a masked and veiled form, the thing passed over into the milder form of slavery which we call serfdom. Serfdom lasted very long, but here again mankind revolted.

And to our own time this relic has remained. The whole human being can no longer be sold, but only part of him, namely his labor-power. And today man is revolting against this too. It is only a continuation of the repudiation of slavery, if in our time it is demanded that the buying and selling of labor-power be repudiated. Hence it lies in the natural course of human evolution for this opposition to arise against labor-power being treated as a commodity, functioning as a commodity in the social structure. The question, therefore, cannot be put in this way: How shall man be protected from exploitation?—assuming as an axiomatic premise that labor-power is a commodity. This way of thinking has become habitual since Ricardo, Adam Smith and others, and is in reality included in Karl Marx and in the proletarian conception. Today it is taken as an axiom that labor-power is a commodity. All they want to do is, in spite of its being a commodity, to protect it from exploitation, or rather to protect the worker from the exploitation of his labor-power. Their whole thought moves along these lines. More or less instinctively or—as in Marx himself—not instinctively, they take it as an axiom. Notably the ordinary run of Political Economists who occupy the professional chairs assume it is an axiom from the very outset, that labor-power is to be treated, economically speaking, on the same basis as a commodity.

In these matters countless prejudices are dominating our life today: and prejudices are disastrous above all in this sphere of life. I am well aware how many there may be, even among you, who will regard it as a strange expectation, that you should spend your time in going into all these things. But we cannot possibly study the fullness of life if we are unable to think about these things. For if we cannot do so, we become the victims of all manner of absurd suggestions. How many an illustration the last four years have provided; what have they not brought forth? One could witness the most extraordinary things: I will only give you one example. Returning again and again to Germany—and in other places it was no different—every time, one found there was some new watchword, some new piece of instruction for the true patriot. Thus, the last time we went back to Germany, once more there was a new patriotic slogan: Do not pay in cash! Deal in checks as much as possible! i.e., do not let money circulate, but use checks. People were told that this was especially patriotic, for, as they thought, this was necessary in order to help win the war. No one saw through this most obvious piece of nonsense. But it was not merely said, it was propagated with a vengeance, and the most unbelievable people acted up to it—people of whom you might have supposed that they would understand the rudiments of economics—directors of factories and industrial undertakings. They too declared: pay in check and not in ready money, that is patriotic!

That fact is, it would be patriotic, but only under one assumption, namely this: you would have to calculate on each occasion how much time you saved in dealing in checks instead of ready money. True, most people cannot perform such a reckoning, but there are those who can. Then you would have to add up all the time that was saved, and come up and say: I have been paying my accounts in checks and have saved so much time, I want to spend it usefully; please give me a job! Only if you did so would it be a real saving. But of course they did not do so, nor did it ever occur to them that the thing would only have a patriotic importance on economic grounds on this assumption. Such nonsense was talked during the last four and a half years to an appalling extent. The most unbelievably dilettante propositions were realized. Impossibilities became realities, because of the utter ignorance of people—even of those who gave out such instructions—as to the real connections in this domain of life.

Now with respect to the questions I have just raised, the point is this: It must be the very aim of our investigations to find out—How shall we shape the social structure, the social life of man together, so as to loosen and free the objective commodity, the goods, the product, from the labor-power? This must be the point, my dear friends, in all our economic endeavors. The product should be brought onto the market and circulated in such a way that the labor-power is loosed and freed from it. This is the problem in economics that we must solve. If we start with the axiom that the labor-power is crystallized into the commodity and inseparable from it, we begin by eclipsing the essential problem and then we put things upside-down. We fail to notice the most important question—the question on which, in the realm of political economy, the fortunes and misfortunes of the civilized world will depend. How shall the objective commodity, the goods, the product, be loosed and severed from the labor-power, so that the latter may no longer be a commodity? For this can be done if we believe in that three-folding of the social order which I have explained to you, if we make our institutions accordingly. This is the way to separate from the labor-power of man the objective commodities, the goods, which are, after all, loosed and separated from the human being.

It must be admitted, my dear friends, that we find little understanding as yet for these things, derived as they are from the realities. In 1905 I published my essay on “Theosophy and the Social Question,” in the periodical Lucifer-Gnosis. I then drew attention to the first and foremost principle which must be maintained in order to sever the product from the labor. Here alone, I said, could we find salvation in the social question, and I emphasized that this question depends on our thinking rightly about production and consumption. Today men are thinking altogether on the lines of Production. We must change the direction of our thought. The whole question must be diverted from Production to Consumption. In detail, one had occasion to give many a piece of advice: but through the inadequate conditions and other insufficiencies, such advice could not really take effect, as one experienced—unhappily—in many cases. And it is so indeed; the men of today, through their faith in certain logical conclusions, which they mistake for real conclusions, have no sense for the need of looking at the Realities. But in the social domain above all it is only the Reality which can teach us the right way to put our questions. Of course people will say to you: Do you not see that it is necessary for labor to be done if commodities are to be produced? That is so indeed. Logically, commodities are the result of labor. But Reality is a very different thing from Logic.

I have explained this to our friends again and again from another aspect. Look at the thought of the Darwinian Materialists. I remember vividly the first occasion—it was in the Munich group—when I tried to make this clear to our friends. Imagine a real, thorough-going follower of Haeckel. He thinks that man has arisen from an apelike beast. Well, let him as a scientist form the concept of an ape-like animal and then let him form the concept of Man. If as yet no man existed and he only had the concept of the ape-like animal, he would certainly never be able to “catch,” out of this concept of the animal, the concept Man. He only believes what [in?] the ape-like creature, because the one proceeded out of the other in reality. Thus in real life men do after all distinguish between the logic of pure concepts and ideas and the logic of things seen. But this distinction must be applied through and through; otherwise we shall never gain an answer to the social and political questions, such as is necessary for the present and the immediate future. If we will not turn to that realistic thinking which I have explained to you once more today, we shall never come to the Goetheanic principle in public life. And that the Goetheanic principle shall enter into the world, this we desired to signalize by erecting, upon this hill, a “Goetheanum.”

In humorous vein, I would advise you to read the huge advertisement that appeared on the last page of today Basler Nachrichten, calling on everyone to do all in his power for the greatest day in world-history which is now about to dawn, by founding a “Wilsoneanum.” True, as yet, it is only an advertisement, and I only mention it in a jocular spirit. Nevertheless, in the souls of men, to say the least of it, the “Wilsoneanum” is being founded pretty intensely at the present moment.

As I said a short while ago, it has indeed a certain meaning that there is now a Goetheanum standing here. I called it a piece of “negative cowardice.” The opposite of cowardice was to come to expression in this action. And it is indeed the case, my dear friends, events are coming in the future—though this advertisement is only an amusing prelude—events are coming which will seem to justify this prophetic action which is being made out of the spirit of a certain world-conception. Though we need not take the half-page advertisement for a “Wilsoneanum” seriously, it is well for us to know that Wilsoniana will indeed be founded. Therefore a Goetheanum was to stand here as a kind of protest in advance.

My dear friends,

In part of yesterday's lecture I took my start from an essay by Berdiayeff, an essay based on the prejudice which we might describe as an unqualified belief in modern science and learning. This essay, however, also records a remarkable fact, intelligible only through the contrast between the logic of the intellect (which is of course the logic of modern science) and the logic of realities. Berdiayeff points out that Bolshevism has appointed Avenarius, Mach and other noted positivists, so to speak, as its official philosophers. I may add explicitly that this essay was written as long ago as 1908. It is a remarkable thing—intelligible only on our spiritual-scientific basis—to find in the work of this Russian author a judgment (no matter what our attitude to these things may be), most in agreement with the present time, or perhaps I should rather say, a judgment still applicable to the present time. And it may be worthwhile for you to know that Mach and Avenarius were already spoken of as official philosophers of the Bolsheviks at a time when—I hope I am making no undue presumptions—when a considerable number possibly even of this audience had not the remotest idea what Bolshevism is. For a large part of mankind in Western and Middle Europe have only been aware of the existence of Bolshevism for a very short time, whereas in fact it is a very old phenomenon.

I now want to add something more to the studies we have recently pursued. I was anxious above all to show you how the social impulses of the present time are to be judged and considered in the light of Spiritual Science. One thing we emphasized especially:—We must not give ourselves up to the simple belief that the social impulses are to be conceived in a uniform way over the whole world. It will cloud and mislead all our thoughts and judgments about the social question if we do not take into account that human communities throughout the civilized world are differentiated. We must avoid the error into which men fall when they say, of the social question, “This or that holds good; human society must be ordered thus and thus!” Rather must we put this question thus:—What is the nature of the forces in Eastern Humanity; what is the nature of the forces in Western Humanity; and what is the nature in the Humanity living the midst between the two? What is the nature in each case of the forces leading to the social demands of the age? We have already characterized in manifold ways, both from the external symptoms and from the inner occult standpoint, the nature of this differentiation between Western Humanity, Middle Humanity, and Eastern Humanity; and observe that in the latter we include the European East, namely Russia. We have already characterized how these differentiations are to be conceived. Without a knowledge of them it is altogether impossible to think fruitfully about the social question.

Now let us ask ourselves (we have often touched upon this question, but today we will bring out certain other details),—let us ask ourselves what is the fundamental quality of soul, the fundamental and decisive quality which is brought out in the age that began in the fifteenth century and that will last, as I told you, on into the third millennium? This fundamental quality which has scarcely yet shown itself in its true form, but only in its first beginning—the fundamental quality which is evolving and will evolve ever more and more—is that of human Intelligence—Intelligence as a property of the soul. Thus in the course of this epoch man will more and more be called upon to judge about all things out of his own Intelligence and notably about social, scientific and religious matters, for indeed, the religious, the scientific, and the social impulses do in a certain sense exhaustively describe the range of human life.

Now perhaps this conception of the Intelligent being of Man, which we must necessarily awaken in ourselves, will come to you more easily if you realize the following. Of the fourth Post-Atlantean Age it cannot be said in the same sense as of the present time, that man as a personality wished to establish himself purely on the ground of the intelligence. I brought this out very clearly in my book The Riddles of Philosophy in regard to philosophic thought. In the fourth Post-Atlantean Age, ending in the fifteenth century A.D., it was not necessary for man to make use of the intelligence in a personal way. With their perceptions of the environment, with their other relationships in life to the world, the concepts, the ideas, that is to say the intelligent element, also flowed into the human being just as colors and sounds enter the human being in perception. Notably for the Greeks, the intelligent-content was a Perception; and it was so also for the Romans.

For the man of modern time, since the fifteenth century, the outcome of intellectual activity can no longer be a perception. The intellectual element is left out of the world of perceptions. Man no longer receives the concepts and ideas at one and the same time with the perceptions. It is an entire error to imagine that this great change did not take place at the turn of the fifteenth century. This kind of error, this inability to distinguish, has indeed been perceived by some people even in the ordinary outer life. Thus a European, as we can easily realize, is apt to see all Japanese exactly alike. Although they are just as different from one another as Europeans are, yet he does not distinguish them. So too, modern learning does not distinguish between the several epochs, but imagines them all alike. But that is not the case. On the contrary, a mighty change took place, for instance at the turn of the fifteenth century when men ceased to perceive the concepts at one and the same time with the perception;—when they began really to have to work for their concepts. For the man of the present day has to bring forth, elaborate, the concepts out of his own personality. We are only in the initial states of it. It will become more and more so.

Now the man of the West, the Middle and the East are in the highest degree differentiated, especially in regard to this development of the intelligence. And since the theoretic demands of the Proletariat today, as is natural in the fifth Post-Atlantean Age, the Age of the Spiritual Soul,—since these demands are brought forward as intelligent demands, it is necessary to consider the relationships and differentiations of the intelligent being of the human soul over the face of the earth. It is necessary to consider it also in relation to the social impulses.

The significance of these things is underestimated because they still work today so largely in the subconscious. Man with his easy-going thought is not anxious to make clear distinctions in clear consciousness. But every man has an inner man within him, raying forth into his consciousness only to a certain extent. And this inner man makes very clear and sharp distinctions, distinctions for example as between the Western Man, the Middle Man, and the Eastern Man, according to his point of view, according as to whether he himself is a Western, a Middle, or an Eastern Man.

I am not now referring to the single individuality as such, I mean that in man which belongs to his nationality. I beg you always to observe this distinction. Of course the single individual rises out of the national element. Of course there are men today in whom the national element works scarcely at all. There are those who systematically try to be pure human beings without letting the national quality determine them. But insofar as it does work in them, it comes to expression in the varied ways which we have already characterized in these lectures. Today we will consider it once more from certain points of view and in relation to the social question.

In effect, whenever the social question emerges, when anything emerges which depends not only on the individual human being but on the community, the qualities of the Nation, Folk or People will always come into account. The member, let us say, of the British Nation or the member of the German People or the inhabitant of the Russian Earth (I purposely distinguish them just in this way), these three as individuals may, if you will, have just the same judgments. But the English, the German and the Russian political or social structure cannot be the same. They must be differentiated. For here the community comes into account. We are, therefore, calling into question not so much the individual relationship of man to man, but that which works from people to people, or differentiates the one nation from another. Again and again I must sharply emphasize this fact, for partly with good intentions and partly out of malice these things which I bring forward are again and again misunderstood.

Take one thing for example. I beg you to take these things “sine ira” quite objectively. They are not meant as criticizing but only as an indication of the facts. I beg you therefore to take them without any sympathies or antipathies. Let us consider a man of Mid-Europe, who observe[s] the life of the English-speaking people and on the other side the life of the Russian-speaking people; he observes them as they come to expression in the characteristic ways of thinking of these peoples—once more then, not of the individual human beings but of the peoples as such. Consciously, the Middle European may pass all kinds of judgments. Needless to say, nowadays a man will say this or that according to public opinion, which is always equivalent to private indolence.

That may be so, but the inner man, the inner Mid-European man, looking to the West, to the English-speaking people, and contemplating the nation as it expressed itself politically and socially—though he need not bring it to his consciousness at all—will always pass the judgment, “Philistines!” And when he looks across to Russia, he will say “Bohemians!” Of course that is somewhat radically spoken. And he himself will hear from left and right the answer:—“You may call us Philistines, you may call us Bohemians, but you—you are a Pedant!” Certainly that may be so, that again is judging from another point of view. But these things are more of a reality than one imagines, and they must be derived from the very depths of human evolution.

Now the peculiar thing is this. Within the English-speaking population the Intelligence is instinctive. It works instinctively. It is a new instinct that has arisen in the evolution of mankind; the instinct to think intelligently. The very thing the spiritual soul will have to educate, the Intelligence, is practiced instinctively by the English-speaking people. The English people has a native talent for the instinctive exercise of the intelligence.

The Russian people differs from the English as the North Pole from the South (or I might even say as the North Pole from the Equator), with respect to this impulse of the intelligent being in man. In Middle Europe, as I have said before now, men do not have the intelligence instinctively; they must be brought up to it. The intelligence must be trained and developed in them. That is the tremendous difference. In England and America the intelligence is instinctive. It has all the qualities of an instinct. In Mid-Europe nothing of intelligence is born in one. One must be trained brought up to it. It must be grasped in the becoming, in the development of man. In Russia it is so, that men even argue with one another as to what the intelligence really is (I could refer to many manifestations of this in literature; you must not think that I construct these things myself).

According to many statements by Russians with real insight, what they call the intelligence is something quite different from what is called so in Mid-Europe, let alone in England. In Russia an intelligent man is not one who has studied this and that. Whom do we call here the Intellectuals (for this will surely have some relation to the intelligence)? We call the “Intellectuals” those who have studied, who have made this or that subject their own, and have thus trained themselves in thought. As I said, in Western Europe and America the Intelligence is even a native quality, born in them. But we shall not permit ourselves to exclude from the Intelligentsia the businessman, the civil servant, or a member of any one of the liberal professions. But the Russian will do so most decidedly. He will not so easily reckon as a “man of intelligence” a businessman, a civil servant, or a member of one of the liberal professions. No, among the Russians a man of Intelligence must be a man who is awake, who has attained a certain self-consciousness. The civil servant who has studied much, who even has a judgment on many things, need not be an enlightened man. But the workman who thinks about his connection with the social order, who is awake as to his relation to Society, he is a man of Intelligence. In Russia it is very significant; one is even obliged to apply the word intelligence in quite a different sense. For, you see, whereas in the West the intelligence is instinctive, born in one, and in the Middle one is trained to it, or at any rate it is evolved in one, in the East it is treated as something that is certainly not born in one—nor can one merely be trained to it. It is not to be evolved quite as easily as that. It is something that awakens from out of a certain depth within the human soul. Man awakens to intelligence. This fact has been observed especially by certain members of the “Cadet Party,” who say that this faith in enlightenment of “awakening” is the very reason why a certain arrogance and conceit is to be found in the intelligentsia of Russia, despite all their other qualities of humility.

The fact is that this intelligence in Russia has a very special part to play in the evolution of mankind. If you do not let yourselves be deceived, if you do not give yourselves up to illusions of external symptoms, but go to the heart of the matter, then—however insignificant the Russians' intelligence may appear to you in this or that Russian according to your Western of Mid-European ideas, you will recognize the following. You will say:—“This intelligence is being preserved and guarded from all instinctive qualities.” Such indeed is the idea of the Russian; the intelligence must not be corrupted by any kind of human instinct, nor must we imagine that anything worth mentioning has been attained with all the intellectuality to which we train and educate ourselves. The Russian—unconsciously, needless to say—wants to preserve and keep the intelligence until the coming of the sixth Post-Atlantean Age, which is his age. So that when that time comes, he shall not reach down with his intelligence into human instincts, but carry it upward into the region where the Spirit-Self will blossom forth. Whereas the English-speaking people let the intelligence sink down into the instincts, the Russian desires above all to preserve and protect it. At all costs he will not let it go down into the instincts. He wants to nurse and cherish it, little as it may be today, so as to keep it for the coming Age, when the Spirit-Self—the purely spiritual—shall become permeated with it.

When we regard the matter thus in its foundations, my dear friends, then even such a thing as with unbiased judgment we must criticize root and branch, will appear as arising out of a certain necessity in human evolution.

As I said, Russians themselves—Russians with insight who characterize these things—discover quite rightly that the Russian intelligence has a two-fold basis which lies inherent in its evolution. Namely it has received the configuration, the character it has today, through the fact that the Russian who has evolved intelligence and who claims to be a wide-awake and enlightened man, has been suppressed by the power of the police. He has had to defend himself, to the point of martyrdom, against the violence of the police. As I said, we may well condemn this; but we must also reach a clear and unclouded judgment. The specific character of this Russian Intelligence, seeking to preserve itself for future spiritual impulses of mankind, is absolutely conditioned on the one hand by the police suppression by which it has been tortured and persecuted. And on the other hand, in a perfectly natural way—as Russian authors themselves bring out again and again—this Russian intelligence (just because it wants to preserve itself for future ages), is today a thing remote from the world. It does not easily come to grips with life. It is directed to quite other things than are immediately pulsating through the world. We may say therefore that in this respect too the Russian life of Soul is the very opposite of what we find in the English-speaking population. In the West, we may say, the intelligence is police-protected; in the East it is challenged and persecuted by the police. One man may prefer the one, another may prefer the other alternative. The point here is simply to characterize the facts. In the West, as I said, the intelligence is protected, its peculiar character is meant to flow into the outer life; it has to be inherent everywhere in the social structure. In the West it is the proper thing for men to take part through their intelligence in the social structure and the like. In Russia, no matter whether it be by the Czar or Lenin, the intelligence is suppressed by the police, and will continue so for a long time to come. Indeed, perhaps the very nerve and strength of it lies in the fact that it is suppressed by the police. We can put these things together, my dear friends, in a pretty epigrammatic way, and yet correctly. One can say, for instance—In Russia the intelligence is persecuted; in Mid-Europe it is tamed; and in the West it is born tame.

If we make this division, this differentiating, then—strange as the words may sound—we are hitting the nail on the head. In England and America, with respect to the Constitution, with respect to external politics, nay even with respect to the social structure, the intelligence is “born” tame. In Mid-Europe it is tamed. In the East where it would like to run about at random, it is persecuted.

These are the things that must be seen if we would see realities instead of entering into them in a merely chaotic way which can never lead to any real insight.

Now the point is this: On the one hand human beings are differentiated in this way, notably with regard to the intelligence, inasmuch as the Nation or Folk is working in them. They are differentiated as I have indicated often and in different directions, and am indicating again from a certain point of view today. On the other hand while, in the age of the Spiritual Soul this differentiation must be clearly seen, we must find at the same time the possibility to transcend it. There are two ways to transcend these things in real life. In the first place by learning to know them. So long as we only declaim from general abstract points of view that this or that is the true social standpoint, so long as we have no knowledge of the differentiations of mankind, all our talk is valueless. Insight into these things, that is the one thing of importance. The other is that we should still be able in a certain way to rise out of these things with human consciousness and experience. In practice we must reckon with the differentiations. We must not imagine that men are the same over the whole earth, or that the social question can be solved in the same way over the whole Earth. We must know that the social question has to be solved in different ways. Out of the impulses in the different peoples it is seeking to solve itself in different ways.

But this, my dear friends, is only possible on a foundation such as is provided here, by Spiritual Science. For if you have some more or less chaotic—or even harmonious and consistent—social idea, how can you apply it, my dear friends? You can only apply it one-sidedly. You may have the most beautiful ideas, capable of absolute proof, so that you cannot but believe that all men, all the Earth over are to be made happy and prosperous by their means. Indeed it is the very misfortune of our times that it generally has such an idea in mind. Who is there that thinks differently in our time when he confronts his audience and speaks of his political or social ideas? It is always in this style: “Social conditions are to be ordered thus and thus throughout the Earth, and with the ideas I am thinking out the whole of mankind will prosper.” This is the way men think today and indeed, on the foundations of our present habits of thought, it is scarcely possible for them to think in any other way.

But if you take the social impulse derived from Spiritual Science, which I explained to you a short while ago, you will see it has quite a different character. In fact it breaks with this habit of thought of our time. I said, the point is not to have some uniform social ideal, but to investigate what is seeking to realize itself. Then I drew your attention to a three-fold membering of social life, which has hitherto been gathered up chaotically into the one-fold State. Today you will always see one Cabinet, one Parliament. Indeed, it seems an ideal for the people of today to gather everything together chaotically into a single Parliament. But as I said, the reality of things is tending to hold apart what is here being concentrated into one. The spiritual life (including judicial—I do not mean general administration, but the administration of civil and criminal law) constitutes one member by itself. The economic life a second member; and the life that regulates the two, constitutes the third—general administration, public security, and the like. These three should confront one another just as independent States do today. They should deal with one another through their representatives, ordering their mutual relationships, but in themselves they should enjoy independent sovereignty.

Let what I am saying be reviewed and criticized and utterly condemned. One will be criticizing not a theory but something that will be actualized in the next forty or fifty years. And this three-folding alone will make it possible for you to reckon once more with the differentiations of mankind. For if you only have a one-fold State you must force it upon all humanity, as though you would put the same coat on a small, a medium, and a very tall man (take the magnitude only for the sake of illustration, I do not mean to describe the nations as great or small). But in this three-foldness there is an inherent universality. For the social structure of the West will take shape in such a way that the life of administration, the constitution, the general regulation of public life, public security in the widest sense, will preponderate. The other two will be to some extent subordinate, dependent on this one. In other regions of the Earth, it will be again different. Once more, one of the three will predominate and the other two will be more or less subordinate. With a threefold conception you have the possibility to find, in your own view of things, the differentiation of realities. A unitary idea you must extend over the whole Earth, but of a thing inherently threefold you can say: “In the West the one is predominant; in the Middle the second is predominant; and in the East the third is predominant.” Thus what you find as the ideal of the social structure will be differentiated over the face of the Earth. This is the fundamental difference of the view, here presented out of Spiritual Science, from other views. This view is applicable to realities from the very outset, because it can be differentiated within itself and applied in a differentiated way to the realities of life. Such is the difference between an abstract and a concrete view of things. An abstract theory consists of so many concepts of which one believes that happiness will come. A concrete view is one of which one knows: It in itself is such that the one can grow and develop in the one case, the second in another, the third in a third. The first or second or third will be applicable to the corresponding outer conditions. This is what distinguishes a view of realities from all dogmatism. Dogmatism swears by dogmas, and dogmas can only maintain their sway by tyrannizing over realities. A conception of reality is like the reality itself; it is inherently a living thing. Like the human or any other organism it is mobile and alive, not fixed and rigid.

So is a real conception inherently living, growing or developing, now in one direction, now in another. This difference of a conception of reality from dogmatism—this you must understand, my dear friends, for it will help you most of all to change the habits of thought within you, which change is so badly needed by the men of today and from which they are yet so far removed—far more than they know.

Moreover what I am now telling you is connected in its deepest being with Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. You see, for the ordinary science of today man himself is a unity. The anatomist, the physiologist studies the brain, the sense organs, nerves, liver, spleen and heart. For him they are organs placed in a single unitary organism. We do not do so. We distinguish the head man, or nerves-and-senses man, from the chest man, or man of breathing and blood circulation, and lastly from the metabolic man, or man of the extremities, or as we might also say muscular man. We distinguish, as you know, a threefold man who lives in the world. Just because it does not hold fast abstractly to the one-fold man, Anthroposophical Spiritual Science discovers that social organism in which man as a three-fold being is contained. For, my dear friends, the guiding thread is always the Anthroposophical membering of man. After all, these three members themselves are, more or less, the outer symbols of his being which man carries with him. For he himself is rooted in all the worlds. We shall find in this three-folding of man once more a guiding thread to envisage the differentiation of humanity over the Earth.

Now that I shall speak plainly about these things I beg you once more to take them sine ire, for I am merely describing. I am not criticizing nor am I saying anything to detract from the one side or to find favor with the other side in any way. Let us begin with the Russian man, the Eastern European man. We simply cannot study him if we only have in mind the present-day anatomy, physiology or psychology. We can only study him if we bear in mind the threefold man, whose nature I have indicated in broad outlines in my book The Riddles of the Soul. For if we consider the peculiar characteristics of the Russian Soul, and generally of the Russian people of today—I beg you to observe once more, the Russian people of today—then we shall have to say: In Russia (may our Russian friends forgive me, but it is true) in Russia the head man is at home. Let our Russian friends forgive me, for they themselves do not believe it, but they are making a mistake. They no doubt will say: In Russia the heart-man is at home, and the head, of all things, is not so prominent. But you can only make such a statement if you do not study Spiritual Science properly. For the Russian head-culture appears predominantly as a culture of the heart, just because—if I may put it tritely—the Russian has his heart in his head. That is to say, his heart works so strongly that it works up towards his head, crosses his whole Intelligence, permeates everything. It is the working of the heart upon the head, upon the concepts and ideas, which configures the heart upon the head, upon the concepts and ideas, which configures the whole of the East-European culture.

And once more, I pray that the mid-European will not take offence, but it simply is so: Their essential characteristic—and this describes the whole of the mid-European culture—is that their head is perpetually falling into their chest, while on the other hand the abdomen or the extremities are perpetually being drawn up into the heart. That is the essential thing in mid-European man. Hence it is so frightfully hard for him to find his bearings, for he is neither at the one end nor at the other. I described this when I said recently that at the Guardian of the Threshold the mid-European man experiences above all a wavering, a tottering uncertainty and doubt.

Once again, may our West European friends not be offended with me (for I see you are already guessing what is left for them) their culture is paramountly an abdominal, a muscular culture. That is their peculiarity—in the nation, not in the single man as such. All that proceeds from the culture of the muscles works strongly even into the head. Hence the instinctive quality of their intelligence. Hence too it is there that we find the origin of muscular culture in the modern sense—games, sports, athletics and so forth. Indeed, all that I am saying—you will find its evidence everywhere in external life if only you are willing, if only you are prepared to look at the facts objectively. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science will only give you the guiding thread to observe the facts of life. In the Russian it is so that his heart fumes up into his head. In the English-speaking people the abdomen fumes up into the head—but not only so, the head reacts in turn upon the power body and directs it. It is very important to consider these things. We need not always express them so radically as we do in our own circle, my dear friends. After all, here we understand one another; we have after all a certain measure of good will one to another. We know how to take these things objectively, not with sympathies and antipathies.

Thus you see, we must envisage the threefold man; we must really know that man is a threefold being, a being after the pattern of the Trinity even when we are studying his physiological and psychological differentiations. And this is the essential thing; men must have an interest in one another not merely as the parson preaches it, but a real interest holding sway between man and man, which can after all only be founded on a real insight. It remains as empty abstraction if you say: “I love all men.” To enter into the other human beings with understanding, that is the thing needful, likewise it is necessary to enter into the different communities of men with understanding, to have a true judgment about them and about their social structure. And this can only be the case when one knows the threefold nature of man. Unless you know what is the predominant bodily feature in a community of men, you cannot really know them. To gain a real insight you must have some guiding thread, otherwise you will confuse and muddle things together. That is the point. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is a thing that reckons with reality. Hence it is a thing that men often find unpleasant, for as a result of certain prejudice men do not want to be seen through, not even in private life. They find it dreadfully unpleasant to be seen through. We may almost say that of any ten men, at least nine will be your enemies if you really see through them. In one way or another they will become your enemies. Men do not like being seen through, even when it happens in the light that is communicated here, my dear friends, so that it may serve to enhance the love of humanity. For the abstract love of humanity (I have often used this comparison), is like the warmth that the stove ought to develop. You talk to it so: “You are a stove. It is your duty as a stove to warm the room.” But if you do not stoke it, all your moral talk is useless. So it is with all the Sunday afternoon addresses. However much you preach at men “love and love again,” if you do not provide the fuel whereby men and communities of men are known and understood, all your preaching is worthless. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is fuel to kindle the right interest of man in man—the real development of human love. Even the historic facts, symptomatically as I unfolded them here a short while ago, the important historic facts underlying the social impulses of today—even these, my dear friends, can only be brought home to human insight from the standpoint of a conception of realities.

Bear in mind all that we have already said of the differentiations of the Western, the Middle, and the Eastern World. It will flow into your souls still more abundantly if with its help you now observe these worlds with understanding. And then perhaps we may ask: How is it—apart from what we have already said—how is it that the Russian intelligence can preserve itself for future time? It needs, as it were, a greater strength to protect the intelligence from the encroaching instincts and the like than it requires to exercise the native instinctive intelligence. It needs a greater strength. And this too has been attained by certain arrangements, if I may call them so, in the evolution of Occidental Humanity. Take only this one circumstance.

Russia has in many respects been held aloof from the currents and movements of civilized life that have taken their course in the West. I once described to you from another point of view this damming up, this congestion of a civilization of former ages towards the East. See for instance how the division of the Church took place in the ninth century and was completed in the tenth. An earlier form of Christianity was driven back towards the East, there to remain stationary and conservative. Thus we may say: A certain condition, which was spread over the whole of Christendom in early centuries, has been driven Eastward and has there remained stationary. Meanwhile the West has continued to evolve its Christianity. Thus something was pushed back towards the East. That on the one side, while on the other side, into the same East, something was pushed forward—namely the Tartar element and all that came from Asia, from Eastward of the Russian East. All this is only an expression of the fact that on the Russian earth earlier forces of humanity have been congested and have received into themselves the human element that came from Asia—in a more youthful condition than the West European humanity.

Or again, consider the mid-European civilization in its dependence on Protestantism—a dependence far greater than is generally thought. At bottom the whole civilization of mid-Europe is configured out of the impulse of Protestantism. I do not mean this or that religious creed, I mean the impulse of Protestantism. Protestantism itself, for one who regards things from a higher vantage point is but a symptom. The essential thing is the spiritual impulse that is working in it. Take all the science and scholarship that is carried on in Middle Europe, the whole form of its development is influenced by Protestantism. Without Protestantism the mid-European culture is utterly unthinkable.

Now what appears so predominant at one place is present differently, in a different relationship to life, at another. It is as I showed you just now when I spoke of the social tasks of Anthroposophy which must be applied in differentiated ways. What has Protestantism been in Middle Europe? One might say that Protestantism gave the first impetus to man's supporting himself on his own Intelligent Being. The mid-European intelligence, of which I said that it has to be trained and educated, is very closely connected with Protestantism. Even the Catholic action which has arisen against Protestantism is, rightly considered, Protestant in character, except when it happens to proceed from the Jesuits, who have consciously, deliberately held back the impulse that came through Protestantism. This inner impulse working through Protestantism works, if I may put it so, in its purest essence in mid-Europe. For how did it work in Western Europe? Study the historic facts in the proper symptomatic way and you will find:—the working of Protestantism in Western Europe and in America corresponds as a matter of course to the inborn Intelligent Instinct. Indeed it comes to expression more in the political than in the religious life. It works itself out as a perfect matter of course. It permeates everything. It does not need a special statement or constitution. Albeit here and there reformist hearts were kindled into flame, it does not need to bring forth so shattering a Reformation as took place in Middle Europe. In the West it is there as a matter of course. At this point we might even say: The modern Western man is born as a Protestant. The Mid-European discusses and argues as a Protestant. In Middle Europe, Protestantism above all calls forth all the discussions about the things of intelligence. Here it is not inborn. And the Russian—as a Russian—absolutely rejects Protestantism; he will have nothing to do with it. Indeed, as a Russian he simply cannot do with it. Russianism and Protestantism are incompatibles.

What I am now saying comes to expression not only in the religious confessions—no, not by any means. It comes to expression in the receiving of every kind of cultural impulse. Take Marxism for example. You can trace its course in the Western countries. There it is received from the very outset as a straightforward protest against the old conditions of property and the like. In the Middle Countries there has to be much discussion on those things, and much argument and bickering and doubt, much useless talk. All this arises out of the character of the Middle Countries. And in Eastern Europe Marxism takes on the strangest forms. There it must first be completely transformed. Take the Marxism of Eastern Europe, you will find it permeated, tinged through and through by the spirit of Russian Orthodoxy. Not in its ideas, but in the way the Russian relates himself to it, Marxism in Russia bears the stamp of Orthodox Faith.

All this, my dear friends, is only to draw your attention to the need of looking beyond the externals and seeing the true inwardness of things. Much will be gained if you accustom yourselves to see in relation to many things of life—the words as they are used today are to a great extent “disused coinage.”

What people think according to the customary usage of words is never really in accordance with reality: we must everywhere look deeper. Protestantism, for instance, defined in the usual way according to present-day habits of thought, no longer expresses a reality. We must conceive it in such a way as to recognize how it appears in Marxism, or in politics generally, or even in science. Then we shall have something that accords with the reality. So radically is it necessary for us to strive to get beyond the mere semblance of words and concepts, and to take hold of real life. Everything depends on this, my dear friends; and on this, above all, depends the right conception of the most important impulse of the present time, which is the social impulse. On this depends a true judgment of the facts of our time. Just because men are so unaccustomed to look at the realities, they judge of the conditions of our time in such distorted ways. Because they are so far removed from real conceptions, they keep on asking about guilt and innocence in relation to the recent war-catastrophe; whereas this question about guilt and innocence as such has not the slightest meaning. I told you here some considerable time ago how these things lay inherent in world-impulses. Just as the map which I sketched before you here is being realized in fact today, so are the other things too on the point of realization. They will indeed be realized, precisely as they were here described, my dear friends. We must have a sense for the reality and not adhere to the empty husks of words. True, the latter must often be used for purposes of description, but we must not adhere to them, must not stop short at them. Thus we must also see from a standpoint of reality the judgment, formed by the Entente and the Americans, which is now being passed upon the Middle Countries. I have already said: When this catastrophe of War began, I heard from many quarters criticisms “root and branch” of what the Middle Countries were then doing. Today the people who were criticizing them then are heard far less in criticism of what in truth is a policy of violence, and all the rest of it. Truth to tell, there would be sufficient cause for a similarly harsh judgment in this case. I think I have never spoken to protect any personalities; I have simply characterized the facts and conditions. Hence it is absolutely not my task, in any way to defend personalities whose characters have been unveiled in the most recent time. But, my dear friends, whether the unqualified deification of Wilsonism for example, and of all that is connected with it, lies less inherent in the tendency to some form of idolatry than the Ludendorff-worship which they evolved in the Middle Countries (and which I described as a special chapter in social psychiatry)—that is a question, after all, which would have to be decided with great care. We cannot pass it over quite so lightly.

Considering the matter, however, from another point of view I once said to you here, my dear friends, that when one person rails at another, and says hard things, the cause is not always—indeed in the rarest cases—to be found in the other person. He may of course be a bad sort; but this badness of his is, for anyone who observes reality objectively, the thing that least of all calls forth the abuse. No, for the most part the cause of the abuse is a need to abuse. And this need of abuse seeks an object, it wants to let itself go. And it seeks to bring its thoughts into such a form that they appear to be justified in the soul of the abusing party. So it is often in the individual intercourse of men with one another. But in the large affairs of the world it is no different; only here we must bear in mind that there are also deeper reasons. You see, it is perfectly intelligible and natural for people in the Entente and American countries now to criticize and condemn root and branch not only individual potentates but the whole population of the Middle Countries, and to say all manner of things in this direction. We can well understand it for, my dear friends, what would the policy of the Entente countries in these weeks look like, if the people [in] those countries were to say: “The people in the Middle Countries are not so bad after all, at bottom they are only human beings, they need only develop the better aspects of their nature, then they are quite alright.” Yes, if they were to say that, it would agree very badly with the policy they are now pursuing. In the world, my dear friends, one must say the things that justify one's action.

We must know how things proceed out of realities. That is a deeper way of seeing things. It goes without saying that the entire public opinion of the Entente Countries is as it is, not because it is true but in order to justify their own attitude; just as it often happens when one man rails against another, he does so, not because the man he rails against is such or such, but because he has a need to rail against something and wants to let it out. Yes it really is necessary to see things differently than men are wont to see them. And this is the whole point: to take hold of Spiritual Science in the inmost foundations of one's soul is in many respects a very different thing from what is conceived, even by many who call themselves adherents of the Anthroposophical Movement.

Outwardly, abstractly considered—and we come now to a different chapter—one might believe that the socialism, the social demands of the present day proceed from social impulses. I described the other day how man oscillates between social and anti-social impulses or instincts. An abstract thinker would take it as a matter of course that the socialist proletarian of the present time is a product of social impulses. For it is proper, is it not, to define the social by the social. But it is not true, my dear friends. One who considers the proletarian socialism of the present day in its reality knows well that socialism as it appears in the Marxism of today is an anti-social phenomenon, a product of anti-social impulses. Such is the difference between abstract definition, abstract thinking, and realistic thinking. Ask yourselves: What is the driving force in those who are seeking to realize socialism in the direction to which I am referring? Are they being driven by social instincts? No, by anti-social instincts. I showed it yesterday even by external indications, by the inner structure of their formula: Proletarians of all lands, unite! That is to say: Feel hatred against other classes in order that you may feel the bond that shall unite you! There you have one of the anti-social impulses. And we might adduce very many anti-social impulses if we studied the social psychology of the present day. Such is the difference between the way of thought that is arising and evolving—that must arise and evolve and that is to be helped on by Spiritual Science—and all that lies in the current habits of thought of today.

Hence, too, the Anthroposophical standpoint which must be put forward in relation to the social question meets as yet with so much opposition. For people cannot think in accordance with realities. Above all, they cannot think in a differentiated way; and if any one does think in this way, they frequently believe that he is contradicting himself.

Important questions of the present day will only be solved by realistic thinking. I will tell you one such question, relating to what we have already spoken of. I said: the thing that is rumbling especially in proletarian minds and that constitutes a motive force in them is this: the ancient slavery has been replaced by the modern enslavement of labor, inasmuch as in the present social structure, labor is a commodity from the labor power. Indeed the threefold social structure of which I have told you already contains the impulse to free the commodity from human labor. For this threefold ordering will entail, not logical conclusions, but conclusions in reality, in the reality of things seen.

Now this question, my dear friends, is followed by another, an absolutely burning question at the present moment. You know, one of the fundamental demands of proletarian materialism with its Marxist coloring, is the socialization or nationalization of the means of production. The means of production are to be made communal property, and this would only be the beginning of communal property in general: in the land, for instance, and so forth. It is a part of the programme of the Russian Soviet Republic, which I explained to you, to socialize, or nationalize the means of production and the land. Now at this point we come to the most important subsidiary social question. Today the tendency of proletarian thinking is to make things communal property. But, my dear friends, for the most important social impulses, it makes no difference at all whether an individual or an association or the community as such is the owner. To anyone who is able to study the realities, this is clearly revealed. In relation to the individual worker, the community will be an employer or captain of industry, not a whit less bad than the individual employer. This lies in the nature of the case, it is like a law of Nature. People only fail to see it, and hence they are misled. For the real question is this: Shall all men become owners of property. That would happen, if, instead of having communal property (I cannot here explain the technique, but it is perfectly feasible), the individuals—every one of them—owned property in a just way, according to the given opportunities in any territory. Shall all become property owners? Or shall all become proletarians? That is the alternative. The proletarian thinking of the present day wants to make all men proletarians, so that the community alone would be the employer. But if we can see the reality, the very opposite will be the outcome. The three-foldness of the social structure can never be attained by making all men proletarians. The tendency of the threefold structure must really be to attain the freedom of the individual in respect of body, soul and spirit. That is not to be attained by all men becoming proletarians, but is to be attained—for every individual—if all men possess a certain basis of property.

The second thing that must be attained is a regulation of social conditions, such that before the law or constitution, before the government in fact, all men are equal: Liberty in spiritual matters; Equality in the State (for if you will, one third may continue to be called so); and Fraternity in relation to the economic life. I know well-written books which rightly emphasize that the three ideals, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity contradict one another; it is true, Equality decidedly contradicts Liberty. Very clever writers said this even in 1848 or even earlier. If we muddle everything together these things contradict one another. There must be Liberty in the spiritual and judicial domain, the domain of religion, education and jurisprudence. There must be Equality in the administration, in the government, the services of public security. There must be Fraternity in the economic domain. In the economic domain we have property, which must however be correspondingly developed in the future. In the domain of public security and administration we must have Equity or Right. In the domain of spiritual life and jurisprudence we must have Liberty. When divided into a trinity, these things are not in contradiction with one another. For here the things that contradict one another in thought are still in accordance with reality, because in the reality they are distributed to the different domains. The mere thought burrows for contradictions; but the reality lives in contradictions. We cannot grasp the reality if we cannot grasp the contradictions, follow them and deal with them in our thoughts.

So you see, Spiritual Science as here intended certainly has something to say to the most important questions of the time. Perhaps, my dear friends, a few of you will yet realize this fact, and realize moreover that the whole way we think about this Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy should be influenced by the consciousness of its relation to the more important requirements of our time.

This indeed is closely connected with the way in which, as I personally for instance must conceive, this Anthroposophical Spiritual Science movement should take its stand in the spiritual life of our time. Of course it cannot be attained all at once that our contemporaries should see these things rightly. Do not believe, my dear friends (anyone who knows me will certainly not believe), that I say these things out of any personal foolishness or vanity; but I am compelled again and again by the necessity of the facts to characterize what happens in one direction or another. It is really so—and I have shown it you on many an occasion—I myself am not at all inclined to overestimate what I can do and claim to do. I know the limitations. I am well aware of many things of which one person or another may have no inkling that I am aware. But for those who to some extent can judge me rightly in this direction, I may perhaps say how earnestly I would desire one thing (the word “desire” is not quite right, but I have no other). It is this, my dear friends, that there should be a certain sense of discrimination between what is intended here, and other things with which it is so frequently confused. How many there are still today, who seeing here or there this or that occult society—or society that calls itself occult—will not discriminate it as healthy human understanding can discriminate it, from what is here to be found. For, imperfect as it may be, here there is at least the real striving to reckon with the consciousness of the age. Look on the other hand at all the other things that are frequently considered as occult or similar movements. How do they reckon with the consciousness of the time? Look at all the Masons of low and high degree, look at all the different religious communities, this is just the antiquated thing about them, they are unable really to reckon with the consciousness of our time. Where else do we find people speaking out of the real foundations? Where do we find them speaking on the burning questions of the time in a way that really enters into modern life, that is adapted to the realities? From all the rituals and instructions of the one or the other Masonic or religious community, you will not be able to discover these things. This is what I would desire: a real sense of discrimination.

I admit, my dear friends, it is made more difficult, because owing to the historical circumstances which I once described to you, this Society was confused in the beginning with the Theosophical or with all manner of other Societies. Outwardly considered, it may have been a mistake; karmically it was justified. It would have been more worldly-wise if this Anthroposophical Society, standing entirely upon its own ground, had been founded without any relation to other societies. Outwardly conceived, it would certainly have been more wise. For all this philistinism, the bourgeoisdom of the Theosophical Society and all the antiquated stuff would not have flowed into it. Not that it has flowed into Anthroposophy; it has not. But it has entered into the life and habits of the Society. If only Anthroposophy lived rightly in our Society—which it does not do—this Society could, in a certain sense at least, be a perfect example to characterize one-third of the social structure which flows from Anthroposophy itself. I mean the spiritual third, even including the juridical sphere. For, my dear friends, the principle of human rights which should hold sway from individual to individual—this should really go without saying among Anthroposophists. I always feel it as the sharpest and bitterest breach with the spirit which should develop amongst us, when one member speaks of another in such a way that he goes outside to complain or to accuse. Here too the consciousness of right, insofar as it is included in the one third of the social structure, should develop. But we have a long way to go yet to gain an Anthroposophical Society such as is really intended, containing what it might contain out of the impulses of Anthroposophy. First of all, my dear friends, we must evolve the ear for inner truth which so few people have today. Because this sense of discrimination which should really come from without fails so to come, it is necessary for me now and then to point to the distinctive features from one point of view or another. And today, especially with regard to certain things, I would say this; What lives through me myself in this Anthroposophical Movement is distinguished from other things in one essential respect. I have always worked according to the principle which I stated in the preface to the first edition of my Theosophy, namely that I communicate nothing else than what I can communicate from my own personal experience. I communicate nothing else than what I from my own personal experience can stand for. Here at this place there is no appealing to authorities such as is cultivated so much in other quarters.

This, my dear friends, entails a certain consequence. I may truly say that the spiritual stream which is guided through the Anthroposophical Movement depends upon no other stream. It depends alone on the spirituality that is flowing through the time. Hence I am under no obligation—I beg you to take this in all earnestness—I am under obligation to no one to keep silence about anything of which I myself consider that it ought to be spoken about in our time. For one who is obliged to no man for his spiritual treasure, there is no rule of silence.

That will already give you a basis for distinguishing this movement from others. For if anyone should ever say that that which is proclaimed in Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is proclaimed in any other way than in the sense of what was said in my Theosophy, namely that I myself am answering for it purely out of my own experience—if anyone should ever say this, then, if you will, he may not know the facts, or he has frequently been absent, or he has only seen them from outside. But whether it be from malice or otherwise, he is proclaiming the untruth. He, on the other hand, who says something else, let us say he alleges some “past” or a connection of this spiritual movement with another, knowing all the time the facts and circumstances here among us—he is telling lies. That is the point, my dear friends. He will either be telling the untruth through ignorance of the facts, or, knowing well the facts he will be lying. And in effect, these alternatives include all the opponents of this movement.

Hence I must emphasize again and again; I have only to keep silence concerning those things of which I knew that they cannot yet be communicated to mankind owing to its immaturity. But there is nothing on which I must keep silence in connection with anyone to whom any vow has been made, or for any such reason. Never has anything flowed into this movement that came from another side. Spiritually, this movement was never dependent on any other. The connections were always only of an external character. Perhaps, my dear friends, the time will come that you will see that it is well to remember that I sometimes say things in advance, which only afterwards become apparent in their right connection. If you have the good-will, the time may come when it will serve you well to remember the sense in which the spiritual treasure that must flow through the Anthroposophical Movement is being cultivated here.

Nevertheless there is a touchstone for anyone who is willing to distinguish this Anthroposophical Movement from other movements. There is a touchstone available today for such a movement and it is threefold. First: such a movement must show itself equal to the scientific and intellectual requirements of the time. Go through all the literature that I have produced; however imperfect in this or that detail, you will see everywhere the earnest effort to create a movement drawing not on old antiquated sources, but thoroughly at home in the scientific methods of the present time and working in full harmony with the present scientific consciousness. That is the one thing. The second is this: that such a movement has something really vital to say on the life-questions of the present time, for instance on the social question. What other movements have to say in this direction—try to compare it in its antiquatedness, in its remoteness from reality, with what this movement has to say. The third part of the touchstone is this: that such a movement can consciously explain the different religious needs of mankind to themselves—can explain them and clarify them. That is to say, it combines enlightenment concerning the religious needs of mankind with a full and actual acquaintance with realities.

Herein already, my dear friends, you can distinguish this movement from all those which provide after all no more than Sunday afternoon addresses, which can well achieve the feat of giving moral sermons and the like, but in face of the real ideas working in the present social structure, are remote from the world. A science of realities in our time must be able to speak on labor and capital and credit and the land, and all these things of the present day—in a word, on the shaping of social life—even as it can speak on the relation of man to the Divine Being, on the love of his neighbor and so forth. This is what mankind has left undone so long; to find the real connections, from the highest realms down to the immediate and concrete tasks and processes of life. This is what Theology and Theosophy in their various forms in our time have left undone and what a certain occult movement too has left undone. They talk from above downwards till they reach the point where they can say to men: Be good!—and so on in like fashion. But they are unfruitful, they are sterile, when it comes to really taking hold of the burning questions of the time. External science and scholarship can speak of these immediate things of life, but they speak in a way that is remote from realities. I showed you yesterday how estranged they are from actual life. After all, how many people are there today who know what capital is, what it is in reality? True, they know: When they have so much money in a safe that it is so much capital. But that is not to know what capital is. To know what capital is, is to know how the regulation of the social structure works with respect to certain things and persons. Just as for the single human being we must learn to know, anthroposophically, the relationships that obtain in the cycle of the blood that rhythmically regulates man's life, so must we know what is pulsating in the most varied ways in social life. But, my dear friends, present-day physiology is not even able materialistically to solve the most important questions, for they can only be solved by anthroposophical insight into the threefold man.

What, for instance, does present-day science know on one immensely important question, namely this: Purely materialistically speaking—what does thought or ideation depend on? What does the will depend on? In a certain direction? I can speak of these things today because, as I said before on another point, I have investigated them for thirty to thirty-five years. Ideation depends upon the fact that man has within him, in the course of the circulation of his blood, carbonic acid which is not yet breathed out. When carbonic acid not yet breathed out is circulating inside him, there you have the material counterpart, the material correlate of Thought. And when there is oxygen in man—oxygen not yet converted into carbonic acid, oxygen that is still on the way to transformation into carbonic acid; there, in a certain direction, you have the material correlate of the Will. Where oxygen pulsates in man—oxygen not yet entirely transformed, but fulfilling certain functions—there is the Will materially at work. And where inside the human body there is carbonic acid, not quite elaborated to the point of expulsion or out-breathing, there you have the material foundation for a Thought-form. But as to how these two poles, the Thought-pole, which we may also call the carbonic acid pole, and the Will-pole which we may also call the oxygen pole—as to how they are regulated, only a science of realities can tell. Nowhere in the books of today will you find such a truth as I have just expressed.

Because men do not train their thinking with respect to a reality like this, therefore they also fail to train it with respect to what is necessary for the man of today in the social structure. But this will have to come, my dear friends, it is necessary for our time. The social question must be made to include the question of how man, as a soul and spirit being, stands within the social structure.

All these things have been left undone. Think how different it would be if in this or that establishment the individual worker were placed, even in soul and spirit, into the whole process which the commodity he makes undergoes in the world; if he understood how he stands within the social structure through the fact that he produces just this commodity. But this can only be realized if there holds sway a real interest from man to man, so much so that in course of time there will be no true adult man or woman unable to master the most important social concepts in a real way. The time must come—it is a social need—when a man will know what capital and credit, what ready-money and checks are in their real economic effects—and these things can be known; they are not difficult, they need only be rightly attacked by those who have to teach them. The time will come when every man must know these things, just as one knows today that soup is eaten not with a fork but with a spoon. Anyone who ate his soup with a fork would be behaving ridiculously, would he not? That the man or woman who is ignorant of these other things is behaving ridiculously too—this must become the public opinion.

Then, my dear friends, the most important impulse of the present time—the social impulse—will be placed on a very different foundation.

My dear friends,

Once again there comes to life in our hearts the verse that has resounded through the centuries, of the Divine Mysteries manifesting in the Heights and of the peace on Earth for men of good-will. And at this moment I imagine, especially in our time, the question will arise within our hearts: What then does mankind need, over the whole Earth's round, for the prospering of earthly evolution and of that peace of which the Gospel tells? Well, my dear friends, we have been speaking for weeks past of what is needful to mankind all the Earth over, especially in this our time—questionable as it is and so fraught with questions. And if we would gather up into a single sentence what has been passing through our souls in recent weeks—then we may say: It is necessary for men to strive ever more and more for a full mutual understanding.

This quest of a true mutual understanding among men coincides with what we explained yesterday as to the fundamental impulse underlying what we here call Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science strives for an insight into those things which can only be seen by spiritual vision in the world and in the evolution of the world. What is it that shall come to birth in human souls through this cosmic understanding? It is the true—not the apparent and illusory, but the true content of the social demands of the present time, and it consists in calling forth mutual understanding among men. We must strive for this understanding of humanity over the whole Earth—strive for it on the one hand with sincerity and on the other hand with strength. And this can only be done today with an active spiritual life, I mean a spiritual life which does not merely wish to devote itself to the world passively, but seeks to be inwardly active, partaking in the inner impulses of all existence and so arriving at an understanding of the world and man. Yesterday I told you, we are living in an age when new revelations of the Spirit are penetrating through the veil of outward phenomena. We cannot take this truth too earnestly. For he alone who takes it in full earnest will prove equal to the task which our age requires, of every single human being who claims to be awake in life.

If you will think back over many things which we have considered in the last few weeks, you will realize that this understanding of man over the whole Earth cannot be attained so easily as many people think. We have tried to throw light on the peculiarities of the groupings of peoples in the Western and Eastern regions of the Earth and in the Middle. Without letting sympathies or antipathies come into play in the very least, we have tried to understand what are the deepest characteristics of the peoples of the West, the Middle and the East respectively. Why did we do so? To take an example, we pointed out that our age is characterized especially by the development of intellectuality, and that in the Western—especially the English-speaking—peoples, this intellectuality comes to expression in such a way that it acts, as it were, instinctively. Whereas in the Middle peoples, intellect does not work instinctively—in fact, to begin with, it is not innate in them at all; they must acquire it by education. This, we showed, is a very significant difference between the peoples of the West and of the Middle. Thereafter we pointed to the peoples of the East and we said: There, the evolution of intellect comes to expression in such a way that, to begin with, the Eastern peoples actually recoil from it. They are loath to awaken this intellectuality to life within them; they want to preserve it for the knowledge of the Spirit-Self in the future. We pointed to other differentiations also, over the earth. Today let us ask ourselves: Why do we indicate these differentiations? Why do we seek from our point of view to characterize the different groups of people over the Earth? We do so, my dear friends, because in future the mere “Love one-another” will no longer suffice. In future, men will only attain mutual understanding as to their several tasks over the whole Earth if they know what is working in one or in another territory of the Earth. They must be able to look consciously at the several characteristics of the different groups of people. Once we can rise to the inner feeling, which is indeed essential to such understanding, this understanding will indeed be brought about. The feeling to which I refer, my dear friends, is this; the moment we begin to characterize human beings all the Earth over in this way, we must rid ourselves of the impulse to judge and value in the way we judge and value an individual human being as to his moral qualities. In seeking to characterize the nations it simply will not do to judge of their worth as we do in the case of a single human being. It is the very essence of the evolution of the individual human beings on Earth, that man develops the moral qualities as an individual being. Morality can only be evolved by the individual, not by groups of human beings. It would be the worst of illusions if we continued to believe that groups of human beings—or, as one likes to call them nowadays, nations—can enter into a like relationship to one another as man to man. One who can understand concretely what groups of human beings (nations, too, therefore) are in reality, will see the nations guided, as you know from our lecture cycle on the Folk Souls, by those Beings of the Hierarchies whom we call Archangels. He will never ascribe to the mutual relationship of nations that which he must see in the relation of one human being to another. What the nations are, they are in face of the Divine Beings. Here there arises a very different valuation from that which obtains as between man and man. It is for this very reason that man becomes an individual in the course of his evolution. He wrests himself free from the mere folk or nation, so that he may enter fully into what we call the moral order of the world. This moral order of the world is a concern of the individual man.

Such things must be understood by real spiritual knowledge. The true progress of Christianity itself in our time consists in this. I said the other day: We are living in a time when the Spirits of Personality rise in a sense to creative activity. They become Creators. This is exceedingly important, for inasmuch as they become Creator-Spirits there penetrates through the veil of phenomena what we described yesterday as a new revelation. The Spirits of Personality, therefore, are taking on the character of Creators. They become different in a sense from what they were before. They in their being take on a character like that which certain other Spirits (the Spirits of Form) possessed, for earthly evolution, since Lemurian times. This means that in a certain sense man will henceforth confront an altogether changed world-picture. We must become conscious of this, for this is the great thing in our time. Man is beginning to confront an altogether changed world picture, one that comes forth—to use a Goethean expression—out of the gray depths of the Spirit. If we look back with Spiritual Science into the historic evolution of mankind—we may look back into pre-Christian times—the farther we go back, the more we find that men possessed in an old instinctive way an extensive cosmic knowledge, which inspires us with all the greater reverence the more we learn to know it. For the seer it becomes a fact that at the outset of earthly evolution an immense Wisdom was poured out as it were over the earthly life of man. In course of time this Wisdom gradually filtered away. And strange as it may sound, my dear friends, yet it is true, it had reached a kind of zero level at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha came with a blessing to mankind. During that time all that humanity had known in former ages fell into a kind of chaos in the consciousness of man. Those who have understanding of these matters express themselves with perfect agreement on this fact. During that time, they say, the evolution into which man is woven had reached once more the point of utter ignorance. Yet into this gray ignorance which overlay mankind there fell the greatest earthly revelation—the Mystery of Golgotha—the starting point of new knowledge, new revelations for humanity.

Nevertheless, through many centuries, as concerns man himself, the dark gray ignorance persisted in a sense. It does enlighten us, my dear friends, in the deepest sense, if, looking back on the last two thousand years, we ask ourselves with understanding: What, after all, did men produce out of themselves during these last two thousand years? All they possessed by way of Wisdom (independent of the Mystery of Golgotha) was old tradition—inheritance from old traditions. Let us understand one another aright. Needless to say, I will not say humanity has had no Wisdom at all during the last two thousand years, nor will I cast aspersions on the Wisdom which they had. The point is this: The Wisdom that was present in the old pre-Christian times—whose relics are still observable in the last centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha—this Wisdom was seen, albeit instinctively, seen in the Spirit of the olden times. Now however they had lost the power of relating themselves, with independent spiritual vision, to the content of the cosmic Wisdom. What had existed in olden times was preserved, as it were, in a historic memory. Even the Mystery of Golgotha, as I said yesterday, was clothed in the old Wisdom, expressed in the conceptions of the old-remembered Wisdom.

All this went on through many centuries. An advance-guard—albeit only an advance guard—for a renewed penetration of man into Cosmic Wisdom emerged in the mode of thought of modern Natural Science. True, to begin with it emerges in an apparently godless form; yet it is so. It is something which man seeks to acquire by his own activity of soul. Have I not often emphasized that for the future men must learn to regard the spiritual world anthroposophically, even [as], since Copernicus, they have regarded the purely mechanical, external order of Nature? To learn to behold the Divine just as men learned to behold the outer mechanical aspect of the universe since Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno—this is the task that must permeate us if we would come to a true understanding of our time.

Of course there are many things against this true understanding of our time. Towards such understanding, as you know, such things are necessary as are said for instance in my book on Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment where we have shown what ways the soul must take to penetrate into the spiritual world even as Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno sought to penetrate the outward mechanical order of Nature. Those who have no deeper understanding for human aspirations may well be astonished that the most vigorous opposition arises out of the spirit of the old religious faiths (if we may call them so) against this endeavor to show what ways the human soul must take to find the spiritual world. It is especially so when the old spirit appears in the form of Jesuitism.

Among the many stupid accusations which have appeared in three articles in the Stimmen der Zeit this year, the following also occurs: “The Church,” they say, “forbids this treatment of the human soul to find the paths into the spiritual world.” My dear friends, for many a modern believer in authority this may sound like something new; but they fail to remember that the very same Church also forbade the researches of Copernicus and Galileo! The Church dealt with external scientific research in exactly the same way. We need not therefore wonder if it metes out the same treatment to the inner researches of spiritual science. It is only remaining true to its old habits. Even as the Catholic Church rebelled until 1827 against the Copernican doctrine, so it rebels against the conscious penetration into the spiritual world. This penetration into the spiritual worlds is no mere talking in abstractions; it is something real and concrete. It means that we transcend in fact once more the state of dark, gray ignorance and penetrate with knowledge into the underlying spiritual content of the world. Was it not also part of this gray ignorance that man looked out upon the world and saw the nations—the groups of human beings—and spoke of them as of a formless chaos. They spoke of the peoples of the West, of the Middle and of the East, but they did not distinguish nor characterize them. At best they knew that the leaders of the nations were Archangeloi, but they did not strive really to know the specific characters of the several nations—of the Archangeloi themselves. This belongs to the new revelation:—we must now observe and understand how the several Archangeloi are working over the face of the Earth. And this will be a real enrichment of man's consciousness all the Earth over. Through the very inability to rise from the dead level of gray ignorance to real differentiation, the gulf has been brought about which I described yesterday, between the subject of the Sunday sermons and what is regarded as the business of everyday life in the outer world. Within the sphere of the religious faiths they talk about the Divine World and its relation to mankind, but all this talking proves too feeble to penetrate the life and business of men on Earth. It can say no more to them than “Love one another,” which is about as sensible as if I were to say to the stove: Warm the room, that is your duty as a stove. Such teaching has not power really to take hold of the hearts of man. They cannot unite their knowledge of everyday affairs with what is brought down to them in this way as abstract precepts, customs, dogmas about the spiritual world. This gulf is there, my dear friends, and the religious faiths would only like to hold it fast.

The strangest flowers spring from the presence of this gulf and from the conscious desire to maintain it. The Jesuits, for instance, object to anthroposophical Spiritual Science because it looks for something in the human being which is capable of inner evolution so as to lead man to the Divine. To do so, they say, is heretical, for the Church teaches us and forbids us to say anything different from this—that God in His Being has nothing to do with the world, nay more, that in substantial identity He has nothing to do with the soul of man. He who declares that the soul of man bears something of the Divine Being within it in any respect whatever, is for the Catholic Church—as conceived by the Jesuits—a heretic.

Into such statements is instilled the inmost tendency of that Church, which is not to let the human beings reach to the Divine but to shut them off from it. Dogma itself assumes a form such as to prevent man from reaching the Divine. No wonder, therefore, since they have not been permitted to reach to the Divine, if in the fifth Post-Atlantean age (which had to bring the Spiritual Soul, once and for all) World-knowledge has become not a Divine but a pure Ahrimanic knowledge. For that which is recognized as Natural Science today is a purely Ahrimanic achievement. We have often characterized it thus. Strange, that the Catholic Church should prefer the Ahrimanic Natural Science to the anthroposophical; for the Ahrimanic Natural Science is no longer considered heretical today, while the anthroposophical Natural Science is anathematized.

A truly enlightened man of today needs to be clear about these things. He must recognize that the same thing must now need to be undertaken on the path of the Spirit as has hitherto been undertaken on the path of Nature. Only so can the path of Nature be saved from its aberration into a purely Ahrimanic realm. It has already suffered this aberration, because in fact the path of the Spirit could only be added to it at a later stage. But from now onwards and for the future of mankind, the path of the Spirit must be added to it, so that Natural Science may be lifted again to its Divine Spiritual height; so that the life in which we live between birth and death be reunited with the life of which the science of the Spirit has to tell, namely that life in which we live in the time between death and a new birth. Yet this will only happen in our time if we have the will really to understand this life all the Earth over, to understand it as it works in man himself.

Moreover we can only understand the single human being if we understand the character of human groupings. Only so shall we be enabled to see into the true reality.

Not long ago I drew your attention to a strange fact which may well surprise many people. I will repeat it briefly. You know that here in Switzerland there lived a worthy philosopher, Avenarius, who undoubtedly regarded himself as a good, law-abiding bourgeois citizen; who did not think himself in the remotest degree a revolutionary. He founded a school of thought written in so difficult a language that very few people can read it. Moreover, writing a rather more popular language, but in a similar sense, there lived a philosopher in Vienna and in Prague—Ernst Mach, who equally regarded himself as a good law-abiding citizen. Truly, neither of them has a vein of revolution in them. Yet the fact is, these two philosophers have become the official philosophers of the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks have adopted them as their State Philosophers—so we may put it, if we do not misunderstand the expression. True, Avenarius and Mach would turn in their graves if they were to discover that they are now looked up to by the Bolsheviks as their State Philosophers. As I said on the former occasion, we only do not understand such a phenomenon because we confine ourselves to abstract logic instead of holding fast to the logic of realities, the logic of facts, the logic of things seen. Though you may think that this lies far afield from your point of view, I will nevertheless refer to it again from another aspect. In particular, I will mention one point in the philosophy of Avenarius which may help us to answer the interesting questions: How could it be that Avenarius and Mach became the State Philosophers of the Bolsheviks? The very fact is after all significant enough of the utter confusion of our time.

Avenarius, you see, raises various questions. If we spoke in his technical language—of “introjections” and the like, of all the purely epistemological concepts he evolved—we should be speaking a pretty unintelligible language for most people. Yet in this unintelligible language he raises a question which is after all very interesting from the point of view of Spiritual Science. Avenarius asks: If a man were all alone in the world, would he still speak of the distinction between that which is in his own soul and that which is outside in the world? Would he still distinguish the subjective and the objective? Richard Avenarius is clever enough to declare: We are only tempted to speak of the difference between “subjective” and “objective” through the fact that we are not alone in the world. When we stand face to face with another man, we assume that that which we carry in our brains—of a table or of any other object—is in him too. By projecting into his brain the same picture which we carry in ourselves, the whole thing acquires a picture-like character, and this leads us to distinguish the things in our soul from the things outside—the things that we confront. Avenarius opines that if there were not other people outside us in the world we should not speak of the differences between that which is in our own soul and that which is outside us. We should regard ourselves as one with the things, merged with the things of the world. We should not distinguish ourselves from the world.

We may truly say, my dear friends, from a certain point of view Avenarius is right in his assertion, but from another point of view appallingly mistaken. It is indeed of some importance that in the course of our earliest childhood (though in our conscious memory we know nothing of that time) we came into touch with human beings. Our whole ideation—our whole way of thinking—was influenced by this. It is quite true, things would be very different if we had not come into touch with others; but they would not be as Avenarius supposes. He who can apprehend the underlying facts by spiritual vision arrives at the real truth. Our whole world-picture would indeed be different if at the time in life when we cannot yet think consciously we did not meet with other human beings. But this is the curious thing, my dear friends. The different world-picture which we then should have would contain the spiritual Beings who underlie the world. It would not be as Avenarius supposes. Incidentally, what a dreadful abstraction! We should not fail to distinguish ourselves from the world if we were alone in the world and there were no other human beings. Behind the minerals and plants (for there would have to be no animals, they too would disturb the world-picture by their presence) we should perceive the Divine-Spiritual World. In other words, my dear friends, our living-together with other men is the reason why, in the ordinary way of life, we do not perceive the spiritual world behind the plants and minerals. Our fellow-men place themselves before this spiritual world and hide it from us. Think what this means! At the cost of not perceiving the Divine world of the Hierarchies, we acquire all that comes to us through our living together with other men on the physical Earth. Our fellow-men place themselves before the world of the Gods and hide it from us, as it were. Naturally, Avenarius was unaware of this, hence he carried the question in an entirely wrong direction. He imagined that if no human being were there we should see ourselves unseparated from the world—should not distinguish ourselves from the world. The truth is we should distinguish ourselves—not indeed from other men or from plants and minerals—but from the Gods whom we should then have all round us. That is the truth.

If you consider this you will realize what is very important to realize in our time. Strange to say, it is in many respects our destiny today! Precisely the most penetrating spirits of our time will often touch on the most vital questions—yet always so as to lead them in the most wrong direction, so as to lead away from the perception of the Spirit. It would indeed be difficult to lead away from the perception of the Spirit more radically than Avenarius does. His philosophy is extremely sharp-witted—written with all the refinement of professorial language—and it is therefore well-adapted to lead men away from the Spirit in a state of sleep. And when men are led asleep away from the Spirit they regard this leading away from the Spirit as a necessity—a kind of mathematical necessity. So long as they do not observe that they are being led away from the Spirit, they take it all as scientifically proven. That is the one thing, my dear friends.

Here we have a philosopher (and much the same could be said of Mach) the inmost nerve of whose thought is to found a system which shall lead man radically away from the Spirit. In Bolshevism, my dear friends, the intention is to found a social order to the exclusion of all things spiritual—to group mankind in their social life so that the Spiritual plays no part in it at all. That is the real inner connection of the two, and it makes itself connection of the two, and it makes itself felt in the logic of facts. Not for a mere external reason but by a deep inner kinship, Avenarius and Mach became the State Philosophers of the Bolsheviks.

You see, it is quite possible—with judgments that are prevalent today—to stand more or less fixedly before these things in blank astonishment. How do the Bolsheviks come to have Avenarius and Mach as State Philosophers? For us however it is possible even now to see the real inner connections. Only to do so, we must look for the underlying spiritual facts, as we have done in this instance, where we perceive how it would be in reality if man [were] alone on the physical Earth without any other men. There are many facts and phenomena entering into our life today—especially in the mutual relationships of men—which paralyze men's minds to contemplate, because they can gain no understanding of them without Spiritual Science. I have just given an instance from the spiritual life; quite everyday facts, however, might also be mentioned in this way.

Do not imagine that it was so in all ages. Such phenomena also existed in ancient times, but they were instinctively intelligible to men—intelligible by the old instinctive clairvoyance. Then, through the long gray period of ignorance, such phenomena were absent from the mutual intercourse of men. Now they are making their appearance once more. Not that the souls of men are evolving; the world is evolving. The world itself is changing, and it reveals its change to begin with in the mutual intercourse of men. In the next epoch it will also reveal the change in the relation of man to the other kingdoms of Nature. Life will remain unintelligible to men, in the present and in the immediate future, so long as they are unwilling to consider it through Spiritual Science. Illusion after illusion will take hold of the soul, if man will not have recourse to the spiritual-scientific concepts. There are some here present to whom at the outbreak of the present War-catastrophe I repeated one thing again and again. It is quite possible, I said, to write of the so-called world-historic facts of the last few centuries according to the records in the archives—by looking up the records and writing histories in the style of Ranks of the rest. But of the outbreak of this War-catastrophe it is impossible to write so. However much they delve into the archives, if they do not observe what was the mood of soul of those who were concerned in the outbreak of this War, and how this mood of soul gave entry for the Ahrimanic powers into the Earth's affairs, and how thereby the causes of this War-catastrophe came from an Ahrimanic side—if, in a word, they are willing to observe the starting-point of this catastrophe with Spiritual Science, it will remain forever dark. This War-catastrophe, my dear friends, is a real challenge to mankind, to learn from it. Much can be learned from what happened during the last four or five years as a consequence of the preceding events. Above all things, we should learn to put certain questions, not so one-sidedly as heretofore, but in keeping with the real needs of the time.

As I have often said, we have no reason to comfort ourselves too lightly about the misfortunes of our time, still less to shut our eyes to them. But we have also no reason to be pessimistic. Only consider the following. We can say to ourselves: immense and terrible events have taken place in the last four or five years over the Earth. And yet, what is the essential thing in all these terrors? It is what human souls have experienced through them. That is the essential thing—what human souls have experienced through these events, with respect to their soul's evolution, needless to say throughout all Earth-existence. Seen in this light, a question fraught with deep significance emerges. The question is strange and paradoxical, but so only because it is fraught with such deep meaning, unaccustomed to our everyday thought. Could we really desire that mankind should have lived on without any such catastrophe, in the way they had grown accustomed to live until the year 1914? Can we really say that that would have been desirable? In putting this question I may be permitted once again to point to what I said before the outbreak of this War, in my lecture cycle at Vienna (April 1914, Cycle XXXII). I said: If we really see what is living in the world of man today, the mutual relationship of men, their social life, appears to us like a social carcinoma—a cancerous growth—eating its way through mankind. Men had only shut their eyes to this carcinoma of the social commonweal. They were unwilling to look the real facts in the face. No one who sees things at their deepest could say that it would have been good for mankind to go on in that way. For on the lines which I have indicated they would have gone more and more downhill, farther and farther from the Spirit. And as to those to whom we look with souls full of pain—the millions who have been swept away from the physical plane by this dread catastrophe and who are now living on as souls—they it is who ponder most of all how different now their situation is, inasmuch as they are spending the rest of their life in the spiritual world; how different it would have been if their Karma had still kept them on the physical Earth.

Sub specie aeterni—from the aspect of eternity—things after all appear quite different, and this must not be left unsaid. Only on the other hand we must not take these things lightly or superficially. True as it is, it is infinitely sad that this catastrophe has taken place, yet it is no less true, my dear friends; by this very catastrophe man has been preserved from an appalling downfall into materialism and utilitarianism. And though it does not yet show itself today, yet it will show itself—above all in the Middle Countries and the East, where, in place of an order that had been imbued with materialism, a state of chaos is now developing. Truly we cannot refer to this chaos without an undertone of pain and suffering. I mean the social chaos which has overcome the Middle and Eastern countries, and that shows outwardly little prospect of transforming into any kind of harmony. And yet there is another aspect. Wherever this chaos exists, the world in the near future will give men very, very little through the purely physical plane. The blessings of the physical plane will truly not be great in the Middle and the Eastern countries. Of all that can be given to man so that he feels his life sustained by external powers—of this there will be precious little. Man will have to take hold of himself in his own soul in order to stand fast, and in the very act of doing so he will be able to set forth along the path into the spiritual world. He will resolve to go towards the Spirit, whence alone the salvation of the future can come. This, my dear friends, will be the essential thing for the future. Our outer bodily existence will, as it were, be slipping away from us. The outer bodily nature, as I said yesterday, will no longer be so sound and healthy as in times past; it has more death in it than it had in bygone ages. The content of the World-riddle is not to be found with that with which our bodily nature is connected; no, we must rise into the spiritual world to find the necessary impulse, and also the impulse which we need for the social order. This insight will arise when men are able to find as little as possible in the physical world. For the physical world itself will only be able to assume a form of harmony when it seeks for this form out of the spiritual life.

The Bible, my dear friends, in its first pages, does not tell us that is was Lucifer or Ahriman who drove man out of Paradise; it was the Jahve—God Himself who did so. And as we know, this very expulsion from paradise signifies man's becoming free—the conscious experience of freedom by mankind. The possibility, the seed of freedom, was given by the expulsion from Paradise. Is it then contrary to the Biblical wisdom if we say: Once more, it was Divine Wisdom which drove men out of the present age that was leading them down into materialism and utilitarianism, thus planting seeds, which, spiritually taken hold of, can really help the world. It sounds to us out of the painful depths of the last four-and-a-half years: “Spiritual life is wishing to reveal itself through the veil of the outward phenomena; men shall learn through misfortune to turn their eyes to these revelations of the Spirit, and it will be for their salvation.”

This too is a language which will seem paradoxical to many a modern man and yet, it is the language which Christ Himself is guiding us to speak. Today it lies inherent in the very progress of Christianity to grasp the Christian truths in a new way. This can only be done if they are taken hold of spiritually. The Mystery of Golgotha, my dear friends, is a spiritual event which has entered into the evolution of the Earth. It can only be fully understood by a spiritual way of knowledge. As in the last resort it was through misfortune that mankind found the Christ, we too shall have to seek through our misfortune for the Christ through the new way of comprehension.

I admit, my dear friends, this is no ordinary comfort. Yet if we are ready to put all trivialities aside in the deeper sense of the word it is after all no little comfort, nay perhaps, it is the only comfort in our time, worthy of the dignity of man. It is not the kind of comfort which says to man: Only wait, and without your cooperation all the divine things will be vouchsafed to you! Rather does it say: Make use of your own forces, and you will find that the God is speaking and abounding in your souls. Then, through this God, you will also find the God in the great Universe, and—which is the most important—you yourselves will be able to work in communion with Him. We must depart from the mere passive attitude to super-sensible knowledge. Man must bestir himself within to find himself, and as he does so, recognize himself as part of the World-Order. Let the religious faiths rebel, which want to make things nice and comfortable for lulling a man's spirit to sleep in clouds of incense (I speak figuratively) so that he may then find his way to the Divine passively and without active cooperation on his part. Let them rebel however much against the call that now springs forth out of the spiritual worlds!—“Man shall now look for his true worth in inner spiritual activity—in the active inner development of spiritual life!”

This, my dear friends, must be; and it must be so especially if we are to reckon with the social demands of our time. I have said so already in these weeks. We are living—at any rate, a great part of our educated humanity are living—from the achievements of Greek culture; but we do not always remember how these achievements, by which we live, were created. Greek civilization was unfolded on a basis of slavery. A great proportion of mankind had to live as slaves in order to bring about at all what we now feel as the blessings of Greek culture. Let us face the fact fully and clearly. All that Greek Art, Greek learning signifies—all this and many other things arose on the foundation of slavery. Then, my dear friends, we shall ask ourselves with renewed intensity: What is it that has brought about the inner change? We today no longer think as did the great philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, who took slavery as an absolute matter of course. At that time it went without saying, even for the wisest of men, that nine-tenths of mankind must live as slaves. For us today it no longer goes without saying. On the contrary, we regard it as an offence against the dignity of man that anyone should think so. What was it then that brought it about for Western humanity—this radical change in men's way of thought? It was Christianity which freed men from slavery and led them to recognize, at least in principle, that all men are equal before God, as to their soul. For this was the principle which uprooted slavery out of the social order of mankind. But as we know—for we must refer to it again and again from many points of view—one thing has been left behind until our day. It is that of which I told you that it is the salient point in the consciousness of the modern working man. One thing has been left behind, namely the possibility—in our social order—for a part of the human being to be bought as a commodity and sold by himself as a commodity. Moreover it is a part of man that takes its course in his very body. The salient point of the social question—the perpetual irritant, the thing that continually incites—is the fact that human labor-power can be paid for. This too creates at the very foundations of all our social order the character of Egoism. For egoism cannot but prevail in the social (I say once more, in the social order—please understand me aright) if to obtain what he requires for his own needs a man must get his labor paid for. He is obliged to earn for himself.

This is the next and necessary stage—after the overcoming of slavery—it must be made impossible for any man's labor to be a commodity. This is the true salient point of the social question, and it is this which the new Christianity will solve. In recent lectures I have told you something of the solving of the social question. For that three-folding of the social order, of which I told you there, sets free the commodity from the labor-power of man. In future, men will only buy and sell commodities—outer objects, things separate from man himself—which (as I wrote already in my essay on Theosophy and the Social Question which appeared in 1905) one man will work for another from motives of brotherly love.

It may be a long way to go to attain this end. Yet this and this alone will solve the social question. Whoever will not believe today that this must come about in the world-order is like a man who would have said, at the time of the origin of Christianity: “Slaves there must always be.” Even as he would have been wrong at that time, so likewise today the man is wrong who says: “Labor must always be paid for.” At that time it seems unimaginable that a certain number of men should not be slaves. Not even Plato or Aristotle could conceive it. Today the cleverest of men cannot conceive a social order wherein Labor would have quite another value—quite another meaning than of being paid for. Needless to say, even then the product will proceed from the labor, but the product alone will be able to be bought and sold. Socially, this very fact will be the salvation of men.

To realize these things it is indeed necessary to have the knowledge of spiritual vision, the logic of things seen. Without it humanity will not go forward. The logic of spiritual vision is the fuel to create what must arise among mankind in future, namely that human love which springs from the understanding between man and man. Strange as it sounds, my dear friends, today, when all manner of atavistic remnants are still there in men in one way or another—today everything is still regarded with sympathies and antipathies. So it is, for instance, when we explain such distinctions as I here did a little while ago. I said that of the three members of human nature the Western peoples are called especially to develop the abdominal nature, the Middle peoples the heart-nature and the Eastern peoples the head nature. Nowadays, such things are nearly always treated as judgments of relative value, in one way or another. At least, somewhere inside him every man still has a little pigeon-hole where he does so. Such valuation must absolutely cease, for this very vision of the differentiations of mankind over the whole Earth's sphere will become the basis of sympathetic, understanding love. From understanding, not from ignorance, true human love—reaching over the whole Earth—will spring, during this age of the Spiritual Soul. Then will men know, over the whole Earth, how to find themselves in Christ. Christ is no concern of one nation or another. He concerns all mankind; but to recognize this, many an illusion must first give way.

Men must be able to raise themselves, to look without illusions into the true nature of things. Today, in many spheres of life, they are unwilling to do so. And yet, I know I am speaking in the spirit of the true Christmas peace in placing the following paradox before you. My dear friends, you know well that I am not speaking of the individual human beings but of the nations as a whole when I refer to these differentiations. It is so easy to misunderstand these things unless one has good will. As I have pointed out so often, the single human individuality who grows out of the nation is not intended; only nations as such. I beg you to bear this in mind when I now say the following:—

You see, my dear friends, let us consider the one or other of the judgments which have been passed during the last four years on the countries, or States, of the Middle of Europe. I can thoroughly understand such feelings. I do not want to say anything in the least against those who are filled with enthusiasm for the Entente. Far be it from me—everyone has his opinion, and that is justified from a certain point of view. But, my dear friends, suppose we now look away from the opinion which prevailed in the past few years and consider its prolongation in the present time. Then after all, perhaps we may find something rather hard for understanding. For we may ask ourselves: Is it necessary for the judgments which were passed, while the potentates of the middle countries held the reins of power, to be continued now? Nay is it necessary to do all that one can—and by the most refined of methods—so as to be able to prolong these judgments? Is it necessary? Is it equally explicable? Superficially considered, it is certainly not so easy to explain as many such things were before. More deeply considered however, it is still explicable, my dear friends. More deeply considered we can understand it—albeit not out of the character of the individuals (for the individuals themselves in Western countries will want to bring about a healing of these matters). Those, however, whose judgments merely spring from their respective nationalities, or rather, national prejudices—they have in their subconsciousness something which we may characterize as follows:—

Some weeks ago I explained that in our conception of the world and notably our way of thinking at the present time much that belongs to the Old Testament is still alive, while the essential nerve of Christianity has only entered to a slight extent as yet. Now it is characteristic of Jahve-worship that it concerns all those things to which we do not bring ourselves up between our birth and death, but which are given to us as an inheritance—i.e., the things which lie inherent in our blood, which in the normal course only have influence on us while we sleep, while we ourselves are outside the body. This Jahve-conception still lives and throbs in our time to a very large extent, and it can only rise into the Christ-conception if we turn in this intellectualistic age with all our power to the conquest of the spiritual world, not through birth, not through what is inspired into us with our birth, but through our own self-education in this life. Now by nature the West is not predestined to pass from the service of Jahve to that of Christ. Such predestination only begins in the Middle of Europe and goes towards the East. This applies once more, needless to say, not to the individual but to the nation. Hence, my dear friends, the characteristic form of Wilsonian thought, steeped as it is entirely in Old Testament conceptions. However much it may deny the fact, the form of thought stands out as though it would fain exterminate what is trying spiritually to emerge in the Middle Countries and in the East. Hence it is outwardly so hard to understand. Under all manner of pretexts, these people still prolong the same hostile spirit, though they have swept away what they professed they wanted to sweep away, and only the peoples themselves are left, against whom—so they assured us—they had no ill intentions. They do so because in reality they are resisting what has arisen in spiritual evolution in the Middle Countries and in the East during the last few centuries, which, nonetheless, is necessary to mankind. Subconsciously, they want to expunge it. They do not want to enter into these things.

We are now living in a most important crisis of the world. I have often heard people ask; how is it that the men of the West especially the English and the French—have such a dreadful hatred of the Germans? There is a very simple answer, my dear friends, and yet it is an exhaustive answer. Man always sees himself differently (especially himself as member of a nationality) than he sees his fellow men. I can assure you, my dear friends, such thoughts as Mach had when he got into the bus or walked along the street are very often there in the subconscious lives of men. You know how Mach himself relates the story. Once, very tired, he got into a bus and did not notice that there was a mirror on the side opposite the door. Someone else, he thought, got in at the same time from the other side, and he said to himself: What a horrid old schoolmaster that is! He knew himself very little in his outward person and when he saw himself he did not like it at all.

Now, my dear friends, observe the spiritual history of Middle Europe—not in its more intimate features but as a whole. Down to Lessing, far down into the last third of the 18th century, the Germans took pains to be like the French. You could see it in everything. From a certain moment onward (approximately in the 12th century) till far beyond the middle of the 18th century, the Germans endeavored to be like the French—to behave in such a way that they also might become Frenchmen. What the French could not see in themselves—or, if they saw it, were inclined to rate it highly—all this they hated with a dreadful hatred when they saw it in the imitation. Unconsciously, man does indeed practice a strange form of self-knowledge. At bottom, in their deepest being, the Germans were never hated by the French. The French only hated themselves when they saw their mirrored image in the German soul.

Since then a very remarkable English influence has arisen, the extent of which is by no means adequately realized. The English naturally see themselves just as little as Mach did; but they notice themselves well enough when they see themselves in this mirrored image which has entered so strongly into the German soul since the 18th century. It is the Englishman whom they now judge in the German. There is the simple psychological solution, my dear friends. If the world-crisis had not arisen, this state of affairs would have gone on for a long time, and we should have a great mixture, as it were a broth, out of which single individualities would nevertheless have arisen, possessing the intimate qualities of the true German. Now, however, out of the world-crisis, chaos and misfortune will cause to arise what must arise: that which was always present, though under the power of the West it was unable to unfold. These are the real facts. There is no ground for pessimism, even in Middle Europe. We must only dive to the deeper foundations which underlie the process of evolution.

My dear friends, what the Entente Powers are doing today may appear thus, or thus. It matters very little how it appears, for at the bottom of their hearts they are wanting what is quite impossible. They are wanting to prevent the rise of something which absolutely must unfold in the Middle of Europe and in the East, for it is connected with the spiritual progress of mankind; it cannot be prevented. But it must also call forth this, my dear friends:—If man is to take the future of the Earth in earnest he must truly have faith in the Spirit; only out of the power of the Spirit will there come what must come, even for the solving of the burning social needs of our time. In the machine age it was necessary for these 50 million invisible human beings—that is to say, human beings visible as machines—to arise, so that men might gradually learn to feel that they must not be paid like machines are paid. And it was also necessary for this appalling catastrophe to arise, wherein the machine age has celebrated its greatest triumphs. Out of this catastrophe man will begin to unfold his real strength, and as he does so, he will gain a certain power once more to unite himself with the Divine and Spiritual. If we may now compare what many people have rightly called the most appalling event in the Earth's history with the beginning of Earth-evolution we may say: just as it was no mere misfortune for men to be driven out of Paradise, so too it is no mere misfortune that such a catastrophe has overtaken mankind.

In the end, my dear friends, the most valuable truths are paradoxes today, as I have often pointed out, we may well say: Men were so infamous as to nail to the Cross the greatest Being Who ever appeared on the Earth—Jesus Christ. They killed Him. We may well say that it was infamous of them. And yet this Death, my dear friends, is the very content of Christianity; for through this Death there took place what we call the Mystery of Golgotha. Without it there would be no Christianity. This Death is the good fortune of men; this Death is the abounding strength of earthly man. So paradoxical are things in their reality. For on the one hand we may say: how infamous it was of men to nail Christ to the Cross; and yet, with this Death—this nailing to the Cross—the greatest event on Earth is brought about. A misfortune is not always merely a misfortune; often it is the starting-point for the achievement of human greatness and of human strength.

The seminar evening is based on the three previous lectures by Roman Boos on “Phenomenological Social Science” from October 4, 5 and 6, 1920. The discussion will be opened.

Hermann Eichenberger: I would like to ask the speaker a question. If we strive to transform public life in the spirit of threefolding, then we have to consider in which area we can begin. So I would like to ask: Can one start with the transformation of public life in the political and legal sphere? More precisely: Is it correct to think of the legal leadership in such a way that people place their trust in a certain leadership - or not? It concerns the way the legislative body is elected, the electoral system. In the “Key Points” this is described as a fundamental issue.

Eugen Kolisko is of the opinion that it is necessary to ensure that there is a base in parliament from which one can work for threefolding. For example, an appeal has been circulated by Dr. Thomastik calling for Austria to be combined into a single constituency, albeit without reference to the threefolding idea. But it is not possible to keep quiet about threefolding.

Roman Boos shares Dr. Kolisko's view. Above all, a national educational program is needed on a large scale; lectures must be given so that the idea of threefolding pervades people's minds. The matter that Dr. Thomastik has raised is only a surrogate, no matter how beautifully conceived and well-intentioned it may be.

Hermann Eichenberger emphasized that Mr. Thomastik had shown courage; he had also given lectures on the threefold social order.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! I do not have much to say about this matter, after what I have heard about it. You can imagine from my previous work that at the moment I stood up for the threefold social organism, I considered it a necessity to introduce this threefold social organism into the public life of modern civilization first. And since then, I have repeatedly stated on a wide variety of occasions that, after a thorough examination of the conditions of modern life, the situation is as follows: either we manage to make the impulse of threefolding truly popular, so that it comes to life – it is not utopian, it must come to life – or we will not make any progress at all. You can read about this again in my collected essays on the threefold social order, which have just been published by the Stuttgart publishing house of Kommenden Tages; the book is called “In Ausführung der Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus”.

And so perhaps I may say that every such comment, that one should present the threefold order in a disguised way, reminds me of what I have experienced with anthroposophy for 20 years, namely that very clever people have come again and again and said: Yes, somehow presenting anthroposophy, we can't do that, we first have to somehow make it more palatable in some other way and the like. I myself have never chosen any other path than to present Anthroposophy to the world in an absolutely true and unadorned way, and I have always rejected everything that did not openly advocate for Anthroposophy, thereby incurring sufficient enmity, which is of no concern to me in essence. And so I can only say, my dear assembled guests, that when it comes to seeking the most direct and rapid way to work for the threefold social order, I am quite happy to speak wherever I am invited. If people want to come up with all kinds of secondary proposals, for example, with proposals for modifications to this or that electoral law, which would only be considered if we were in the process of implementing the threefold social order and had political-legal link had been crystallized out of the social organism. When people come up with such things, I have to say that they seem to me – and I say this entirely without emotion – like a renewal of old political wheeling and dealing, and I am not interested in that. I am not interested in it! Now the question is being asked:

I would like to ask Dr. Steiner about how one should imagine the organization of a free spiritual life. Experience shows that artists, scientists and other intellectual workers are the hardest to bring to reasonable cooperation. How can one think of such an organization? Can it even be an organization in the usual sense?

Dear attendees, I would like to start by emphasizing one thing in response to this question: The threefold order of the social organism, as presented in my Key Points of the Social Question and elsewhere, is very often spoken of as if it were some kind of utopia, whereas everything that is presented in it comes from a thoroughly practical way of thinking and also pursues the goal of being taken up in a practical way. On the other hand, however, the character of utopianism, of utopia, is being stamped on this threefold social order movement through numerous questions, even from well-meaning people. It really cannot be a matter of taking the fifth and sixth steps today if one wants to be a practical person without first taking the first step. Now, however, this question points to a difficulty in taking the first step. In the case of the life of the spirit, which in the direction of the impulse of threefolding must be a free life of the spirit, one can of course least of all expect that it can somehow be reorganized overnight. But one could realize threefolding overnight, realize it immediately. One can really do it. One would have to do nothing else but realize it in the same way as the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. And I must, if only to bring the whole discussion down from the abstract heights at which it has been conducted today, to something more concrete, point to this concrete manifestation of the Waldorf School, which has now been in existence for a year.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, when a number of people sit down to make decisions based on principle, for example, regulations for the school system with regard to curricula and teaching times, then – and I mean this quite seriously – these people are basically always very clever, of course. And if you put it together, paragraphs 1, 2 and 3 can be made in such a way that you say: the teacher should teach in a certain way, this or that subject must be taught according to these or those principles, and so on. And I am convinced that, in their abstract content, these dozens of paragraphs could contain something extraordinarily beautiful and powerful, but only in abstract form. Whether they can be applied depends entirely on whether the people are available to do so. Let us assume the most extreme case: let us assume that in a particular age and territory, due to some conditions, we only have people who cannot rise above a certain level of education because, in a particular territory and in a particular period of time, no geniuses are born, only 200 people of average intelligence. Now, one can be quite convinced – if one has real thinking, one sees this immediately – that even then these moderately clever people will elect their best representatives, and when these meet, that they will still make their best paragraphs 1, 2 and 3 and so on, for example, that teachers should teach in this or that subject in this or that way. But all that is not what matters in the world at all. If we really want to take account of the available forces, then it is first of all important to bring together those who are considered capable from among the people.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is what has been attempted, for example, at the Waldorf School. And no paragraphs have been drawn up; at most, I have given a lecture course and held seminars before we opened the school. We also had many discussions together during the school year. I have also held a short seminar course again before the opening of the second school year. But everything that is done in the Waldorf School is done by the community of those personalities who are there, that is, out of their abilities, out of their strengths; without any [paragraphs] being put in place, everyone does their best according to their abilities. And there we have a small circle of what you will now call it, an organization of the free spiritual life, there you have a small circle that is completely self-sufficient, that works entirely from its own abilities and intentions. At some point, something like a section had to be taken out of the other states. It was possible in Württemberg because there was still a gap in the school law, and this gap could be used to bring in this Waldorf school. Here in the canton of Solothurn, it could not be done, as is well known. The thing is, therefore, not to go to abstractions, but to people and let people do what they can really do. Now, however, a difficulty is indicated here. It would, of course, be possible if the impulse of threefolding were properly understood, that the representatives of intellectual life would simply find themselves in some territories, which have already been given from previous history, in a wide circle, wanting nothing more than to understand the to understand the self-sufficiency of intellectual life; that is to say, that these representatives of intellectual life – the majority will, after all, consist of the various teachers of the various institutions – that these various representatives of intellectual life would really find the courage to stand on their own.

We have begun in Stuttgart to found a so-called cultural council – I have already pointed this out here on another occasion – and of course we first had to approach those who are concerned. Now, my dear attendees, you cannot suddenly want to place other people in the cultural life than are already there. It is self-evident that anyone who thinks practically will first say to themselves: We want to realize the threefold social order, not create some utopia in a cloud cuckoo land. - So, of course, the first step is to take into account those workers in the spiritual life who are already there. And it is important to realize that this intellectual life is now on its own, that it has detached itself from the unified state. Just by doing that, something is really happening. But it was not very well received, because the university professors in particular said: Well, if the universities were to administer themselves, then my colleague would be the one to help administer it - no, I still prefer to have a minister on the outside. - Because no colleague actually trusts the other. Of course, this is something that must be overcome. But when it comes to real thinking, the situation is as follows: No matter how many artists, scientists and intellectual workers want to go their own way for my sake, the decisive thing is that the spiritual life is self-contained, so that in education and teaching, from the lowest school class to the university professor, nothing but the voice of those who are actively involved in this spiritual life is decisive. Whatever needs to be decided within the spiritual life must be decided on the grand scale, as it is decided in our Waldorf school, that is, only by those who are involved in this spiritual life, not by some parliament or the like or by some ministry that is outside, or at most by a consultant who, because he has grown too old for the teaching profession, has to take care of the department in the Ministry of Education afterwards.

What is important everywhere is that the idea of the threefold social order enters people's minds in its true form. Then it will be seen that it is not a matter of reflecting on these details, but of ensuring that spiritual life is truly externalized simply by the representatives of this spiritual life feeling that they are on their own, and of course being on their own, in that no state can do anything about it. When they feel they have to rely on themselves, a completely different kind of work will be done in this spiritual life. And then, out of this spiritual life, there will arise that which is progress in the sense of the threefold social order and of a true humanity. So it is a matter of not thinking that you have to line up and do something, like lining up lead soldiers in columns, but you have to take life as it is and just bring threefolding into it, and of course you have to take the people who are there now. But it is also a matter of nothing more than these people understanding what is really in the idea of threefolding. So this can be said in answer to such a question.

Yes, my dear audience, there is an organization in spiritual life, things are organized: primary schools are there, and secondary schools and universities are there; an organization, a certain fabric of spiritual life is there. It is not a matter of remelting it all, but of freeing the spiritual life and then letting things happen - and a great deal will certainly happen when the spiritual life is free and left to its own devices. Then those who are fools outside will not be heard. We have a great many complaints about our Waldorf School; we have a great many complaints, in all areas, including here in Dornach, that no one gives us money; but we really have no complaints that the Waldorf School is not heard. They are very gladly heard, one would like to hear the teachers everywhere, they cannot do enough and they are almost torn apart. Those who have something to say will be heard. But that is what it is about; I will also talk about it.

Now the second question:

How does the association present itself in comparison to corporate organizations?

Well, my dear attendees, I would like to tell you, again starting from something concrete: in economic life, too, it is important, as I said on another evening, to really think economically, that is to say, one can think economically in economic life and not think economically in the sense of legal or in the sense of how one has to think in the spiritual organism, but one can really think economically in economic life. Of course, difficulties still arise today; but that is not the point, because these difficulties could gradually be overcome in a very specific way, which I will indicate in a moment. But the point is not to see how the difficulties arise, but rather that one should first of all really take up the associative impulse.

Now, what did we do in Stuttgart after we started working there in April of last year? You see, we didn't just make some kind of abstract attempt and then declaim how the associations should be formed, for example among shoemakers. Instead, we took up a thought that was popular at the time. At the time we took it up, it was not only popular in the proletariat, but was even popular in the business world: the concept of works councils. But we wanted to have the concept of works councils, the institution of works councils, in the sense of threefolding. What did we do? We tried to make the following point to those people who were interested in it – and there were a great many of them at a certain point in time: if the institution of works councils is introduced in an economic area, then it is, of course, foolish to impose legislation in the factories, whereby works councils are introduced in the individual factories, which work there, supervise and the like – that is not the point. That this cannot be the case was most clearly demonstrated when the Soviet Republic was introduced in Hungary – please read the extremely interesting book by Varga, who, I might add, was at the cradle, where he was People's Commissar for Economic Affairs and President of the Supreme Economic Council.

The aim is not to introduce works councils in the way that has now been done in the completely absurd German laws, but to form a works council from the economic life and its individual situations itself. And the idea of allowing a council to emerge from the various branches of economic life, be they branches that are more oriented towards consumption or production, be they members of this or that class, in short, to allow the council members to emerge from economic life, this idea was also popularized among the proletarians. The electoral procedure would have been worked out, once it had been established that business personalities should emerge, who would then come together to form a kind of economic constituent assembly, which would have been a body to be formed across a closed economic area and which would have worked first of all. This was always my message at every discussion evening with the Stuttgart workers' committees, at which this matter was discussed – which had actually progressed quite a bit before it was made impossible. The next thing to be done is for the proletarian to stop talking out of habit in empty phrases and thinking he knows everything. This has been emphasized over and over again.

Now I will give an example, one I have always liked to give to proletarians: After the threefold social order had been discussed, a man stood up for discussion who spoke from a communist point of view and declared that he could say better than anyone else everything that was said about the threefold social order. And so he rattled off a few Communist phrases, and then he said that he was only a cobbler. Now, of course, there was no need to hold that against him, because it is truly not a matter of whether someone is a cobbler or something else. He meant that as a cobbler he could not be a civil servant, but he implied that he could very well be a minister, for example. Well, you see, above all, it was made clear to the people of us that it would be about working; and anyone who thinks practically knows that, through the community, if things are managed properly, a higher level can actually be achieved, at least a higher level than that which each individual, even the most ingenious in the community, has; more can be achieved in the community. The first task of this association of workers' councils as a community should be explained.

So what is the first step towards this association? Not asking all kinds of detailed questions before we have even taken the first step, before we have properly examined life and then, on the basis of this examination, formed an idea of how we can come to associations. But this is possible for everyone, at whatever point in life they are, if they are truly immersed in life, if life strikes them, they can in some way see how they can come together with those closest to them in an associative way – as long as they are not a mere rentier who is not immersed in real life, namely not in [real] economic life. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what must be considered the first step in economic life: that one must come to associations at all – just as in the spiritual realm, the main thing is that people understand what it means to become independent within the spiritual realm. That is what needs to be said about these two areas for the time being. And when these two areas now understand how to stand on the ground that must be recognized by their own essence as theirs, then the political and legal area remains in the end. Then this will already be found, because the first thing to do is to properly form these two wings: intellectual life and economic life. The other thing remains. That will only be found when order has been created in these two wings. That is what must be said about the political and legal life from the idea of threefolding.

Now to an objection:

In Mr. Ith's lecture, it was said that the relationship between the price of goods and the individual production costs should be regulated by the legal system.

Now, if that had really been said, it would of course be a mistake, because the legal field has nothing to do with the price of goods. The price of goods can essentially only arise from that which is determined by the associations as the mutual value according to the principle of the economic primal cell, which has already been mentioned here.

It has not been clearly stated that these relationships are not established in the legal sphere, but only in the economic sphere.

Now, the essential thing is this: that both the distribution of what is produced in the product of labor, which is of course a matter for the economic sphere, and the other thing, [prices], that is quite clear.

Another question:

Will the price of goods have to be fixed?

Dear attendees, if you think in real terms, then it cannot be a matter of setting the price of goods, and it is precisely the threefold social order that must be thought of in real terms and not in abstract terms. If you think in real terms, then you will come to the conclusion that the price of goods is something that arises simply in a particular territory due to the fact that a certain number of people within that territory need certain things in a certain quantity. And it will be necessary to know: only if this price cannot be maintained at a certain level, if the price becomes too high and if this is noticed, then it is necessary that the associations ensure that this product is not produced too little. After all, the aim is to organize economic life in such a way that a price that results from needs can really be maintained at its level. This cannot be achieved by setting a price, because it is clear that if the price of any product is too low, then too much of that product will be produced. And then it is a matter of regulating this production by redirecting the workers who work on it to another area. But if a price that is too high is paid for it, the opposite is the case.

It is not a matter of making laws. The associations will not have the power to make laws; the associations will have to work continuously to ensure that, firstly, unnecessary work is not actually done, with much being wasted, as I have already described here, and, secondly, that everyone is actually placed in the position where they can work best, but in the interest of the whole. These associations will have to work in just such a way as to give economic life its appropriate configuration. So it will be a matter of thinking about the first step first, about the formation of the associations, and then simply getting these associations started; they can simply start working as soon as they are in place. Then there is another question:

Is the distribution of the profit share determined only within the company?

This cannot be the issue at all. Rather, the question of the needs of the individual in an economic area will depend on the entire economic area. And this fact, which is being looked at here – the distribution of the profit share within the company – does not actually become a real fact at all, because it simply has to be brought out of the associative realm. Whoever works this or that must receive this or that for his product of labor. It cannot be a matter of determining one's share of the profits within the enterprise; rather, it is inherent in the whole structure of economic life that one must receive one's corresponding share of the profits.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to summarize, because it is already half past ten and we cannot go on talking until midnight. I would have liked to say a lot more; of course, one always arrives a little late at the actual specific questions. I would like to summarize by saying the following: You see, the impulse of the threefold social order has been brought into the world on condition that people are found to take it up.

What do we need today? We do not need quackery, such as how to best arrange this or that, for example, lesson plans. Oh, I am convinced that even people who are not very talented, when they sit down and work out beautiful lesson plans for themselves, the lesson plans will be very beautiful. I do not mean that humorously at all, but quite seriously. The point is to have an understanding of reality so that you know what you can do with reality.

Now, of course, you can say: You tackled the cultural council, you tackled the works council, nothing came of it. — But things failed precisely because people got carried away and asked: Yes, what will become of my sewing machine in the tripartite social organism? My dear ladies and gentlemen, that is only a detail, a detail that has actually occurred; I could give you thousands of such examples. It should be clear that one should first understand the threefold nature of the social organism in much the same way that one understands the Pythagorean theorem in mathematics. Do you think that someone understands the Pythagorean theorem by approaching all right-angled triangles and trying out whether the theorem is correct? No, he knows that once he has understood it, it is only a matter of applying it in the right way in practice in each individual case. And so it is also a matter of seeing through the things of the “key points of the social question” in themselves. One must know that they can be applied in reality if one only acquires the practical hand and the practical attitude. That is what matters. The fact that things were not carried out was due to something that I do not want to discuss now, my dear audience. But I am not afraid to say what I have tried to do, and it will be the same with another step: you just have to keep trying until the matter is understood. You will just have to try everything – I know that the matter is still subject to misunderstandings and ambiguities – you will just have to try everything as long as this matter is not understood. And it has not been understood so far.

When I saw that I could not make headway with the illustrious representatives of intellectual life, that I could not make headway with the proletariat, which is turning to a belief in authority that is much worse than was ever the belief in authority in the Catholic Church. When it became clear that nothing could be done with the representatives of intellectual life and the proletariat, the question was not to discuss it, but to do something real. And so I thought that one should at least see if, in the wide area of Central Europe, which is truly suffering enough from misery and hardship, fifty people could be found who could simply be summoned to Stuttgart and taught the real foundations for working in public life. For today, most people in public life speak without any basis, without knowing anything about what has happened and is still happening, otherwise there could never have been a National Assembly like the one that met in Weimar; they speak out of some emotions that they form from experiences that are not even the very latest, but which are the expression of old historical and old political views. That is the essential feature of our present-day parties: what is represented within a present-day party has no objectivity at all, it is only a shadow of what once existed. The point was to find these fifty people so that we could initially develop real public activity in this way. They did not find each other, my dear attendees, these fifty people did not find each other!

What we are dealing with today is not that we are discussing election laws in an abstract way and whether an association can be compared to a corporation and so on, but what we are dealing with today is that we get as many people as possible with initiative, because today it is not about how we vote, but about the right people getting into the right places. And today, too, those who are inwardly imbued with understanding, imbued with insight, imbued with the practical sense of the threefold social organism, will, if there are only a sufficient number of them (you can't do anything with a small number), these people with initiative, they will work. They will be elected to the right places, no matter what the electoral laws, and what is to be will come about. Therefore, it is of primary importance that we have a sufficient number of people with insight into the necessities of the time and with the necessary initiative. If we were able to follow those who have led the world into ruin because they at least developed some learned initiative, we will certainly also follow those who develop healthy initiative. That is why we need people with initiative and insight today. And if we succeed in winning people with initiative and insight, then the threefold social order will march forward, which it did not do before. But we must work towards this goal openly and honestly, without masks or embellishment.

When the theme for today's lecture was announced, the question could have been asked: ‘From which angle is this going to be approached?’—From some or other research, it could be concluded that now again an understanding needs to be addressed, an understanding so strongly yearned for which has for a long time been imposed as today's capitalistic sea of confusion, and those in it notice that the water is up to their mouths and they are no longer able to swim in this sea. They search for a rescue boat; they would not be able to find such a rescue boat with conditions they usually insist upon. About such an interpretation I don't want to speak this evening. It appears to me that in the time in which we are living, quite other things are necessary. If we look at one another, at what has actually happened and what is going on at present, for those who are searching for such an understanding, it is so terrible.

What is called the ‘social question’ today has in no way only come about yesterday. In the way one speaks about it today, it is more than half a century old. However, what has actually led up to the social question is much, much older; it has come out of the entire development of modern times and out of the last centuries. When we observe where this development of the last centuries has led up to, then we can sum it up in the following way.

There were a number of people who we can best describe by saying they lived in a capitalistic economic order and felt comfortable living in this capitalist economic order. One hears often enough from these people how far civilization has progressed. One can hear how it has come about that humanity has reached such a stage in which not only distant single countries and continents but over world oceans they could quickly come to an understanding; how far humanity has come through a certain education and taken part in what they called spiritual life, imagining they had reached impressive heights in our time.

I don't need to mention all the praise declarations about this direction in our modern civilization. However, modern civilization has developed out of a foundation. Without this foundation, it is inconceivable; it thrives from this foundation. What was in this foundation? In this foundation there were increasingly more people who out of their deepest soul sensitivities had to let the call be heard: ‘Does modern life give us what our human existence is worth? Why have we been condemned by modern civilisation?’—So, modern humanity is ever more split into two divisions: in one in which they feel comfortable or at least feel satisfied in modern civilisation, but out of which they can only feel satisfied because of this foundation, while the other one must create the foundation as their labour, towards a social order in which they can basically have no share.

In the entire process, admittedly something else also developed. It developed in such a way that the carriers of the so-called civilization in the old patriarch conditions could not progress with its numerous illiterates. It meant that of the capitalistic supporters at least a part of the Proletarians, the part in their employ, had to be educated. As a result of this education, the Proletarians developed something which has come to such a frightening expression for those who understand the all too necessary facts. This development brought about the possibility to a large number of people, who had just created the foundation for this modern civilization, to be able to consider their situation; they didn't arrive at an instinctive insight any more but it enabled them to pose this question in the most intensive way: ‘Can we have a dignified human existence? How can we acquire a dignified human existence?’

Those who up to now had been the leaders of humanity have in the course of modern economic life brought the economic life as far as they could, into a connection with the modern state. The modern Proletariat could to a certain extent not be excluded from the modern state through the influences of recent times. So it came about that the Proletariat on the one hand within the economic life strived for a dignified existence and on the other hand with the help of the state, tried to win the right.

One can't deny this—the facts teach us—in both directions little has been accomplished. In the manner of the trade unions the modern working community within the economic circulation has tried to accomplish something: there were scraps of what human dignity within a healthy economic order should be. This has been achieved in a way, by state life. On the other hand, the economic and political power of the hitherto leading class of mankind was opposed. So one can say that despite various things having been accomplished in both these directions, today the modern Proletariat is not less challenged by the question: ‘What significance is there actually in my work in relation to what each person in the world must consider regarding dignity?’

In contrast to that, for long decades the Proletariat have, in the most varied forms, addressed the leading circles with the cry: ‘It can't go on like this!’—On the other hand, hardly an understandable word can be heard in response. The words which do become audible stand in an extraordinary relationship to what the minds of the time should have striven for. Don't we hear it from all possible sides—from the Christian-social side, from the bourgeois-socialist aspirants—some or other statement is being made which could help remedy the dangers which one is believed to be able to see? Was it more basically as ingratiating phrases which came out of various moral, religious deliverances, emerging from those, up to then, leading classes?

These leading circles didn't experience it but the other side of humanity did. The one who feels it from quite another angle than as from empty phrases, the one who experiences it out of the awareness of his or her class, brought into a particular social situation, should form the base for this modern civilisation. And so, some things were done through the trade union, cooperative and also political life, yet something else came about which was more important than the modern Proletarian's work, something which was full of seeds for the future and the facts of the present carried it into abundance. This was created in the following way.

While the ruling classes were amassing their luxuries, which could only be fed and empowered by capitalism, the Proletarian, in the time left over for him, in his meetings sought in the truest sense of the word an education towards a spiritual life. This was something which the earlier ruling classes didn't want to see, that among thousands, yes thousands of Proletarian souls a new culture, a new viewpoint was developing in the people.

Based on the nature of these things, the Proletarian development next proceeded to the viewpoint of considering economic life, because the modern life of the Proletarian was forged by the machine. Into the factory he was packed, harnessed in by capitalism. Here he found his concepts. However, these concepts—I only want to point out how intensely everything connected to Marxism penetrated with meaning into the Proletarian soul—this development was such that very little, really very little reaction was elicited from the leading, up to then ruling classes.

Isn't it typical that those who know about these things must say today: Among the ruling proletarian personalities, among those who really understand the Proletariat, not merely think about the Proletariat but among those individualities who have taken up what could really be considered a fruitful development offered by economic life, among them really live the basic, thorough knowledge of life into which the social organism plays even as the most elite of educators, even the most thoughtful professors of sociology, university professors. It is typical that this circle, whose calling it was so to speak, to concern itself with sociology, with national economics, that it resisted everything which presented itself as an understanding for the modern Proletariat, for as long as possible. Only when the facts threatened and no longer allowed anything else to be permitted, did they accommodate the bourgeois leaders, allowing many Marxist or similar terms to be taken into their national economic system.

That the work of the modern Proletariat was achieved, I would like to call it, achieved in total secrecy towards the leading ruling circles, this I report out of no grey theory; I maintain this because I could observe how this work was being executed. For years I was a teacher in the worker's education school in Berlin, where Wilhelm Liebknecht, the dear old servant, could be validated. Partly in this school, partly in what was happening, one had a good extract of every process in action, directed towards a new era developed out of the proletarian consciousness. This should have been considered long ago, but superficially regarded the modern proletarian movement only in terms of wages and daily bread and failed to understand its needs to be considered as a question of human dignity of all people.

On the other hand, it is not really important when people point to the frightening and sometimes cruel events out of the world of facts as originating from the social chaos. Those who understand these things correctly, how they have developed, don't question the connection between these cruelties or terrors to the modern proletarian movement but they clearly take it that the leading classes are at cause for what has come about today.

The world-historical moment only started when the Proletariat began taking responsibility for world historical events. Capitalism, the capitalistic world order particularly in the most recent times worked right into the terrible and in many respects insane catastrophe of the world war.

What can we now see as a central focus in the Proletarian movement and the Proletarian yearnings, which can be considered as the Proletarian progress? In the centre of this we see what the Proletarian experiences regarding that which basically is the cause and which can only be given from the modern economic order to the social organism, because the leading cultural circles are basically only interested in one thing which the Proletarian can give, and that one thing is Proletarian labour. One needs to realize how incisive Karl Marx's ideas were, which crossed the tracks of the modern Proletariat in such a way that they had the experience: Above all things clarity must be created in relation to the manner and way in which human labour may flow into the social organism.

Now, it has often been said and illuminated in the widest circles: through the modern economic order, labour has become goods among other commodities. It is typical of the economic life that it exists in the production, circulation and consumption of goods. However, it has happened that the labour of the modern Proletarian has been made into goods.

From this angle, basically everything can be said about the Proletarians. However, the question is usually drawn to one side so that it doesn't appear in the full light but through which one actually gains insights into the statement of the human labour in the healthy social organism. Here the question must be raised which in any case rises out of the Marxist question but it is raised in an even more precise, an even more intense manner. It must be asked: Can human labour ever really be considered as goods?

Through this the question leads to quite a different track. One will in fact ask: How can human labour legitimately be rewarded? How can human labour in any way come to its rights? One can add further: it must be in such a way that human labour earns its pay.

A wage is in some ways nothing other than purchase money for the goods called ‘labour power.’ However, the power of labour may never be goods! Where the power of labour in the economic process is made into goods, there is a falsehood in the economic process, because in reality something is added which could never be a true component of this reality. On this basis labour can be no goods because it can't have the character which goods is necessitated to have. In the economic process, each item of goods must have the possibility through its value, to be compared with other commodities. Comparability is the basic condition for the ‘being-of-goods’ (Ware-Sein) of something. The value of human labour can never be compared with the value of some or other commodities or products.

It would have been terribly easy if people had not forgotten how to simply think. Just think about it, for my sake, when ten people in a family work together, each one doing his or her work, how one can take a single contribution out of ten and compare it with the achievement which the ten has produced together? People just don't have the ability to compare the output of goods to the power of labour. Labour stands on quite another basis of social judgement than goods. This is what has perhaps in recent times not been clearly spoken about, but which lives in the experiences of the modern Proletariat.

What lives in the requirements of the modern Proletariat? What lives here in the feelings of the Proletarian is factual criticism, the world historic criticism which simply lies in the life of the modern Proletarians and, hurled into it, everything which the leading circles as a social order have promoted. The modern Proletariat is nothing other than a world historic criticism. Just the knowledge that labour can never be goods, owes its sensation, the basic experience of its existence, which is lived through in recent times as an enormous, an all-encompassing white lie, because labour is sold and according to their being this can never be sold.

That a remedy must be found, as everyone with insight must find obvious, of this the modern Proletariat is convinced. Yet he has been driven into something which not he, but the earlier ruling classes has made of the social organism. He has been pushed out of everything left over and is only drawn into the economic process. Does this not make it clear that he would want to bring about through this mere healing of this economic process and the circulation of the economic life itself, the entire social organism as well? Out of this the ideals have originated in the same way as the ideals the modern Proletariats have lived up to now.

It has been said that because private capitalism has made modern production into a goods production through private means of production, it has resulted in the modern Proletariat coming into the position which only he can experience. The only help can be offered by reverting back to the ancient idea of the cooperative, a cooperative which means that one's production goes over to the other and work towards self-production in which he can't misuse the other on the grounds that he would then be prejudicing himself. The following can also be asked: How would this great cooperative be set up? Here one must take refuge in the framework which has been created in recent times—that of the modern state. The modern state itself must make itself into a big cooperative through which the production of goods gradually is directed to the production of the self-employed.

Here we find the very point which needs to be grasped. One can now say that healing can be found in the modern Proletarians' spiritual life on the one hand, and at the same time discover that where there is a possibility for development in the modern Proletarian's spiritual life, there is a possibility from this step, to take yet another step towards progress.

People who do not agree with this should really not be resented if they are being sincere with honest feelings which they cherish, for they do not yet see results coming from the present Proletarian world view, but it is necessary to point out that this Proletarian world view have seeds of progress, and that this progress should really be striven for—and it can be striven for.

There are those who would admit they became enlightened by what I have already said—about eighteen years ago—in the Berlin trade union house, as a characteristic, and then often again had to emphasise it as a peculiarity of the modern labour movement, which I still maintain as absolute truth. At that time I said: For those who glance over the historic life of humanity with an inner understanding for what has emerged, for them it will be noticeable that this modern Proletarian Movement appears different to all other movements of humanity, basically because—and you might find this grotesque, a paradox even—it stands on a scientifically orientated foundation.

Profound, very profound it was then in this direction as a fundamental, basic requirement of the modern labour movement that the almost forgotten (Ferdinand) Lassalle's famous lecture was given entitled “Science and the Worker.” Things need to be looked at from another point of view than what is habitually done: one must look at it from the view of life. In doing so one could say: with reference to what has become available to the Proletariat as a result of what the ruling classes had to give him because they didn't want him to be left illiterate, through this the modern Proletarian had the desire to conquer, to take it as his inheritance what had been built up in the recent times out of the endeavours of the leading circles, what they had created as a scientific world view.

What it comes down to is this—now the modern Proletarian reacted in quite a different manner regarding this scientific world view than all the other circles, even though they were the ones who had created this world view. One could be quite an enlightened person in the leading and up to the-then ruling circles, a person whose innermost convictions welled up from the results of modern science, for my sake one could be a scientific researcher like Vogt, a popular scientific researcher like Büchner, and still your scientific orientation will be different to that of the modern Proletarian.

Those who, out of the leading circles with their prejudices, namely their anticipation and their presentiments, who theoretically confess to their modern education regarding human beings and nature, they remain stuck for this reason within a social order which cuts them off from the modern Proletariat. The structure of the Proletariat does not rest on scientific claims but is due to what came before modern science into human minds as religious, lawful and such imaginations towards the fulfilment of human dignity. Of this I once had a direct experience.

It happened in the moment when I stood in front of a worker gathering with the tragically passed away Rosa Luxemburg. We were addressing the gathering regarding the modern worker and modern science. There one could to see how, what modern science poured into the modern proletarian souls, worked quite differently even in the most convinced leading circles, when Rosa informed the people: ‘There is nothing which refers to the angelic creation of people, nothing which points to the lofty places of origin which the common people eagerly describe; there are even claims from the common people's world view how our origins developed from climbing animals. Whoever thinks this through’—thus she spoke enthusiastically about this issue, this leader of the workers—‘whoever thinks this through can't discriminate like the present leading circles are doing, persisting in their prejudices about the possibilities of grading ranks among people who all originate from the same origins.’—This was taken up differently by them compared with those in the leading circles. This supplemented the ideas which the modern Proletarians were taken to understand as science.

That which has been taken up by a soul has the possibility for further development and about this evolution I would like to relate something to you.

If you glance over everything which relates to the question of how it is possible that the force of labour of the modern Proletarian has been made into goods, you will gradually be coerced through your observations regarding the economic life to arrive at a point where you have to say to yourself: It has come about precisely because the modern worker has been harnessed to the mere economic life and through being within this economic life his labour has become goods. In this direction, we have the continuation of the slave question of olden times. Here the entire person was goods. Today what has remained is only the labour of the person. However, now this power of labour must be adhered to by all people.

Within the modern Proletarian soul was the feeling that the last remnants from Barbarian times must not be allowed to continue into the future, that it should be conquered. There was no other way to conquer it than with the same clear strength of mind with which the modern Proletariat grasped the essence of economic- and human nature, with which the science for a healthy social organism can be grasped. About this science I would like to say a few words to you.

One thing above all appears clearly. One need to ask oneself: within the circulation of the modern economic life, what makes the force of labour of the modern Proletarian into goods? It is the economic power of the capitalists.

In these words of the power of the capitalists there is already an indication for a healthy answer. So: when is power diametrically opposed? Power is diametrically opposed by law, by rights. This however points out that for the healing, the recovery, of human labour in the social organism it can only come about when labour is taken out, when above all the question regarding labour is taken out of the economic process and it becomes a pure and clear question of law.

Through this we come to consider things in broader terms, whether there is a more significant difference between the economic question and the question of law. This distinction exists: only we are not inclined today to examine this difference deeply enough. We are not inclined to goo deeply enough into, on the one hand, what the active forces in all of economic life has to be, and on the other hand, what the active powers need to be in the actual life of rights.

What works in the economic processes? Human needs are active in the economic process; here the possibility of satisfying human needs may come through production. Both are based on natural foundations, the human requirements are based on people and production is based on climatic, geographic and such natural foundations. The economic life of the modern division of labour has led towards what the exchange of commodities is, and has to be. Each exchange of commodity which benefits both the needs of people and value of goods according to their mutual estimation—I can't describe it in detail, it would take too long—appear on the markets and is drawn into the circulation of the economic process on the markets.

Within the circulation of the economic life, the life of the law can't develop simultaneously as a closed circuit. Human nature will as much admit that the social organism within the economic life develops the life of rights by itself, as it will admit that a single centralized system exists in the human organism. Tonight, I really don't want to play with various comparisons out of natural science but I believe here is the point which the natural scientist has also reached today, as we have done. In my last book “Riddles of the Soul” I have remarked that natural science can't properly acknowledge that there are three systems in the healthy human organism: the sense-nervous system is there as carrier of the soul life, the breathing and heart system as carrier of the rhythmic life and the metabolic system as carrier for metabolism and this comprises the entire human organism. However, each system is centralised in itself, each has its own approach to the outer world. In this human organism order and harmony is summoned in order for these three systems not to cause chaos among one another but that they unfold side by side, and as a result allow the power of one to flow into the other.

So in a healthy social organism such a three-foldness should take place. It must be realised that when a person in the economic organism becomes active, he must simply operate in the economic process. Then administration, the legislation of this economic process is expected to mutually evaluate the goods in the economic reality and bring it into movement towards a goal orientated circulation of goods, introducing the goods production, introducing the consumption of goods. What needs to be removed now from this economic process is not everything which includes the satisfaction of needs of one person to another, but is connected to the relationship of one person to every other person. Where all people should be equal is radically different from what can develop only in the economic life. That is why it is necessary for the healing of the social organism that the purely legal life element, the actual life of rights, be removed from the economic one. This development is just what has been striven against in recent times.

The ruling classes up to now—what have they done? In the regions where they felt comfortable, where their interests really lie, there you have the old merging which certainly had existed in many areas between the economic life and political state life, and now is taken further. So we see that in recent times, under the influence of the leading circles of mankind, so-called nationalisation came about in certain economic sectors. Post and telegraph and similar ones nationalised in a modern step which this modern progress wants.

In exactly the opposite direction it must be considered, not according to the interests of the leading circles up to now, but with the question: ‘What are the foundations of a healthy social organism?’—Efforts need to be made to gradually dissolve the purely economic life from the actual political state, a state which has to care for law and order, but above all to care for those things that out of these areas, out of the economic life the corresponding life of law flows in. Those who have no eyes, no spiritual eyes, can't really distinguish how radically different the economic life is to the actual political state.

Look at how these things have developed today. Some people speak out of the present social conditions in such a way that they say, within the social conditions we have as the first item: ‘Exchange goods for goods.’—Good, this happens in the economic life. It has just been spoken about. Now as to the second item: ‘Exchange of goods, alternatively the representative of goods, namely money, for labour.’ And as a third item: ‘Exchange of goods for laws.’

What about this last one? I've just spoken about the second one. Now, we need to look at the relationship of property ownership within the modern economic order and we will immediately become clear about what should be clarified in this area for the future. How one usually likes to think about the ownership relationship in relation to land—everything else in the actual foregoing regarding the social organism doesn't really have meaning, the only meaning it has is that the owner of the ground and land has the right to own a piece of land and can utilise the earth, and by doing so make his personal interests valid.

This doesn't have the slightest relevance in the origins of the economic processes as such. With the economic processes—against this only an erroneous national economy objects—it relates to what there is on the land as goods or the value of goods that can be generated. Use of the land depends on a right.

This right, however, is turned into power, transformed within the modern capitalistic economic order, through the amalgamation of capitalism with land rental. So on the one side we have the power, excluded from such rights; on the other side economic power, which is able to compel human labour to become goods. From both sides, nothing other than the actualized white lie is the result, when there is no striving—striving out of actual social insight—towards the dividing of the social organism into an economic organism and an organism in the narrower sense, as state-political.

The economic organism must be established on an associative foundation, out of the needs of consumption in its relationship to production. Out of the various interests of the most varied career circles the manifold cooperatives—one could name them with the old word of ‘brotherhood’—need to be developed, in which the needs and their fulfilment are managed.

What develops from this associative foundation of the economic organism will always relate to the fulfilment of one sphere of people with another sphere. In this area expert utilisation must be decisive, first in the natural foundations and then also in the design utilisation of the production, circulation and consumption of goods. What will be of relevance here would be human needs and human interests.

This is always regarded as contrary, as something radically different to how apparently equal people relate towards one another, where they should be equal; it is today already uttered in trivial words: ‘Where they must stand equal before those laws which they have created themselves, as equals.’

On the associative foundation, the circulation of the economic process will rest; on a purely democratic basis, on the principle of equality of all people and their relationship to one another will rest, in a narrower sense, the actual political organisation. Out of this political organisation something quite different will develop compared to the economic power, which makes labour into goods. Out of the economic life, separated from the political life, something will rise as a true law of employment, where here and only here, the labour which can be traded between one person and another, measure, work and so on can be agreed upon.

However, one might believe that things in recent times have already improved a bit—but fundamentally it comes down to not having improved. By the way the Proletarians' labour is positioned in the economic process, the price of labour as goods and the price of other products are dependent on the value of the goods. Everyone can see this if one looks deeper into the economic process. It will be different if, independent of the laws of the economic life and its administration, out of the political state, out of the purely democratic administration and making of laws for the political state, a labour law can come into existence. What will happen then?

What will then happen is that a person, through his own labour, will stand through his particular relationship towards the social organism in an ever so lively a way, as we can see today in the foundations of nature. Within certain boundaries, such things as the technical fertility of the ground, and so on, can be shifted a bit; the fixed boundaries of the foundations of nature be shifted a bit; yet these natural foundations determine the economic life nevertheless in the most extensive measure from one side. Likewise, as the economic life is determined from this side, so from the other side the economic life must be determined from outside, so that it doesn't make labour dependent on it but that the economic life can be presented by purely human foundations. Then labour determines the price of goods, then goods don't determine the price of labour any longer!

At most it can happen that from some or other basis the power of labour can't manage sufficiently and the economic life is impoverished. The remedy should be sought in the correct basis and not merely in the economic life.

The basic economic life is only based on supply and demand. With labour rights, which is situated on the basis of an independent political state, all the rest of the rights are also necessarily based on this same foundation. Briefly—I can only indicate it due to our limited time—it must necessarily be seen how there has to be a peeling apart on both sides: the life of rights and the economic life, the ideal of a healthy social organism in the future.

As a third element, the independent economic life must be integrated with the independent law of rights, with what one can call the spiritual life on mankind.

By speaking of true progress within the Proletarian world view, one will encounter the most resistance. The opinion has come from thinking-habits in this sphere, more than elsewhere, that salvation depends on the absorption of the entire spiritual life by the state. People were unable to see through the dependence of their spiritual life coming from the state right now in recent times, from what had happened before in the so-called interests of the ruling state circles, which had been able to satisfy these ruling circles. These ruling circles discovered their interests were satisfied by the state; they allowed the state to absorb ever more, what they called the spiritual life. Like the political state necessitated obligatory tax laws and established that all people are equal before the law, and how it is necessary by the state, through the obligatory tax to satisfy its needs, so, on the other side the spiritual life had to be freed from both the other spheres of the social organism.

The striving towards the amalgamation of the spiritual life with the economic life has brought disaster into our recent times. That which is to develop in the spiritual life can only do so if it takes place in the light of true freedom. Everything which can't develop in the light of true freedom stunts and paralyses the real spiritual life and besides that, leads to going astray, which can be recognised all too easily in the newer social order. Of necessity, here is to figure out which inner connections exist between the spiritual life in the narrowest sense, and the religious life, the economic life, the artistic life, a certain ethical life—what the relationship is between the life of all of them which originates in the first place out of the individuality's abilities and skills.

Out of this now, while we are speaking about these things in the most serious way, when in the first instance a healthy social organism is considered, we must speak about it in such a way that the following needs are to be counted under the heading of spiritual life: everything which involves the unfolding and development of individual abilities, from the start of the schooling system through to the university system, right into the artistic, right into the ethical life, yes, right into those branches of the spiritual life which form the foundation of practical and even economic systems. In all these areas, the emancipation of the spiritual life is to be striven for. Thus, the spiritual life is to be placed as a free initiative of individual human capabilities, so that this free spiritual life can only be there in a corresponding way in a healthy social organism, when its validity also depends on free recognition, on the free understanding of those who need the acceptance. That means that in future the management of the spiritual life will no longer be directed out of an addition of sums of what there is in the purse or strongbox, nor come out of state bureaucracy.

Not only as a result of the spiritual life being governed by the state, did it take on a certain characteristic corresponding to the personalities within it, in relation to the personalities who administered it, but the spiritual life as we find it today, rightly experienced as an ideology by the modern proletariat, this spiritual life has actually become a mirror image of the interests and desires which the leading circles have for the modern state because this they created according to their own comforts and needs. Is it basically right to say that the entire spiritual life has gradually become only a mirrored superstructure for the economic and governmental life? The modern spiritual life of the leading circles is exactly such a superstructure. Certainly chemistry or mathematics can't easily take on characteristics according to the interests of the leading circles. Already within the scope in which they are practiced, especially the light which falls on them from other spiritual areas, is determined through the fact that the leading circles have interests in the modern state life and for the modern spiritual life to grow together with the state.

Yes, modern spiritual life is exactly at the most important stage where it should penetrate the human soul and take its particular position in the social order, but instead it has become a sporting ball of the economic and political life. One can see in the way in which, right into the terrible war catastrophes, the carriers of the spiritual life were connected to the modern state life through capitalistic detours, basically taking the most important spiritual areas of life and inserting what could be applied, to the service of the state.

Not a hundred, not a thousand but thousands of proofs can be found. You only need to think of taking the German history professors and supporters of historic science. Try to make an image of everything they have produced in relation to the history of the Hohenzollern, and ask yourself whether, according to this world historic fact, the history of the Hohenzollern actually looks like it does, as it had appeared before? According to this, one can observe how relationships within the spiritual life have become a mere game for those who were not liberated from it.

The spiritual life must become free from both other spheres. Only then can the spiritual life continue with its own legislation and administration—as strange and surprising as this might sound, but it needs to be said—of what today can only, and completely, come out of capitalistic prejudices; then spiritual life will really become the winner over purely economic proletarian interests. The spiritual life is consistent. The spiritual life comes out of the highest branch of spiritual life right down into those branches which originate as a result of someone, out of their individual talents, taking the lead in some or other venture. Just as he directs them today, so he directs them out of the economic life through the process of power, economic power. Like he leads them from out of a healthy social organism, so it comes out of the spiritual life. Spiritual life has within a healthy social organism its own legislation and administration in relation to the higher branch of spiritual life, but also in relation to everything within the economic process which work towards the spiritual life being independent as such.

Then within this economic process the right way and influences of emancipation will rise towards an independent spiritual life. What had been achieved through capital can no longer be achieved according to the sense of modern capitalism. Now it will be achieved only through the impulses coming out of the spiritual life itself.

However, these impulses must be imagined in the correct way. How will an enterprise really look in line with these impulses?

Whoever knows the foundations of spiritual life—I have come across this quite often—will not contradict me when I give the following sketch of an enterprise which obtained its impulses not from an economic influence but from a spiritual power. Here would be those who are in the position, out of a free understanding with their colleagues and with a certain capital fund, to undertake nothing related to their own needs but directed to a social understanding which has been truly founded in spiritual life. In such an enterprise they would face, through a free understanding of all colleagues, right down to the last worker, the free understanding of their appointed posts, then a relationship of free understanding will arise between the leaders of the enterprise and the workers who are quite necessary for its execution. This results in, that beside the working hours there is included, within this enterprise and within the cooperatives of the enterprise, the possibility of a free expression about the entire way in which the overall social organism is placed within the economic process. Then those who live within the influences of a spiritual life would replace those in positions held by capitalist entrepreneurs today and reveal themselves in regard to all which places their wares in the entire social process of mankind. Each individual will then see the direction taken by the product to which they have contributed their work, where the product of their particular individual capabilities of manual work leads to. Everything can then also become included which would give the worker the possibilities to establish a real employment contract.

A real employment contract can't be determined when it is established on the basis of the condition that labour is goods. A true employment contract must not be based along these lines: the one and only real employment contract can only be based on the condition that work, which is necessary for the creation of products, is accomplished on the basis of laws, but that in relation to economics, that the proper cooperation is created between manual work and spiritual work, that in relation to economics, that a sharing operation between the manual and spiritual work must happen which can only take place out of the free understanding that manual work was the precursor, because then the manual worker knows that out of the spiritual coexistence with the leaders to what degree his work, through their leadership, flows for his own benefit into the social organism.

In such collaboration, the possibility ceases for capital based enterprises to develop according to egotistic benefits. Then only, when in this way the social organism is healed, then only can today's profit motives be replaced by purely factual interest. To a greater extent what had been the case in earlier times, would arise again as the interconnection between a person and his or her work.

Let us consider the connection between a person and their work today. On the one hand, there is the entrepreneur who wants to accomplish what he regards as work but he clears off as quickly as possible from this work. He expresses it in such a way that when he has cleared out from his work, he refers to it as “shoptalk.” He gets away from it and then searches through all kinds of other things to discover his striving as a human being. Through this relationship of human beings to their work is shown how little people grow together with their work.

This is an unhealthy relationship. This unhealthy relationship attracts others; by this tearing the modern Proletariat away from the foundation of their old craft, where they grew with their occupation, grew from their professions to their honour, to their human dignity, tear them away to where they are installed at machines, harnessed in a factory; here the unhealthy proof is produced in them that they can obtain no relationship with their jobs.

Whoever has come to know the true foundations of spiritual life knows that such an unhealthy relationship between a person and his occupation can only arise from unhealthy requirements. There is nothing in a healthy spiritual life which is free from political and free from the economic life which only have an effect on them; there is nothing in such a spiritual life which is not directly interesting and which, when it is correctly handled, a person can connect to his work, because he knows: this work he does, becomes a member of the circulation of the social organism. It is not something which can only be judged because it can't be any other way, that a person must also do something uninteresting. No, it must be judged in such a manner that precisely this foundation of spiritual life will be searched for, which is the one and only thing which can call forth interest: coherence of people with their work and interest in all spheres in any occupation.

This will show that, when the emancipated free spiritual life out of spiritual impulses enter right into the most individualised branches of governmental and economic life and its administrators, then only will it be possible that a real, factual interest is applied to all and not be based on a mere commercial, mere outer economic and benefit ratio relationship.

Admittedly the foundations for such a spiritual life need to be created. These foundations can only be created when everything regarding schooling is to be placed in the management of the spiritual life, when the lowest teacher no longer asks: what does the political state expect of me?—but when he or she can look at those in whom they have trust, when he or she can look at the spiritual life according to their own principles in their managed area of the social organism.

Thus, it works in many respects, I believe, when it proves itself naturally. From a true continuation of the proletarian world viewpoint it works against habits of thought. While people had absorbed the inheritance of the bourgeois science and amalgamated spiritual life, state and economic life into one another, it is important that for the healing of the social organism there needs to be a striving towards the independence of these three mentioned areas. Only through these areas—if I might use acceptable expressions—gradually having their own parliament and their own management, which relate to one another like a government of a sovereign state, only negotiating through delegation, only exchanging their communal needs through transport, then only will the social organism be healed. The question today is a fundamental one, arising out of all the facts: How can the social organism be healed? It needs to be taken in hand, it is sick, this social organism!

In order for those who, out of their class consciousness, want to make the correct claim towards healing the social organism, they actually need to research the Proletarian world viewpoint down to its fertile sprout and from there continue to build further.

I must admit that initially some could object to what is considered as correct today, when it is said: The direction must be taken according to this social three-foldness, this three-foldness of the social organism.—As much as these ideas contradict thought habits of some people at present, the reality must not be to steer towards our comforts, not towards what we believe has up to now been true for life practitioners. Reality needs to orientate us, reality founded on honesty and a healthy sense of judgment for the recognition of truth.

What I have explored here has no relevance to some or other cloud-cuckoo land. Oh, the time is here when some, who can only glance superficially at the simplest things and then create their own thought patterns, considering themselves practical in life, must admit that the very frowned-upon idealists who think from the basis of evolutionary necessities of mankind, are the real practical people. What I have given you is not clouds of cuckoo land; it originated exactly out of the most direct, daily needs in the life of mankind.

Admittedly I can't enter into all the single areas; in conclusion, I would like to touch on one area, an area which I can only mention fleetingly as something which I've apparently derived from the most ancient idea of the social life and how it comes across as the most ardent need. What in life is most humiliating? The most humiliating thing is that we must have what we call money, in our purse. We also know however, what is connected to this money. You know how this money intervenes into every part of life. If one considers the development of a healthy social organism, in which branch does the control of money belong?

The management of money has up to now been the concern of the state through certain forces of its development. Money is actually truly goods in a healthy organism, just as labour is not goods. Everything unhealthy which comes through how money enters the social organism results from money being stripped of its characteristic as goods, that it depends today more on the cancellation of some market through the political state, than on what it certainly should rest, while nothing else works in international traffic, which is on its merchandise value. National economists have an amusing battle today, a battle which really works in an amusing way to the insightful. They ask if money is goods, just a popular commodity, for which one can always swap other goods, whereas if for instance you had the misfortune of only manufacturing tables and chairs, you would have to go around dragging your tables and chairs and wait for someone who had vegetables. Instead you could swap your tables and chairs for the money they are worth and then find what's applicable according to your needs. While the one says money is a commodity or at least represents a commodity, even if it is paper money, for which there is a corresponding value, the other might say money is totally only that which comes about through the state law pigeon-holing a certain brand. Now these educated economists research the question: What is correct? Is money a commodity or something which arises from mere branding? Is it a mere payment for goods?

The answer is simply this: today money is neither the one nor the other, but both. The one is a result of the state simply approving of certain brands; the other is that in international transportation or in a certain relation also in national transportation, money purely as a commodity is the only form in which it can participate in the circulation.

A healthy social organism will strip money of its legal characteristics; its management and legislation will be assigned through a natural process within itself, in the adjustment of money, coinage, the value of money within the economic circulation, the same parliament, the same organisation which manages the rest of the economic organism.

Only then, when something like this steps in, which the modern Proletariat may be striving for, will it be placed on a healthy foundation. That strange relationship which exists between the working wages and the nature of goods, this relationship depends on a white lie. While the worker on the one hand believes that when his demand for an increased wage will suffice towards healthier living conditions, then on the other hand the price of commodities rises if it is not freed in the economic cycle from the legal cycle of the political state. These things are all placed on a healthy foundation only when the three-foldness steps in.

In the same way, if you have insight into the necessity of independence of the spiritual life, then you will see, will accept that there is no necessity to create capitalistic organisations as such, but that the manner and way how in the course of modern time capital is managed, how it has been used, that it only exists in the economic process, is how the capital process has caused damage which is linked to so much misery.

One will have to recognise this: as long as the employment contract does not relate to the collective output of what the crafter and the spiritual worker brings, but as long as the employment contract is related to the wages for the work, for so long would it be impossible to place these on a healthy basis.

The one and only way for the spiritual life to be recognised as a healthy reality becomes revealed in any case in its necessary relationship between worker and spiritual ruler, there where the worker is cheated, not cheated merely through the economy but cheated by the business man, who does not value his individual qualities, his spiritual traits in the right way, but in an incorrect way, in a inhuman manner. The worker is not exploited by the economic life, the worker is exploited through the white lies which come about in today's social organism in which individual abilities can just be used by cheating the workers because they are not seen from both sides in the economic process; within a healthy spiritual life they are seen from both sides and directed thus.

As I've said, what I've brought here towards the healing of the social organism can still be resisted by many Proletarian minds. I can see this. For years I have been involved with workers and spoken to them about these things. I haven't managed only single branches of teaching in the workers educational school; I have also offered exercises in speech. In these exercises which led on to speech exercises, several workers in this community truly showed what particular colouring, what special form their demands took as modern Proletariat. Here one could readily acquire the ability to think about the Proletariat not only in the manner of today's leading circles or the leading circles up to now. This is what I wanted to say to you today: think with the Proletariat, don't think about them!

For my sake think about it, it is like this—I would like to bring you to understand—that with reference to the contents of the one or the other meaning, one could perhaps renounce one but it is not important in today's world historic time whether one denies one or other meaning but that one agrees as to their honest claims which should be the claims of the modern Proletariat. Only through becoming comfortable with these agreements, with the consensus of honest Willing, then only through this could the seedling be discovered, which lies in the Proletarian world view, towards further growth and development. The time for mere discussion is over, the time is past for people who only want to serve their interests and speak about understanding. The time has come where for decades already, merely the undercurrents of outstanding claims of the modern Proletarians have now stepped up to the world historic plan, where they may really become the most important and most meaningful events in modern times.

What has come out of the chaos of the recent world war due to the economic war, which for a long time might in future continue to meet the future, this will become the social question. Today I will present no unreal, no theoretical solution or attempt to give one. I want to make you aware that the time has now come for the social question to present itself, where people in their social communal work need to be divided into governmental-, economic- and spiritual organs, that out of these healthy divisions a continued solution of the social question can come about.

This social question will not be solved from one day to the next once it is there; because it will always be there like life always generates new conflicts, so there needs to be this branching of members which strives in an honest way for solutions in the rising conflicts in social life. Whether people would try, in the widest circles, to become aware of such an evolution in the proletarian world view for the healing which would lie in the future, would depend on the direction taken from the starting point of the modern proletarian movement. Actually, it needs to lead to something which has not been able to come about yet. Out of all the eligible demands of the questions of wages, of bread, it needs to be lifted up to a mighty, radical world historic change, coming out of the consciousness of the modern worker and passing over into general human consciousness, out of the dignity, out of the sensitive dignity of the modern Proletarian, to be established as real dignity for all people.

In the attached discussion, various speakers were heard and the conclusion was given in the following words by Rudolf Steiner:

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, regarding the first honourable speaker I would like to make something like a fundamental remark. When one speaks one is often in the position to say that one can't quite grasp why things which the previous speaker uttered are not quite understandable, as if it had been said as a refutation of what one had just said. The first speaker spoke in such a way as if he found it necessary to assure me in every way—even though he has acknowledged many things, at least in relation to his whole attitude—that he actually has to fight. I'm not in a position to fight with him but I would like to say that actually those who have listened to me don't have so much against what the first speaker had said. I am in the position to acknowledge much more, also in relation to the content of his statements, than what he somehow seemed to focus on in relation to what I actually wanted.

Now, some details seem important. It is remarkable that the first speaker believes that according to my lecture I spoke to workers, but I did not work with them. Sure, naturally each one can only work in his area of expertise, but the manner and way in which I worked together with the workers is already such that one can't say: ‘the workers were merely spoken to.’ I also believe that those who perhaps enter more into what streams through the lecture, on its entire intention, will find it understandable that for so many years I have not been addressed in this way, even though I admit I have been thus addressed today. I have not always been addressed like this, only I believe, out of the simple reason that at that time workers already felt that what I had to say was not uttered from mere conversations with workers.

When it became possible for me to speak in such a way as I have had to do today, it is really not some learned skill. Let us pose the question: Who can actually implicate themselves as Proletarians? Whoever can speak with and to the Proletarian about his destiny which he has struggled through with his own forces, can speak in such a way as I have done today, only as a free speaker. In these circles I have been accused, shared community, I have perhaps even been treated nearly, perhaps even treated worse, than I've been handled here this evening. Surely it is something different when someone, like me, has struggled through in a similar way; I will continue thus in my short life which remains. I have struggled for years through conversations with the Proletarians, worked with the Proletarians, I have grown out of the Proletariat, grown hungry with the Proletarians. I didn't ask the Postman how much he earns to make him starve, but I had to become hungry myself. I didn't get to understand the Proletarians through thinking about them but I learnt to understand the Proletarians by living with them. I grew up out of the Proletariat, learned to starve because I had to starve. This is the foundation from which you can already sense that because I've been able to live for years with them, I don't speak as it it's a mere theory but from a position of an applicable practical position. I believe it can also give the basis whether one has a certain right to speak to the Proletarians or not.

This is what I wanted to say about this issue.

What the first speaker brought, for the greatest part, doesn't actually relate to me but to the intellectuals. Yes, the chairman has since said: ‘When someone or other can speak about being pelted with dirt, dirt thrown at him by the intellectuals, then I may do it too.’ Really, when you want to investigate the manner and way in which dirt has been thrown at me, and the way and manner this dirt looks like, then you will not envy the dealings I have entertained with the intellectuals.

Anyway, this is a personal remark. However, those who have replied to me, also come from a personal basis and therefore these remarks need to be made.

Now, the greatest part of course doesn't involve me but it has relevance to the student body. In relation to the latter: do you believe that I don't understand at all how the majority of today's student body is justified by the reproach that this ideal does not reach the lowest wage-labourer? Obviously here much can be argued regarding capital. Just as the modern worker, on the other hand, understands that after all, other classes of people have developed out of circumstances, so eventually the modern student has also had to develop out of their situation. Whoever can impartially compare the strivings within the modern student body with for instance what was found within the student body, when I also—it's been a while—had been within that student body, it was said, in reference to the profundity in just the phenomena of decline in the bourgeoisie, as contained in the modern professorial body—which obviously depends on the student body—that in relation to the example which illuminated the modern student body one can above all observe the blossoming which brings improvements to the students, which in itself has a certain satisfaction. It has become quite obvious—when today it looks as if the students would stick the workers in the back—that out of the colleagues of the student body, I believe there are quite large numbers already, it will rise towards social ideals. The student has to overcome various things. One must not forget how unshakable the clamps are which immobilises one. I have just recently had many an opportunity to also speak to young students, whose ideals appear unreachable to them yet they are closer to having developed a healthy spiritual life in general out of the sick spiritual life of today. I know what kind of receptivity the youth has for the renewal of the spiritual life. I know also, however, how great the temptation is, when inspired youth who have graduated, who find it necessary to search for a position in the modern community, how close the temptation lies to become dulled and fall back into the infidelity of philistinism.

Naturally we won't reach a final solution from one day to the next for what we most hope and wish to see. However, it must be acknowledged that everywhere where such a longing exists, this kind of sensible yearning which the modern Proletariat calls for, takes place, that it isn't suppressed and in some fanatic or dogmatic way mixed with one another. I still believe that this dogmatism at least up to a certain degree—even in modern struggles the funds can't be too easily chosen—would have to yield to the spirit which I've presented in my lectures: what is important is not so much the variety of thoughts but more on the equality of earnest will forces.

Just ask for once how many of those you blame for sticking one in the back are dependent on the circumstances established by the modern student, and ask yourself on the other hand, how much earnest will is valid in today's youth. Rather maintain that, than falling into dogmatism and becoming lamed.

Now, what I can say about the content brought by the second speaker is this: I agree to the call which has fallen to the left, which is basically not so very different from what I said myself: I don't claim things need to be as firmly said as I've expressed them. When something or other is said which can improve things, then I'm pleased about it. As a result, I don't judge as harshly as the second speaker has done; I would only like to put right what can always be referred to by this speaker who has not quite taken it in a right way. He has for instance referred with suspicion to the worker school where I taught for many years in Berlin by saying it could only be a liberal educational association. I have clearly stressed that it came from the old Liebknecht, the labour school was founded by Wilhelm Liebknecht! I don't believe you can push over the old Liebknecht with founding an arbitrary educational association for the working class as they would not have accepted him at the time. The audience wasn't made up out of the “ordinary bourgeois liberals” but were entirely comprised of workers who were none other than social democrats out of Proletarian circles organised through the bank!

So I believe that some of the words I have spoken have not been taken up in the right way by this speaker, as I would have liked them to be taken, and how they can be understood when not approached with a predetermined opinion when the other person arrives with a different meaning, but when he expresses what is meant only in a different form because he believes it is necessary that this world historic moment must be taken more comprehensively, and while he believes that today not every practical person can be called who would only judge in relation to the near future but a true practical person who overviews the bigger picture.

In relation to the question of the “call for proposals,” which corresponds nearly word-for-word to what I've said tonight—you need not wonder about it because you have heard that the “call” was created by me and that you need not expect that when I speak about something to the bourgeoisie, that it should sound different to when I speak here from this podium.

Interruption: Either everywhere the same or...

That's what I've just said. I said in the “call” are the same words as what I've said here. In every “call” there is nothing different to what I've said here.

For me it is important that the meaning of what I say is the truth and I will speak the truth in every instance where I am permitted to speak the truth. I only speak the truth; that is what it comes down to, for me. This is what I want to say in relation to this. I will exclude no one from anything if he can merge it with his conviction and can say yes to what I say myself. I believe this is the only way to arrive at an olive branch, that we speak the truth, unconcerned about the impression made on people, whether they support it or not. This is what I wanted to say about this.

In conclusion, I would like to make a remark which relates to what the next speaker said: I had not said anything about the manner of the struggle.—However, out of my words you can extract how I actually think about this struggle. I believe I've referred to it sufficiently; my view does not depend on a superficial understanding or how the nice things are all mentioned. Today we are enslaved in a facts-phase where our deeds are nothing but an empty observation of how things must be changed, however we need, through our observation, to find which new thoughts are really able to be brought into human souls. The ancient thoughts showed what kind of a social order they could bring about and these old thoughts are the proof that they are useless. For this reason, I believe that it first and foremost practically comes down to those who have an honest social will, to communicate before anything else about what can happen.

Today we stand here in Switzerland—I don't know if one could say “Thanks to God” or “unfortunately”—still in the circumstances which are not the same as in the central and eastern European circumstances. Central and eastern Europe is in circumstances only manageable through the connection to the ancient thinking of a social organism. When there is no effort made by the Proletariat themselves to utter the fundamental questions, which now out of this chaos through the simplest organisations, which all have to have the characteristics, according to my view, of this three-foldness of the social organism—if healing is not brought about by the Proletariat themselves, by organisations being newly recreated, according to new ideas, then I see absolutely no healing in the coming decades.

First of all, we need to begin with something you might regard as insignificant: we must realize we don't only face civil institutions, bourgeois conditions but that we face a bourgeois science.

This is what I've said in the Berlin union house for sixteen years and it was really understood among the Proletarians. The Proletariat still have the task of expelling thoughts of bourgeois science out of their thinking and not to meet some or other institutions with the bourgeois science but with new thoughts, which perhaps can only be brought by the Proletariat because the Proletariat are emancipated from all the remaining human relationship in which unfortunately the bourgeois people stand. Today the most important thing is something which probably appears as the least important to you, the emancipation of spiritual life; the accomplishment of the development of freedom of the spiritual life. If we accomplish in having a free spiritual life, if we manage to have a science which is not a mere capitalist tributary and thus indicate this tone into the Proletarian circles, then only can we approach healing. Not a restriction in the bourgeois sense, not a reduction but rather an amplification of proletarian activities.

I have the firm belief—if people were capable of arguing like the second speaker from a viewpoint which I well understand, and apply so many objections that one can't understand, sentence by sentence, what I've said—I have the firm belief, because I have spent much of life among the Proletariat, that what I have said is understood not from other classes but would be understood by the Proletariat. Unfortunately, we have to wait until the Proletariat understand it. I do believe however that it will be understood.

With these thoughts, I would like to say, I can with a certain satisfaction look back at what I've wanted to achieve this evening. I really haven't wanted to convince you right into the details of every word. I am taking into consideration your free individualities; to each one of you I take care to allow for your understanding, out of freedom. I do believe that among you there are many who will still think differently about what I have said, as you already thought about it today. This belief is the very thing which needs to be applied to healing the social organism.

by Joseph Weizenbaum

History often provides insight into the present. Consider the American South one hundred and fifty years ago, for example. There human rights and economic servitude were compressed into a single domain for black Americans. They became a means of production that could be bought and sold as a commodity. In many parts of the South it was forbidden to teach blacks to read. Control by law of education, part of culture, was found necessary to subordinate human rights to economics. The domain of rights and economics thus also engulfed culture.

Today we recognize rights which are independent from economic power, at least in principle. Modern workers must accept the authority of their superiors but only in matters directly related to their employment. Human beings no longer can be treated as mere means of production. We have separated economic power from civil rights at least to the extent of making slavery illegal.

If we can perceive how law, economics, and culture grew independent of one another relative to their nearly complete interdependence one hundred and fifty years ago in the South, then we can imagine the possibility of their even greater separation. This greater separation of the three domains - economics, law, and culture-forms the core of Steiner's social thought. Written in 1919, the essays contained in this volume address the reconstruction of a shattered Germany. They call for a proper separation of these three spheres of activity arguing that only this would allow each to express its essential nature and thereby enable human society to revitalize itself.

To understand this separation we must understand the component activities. For law the essential characteristic is human equality. Law both guarantees and limits rights, and it does this equally for each person. It governs the democratic political process in which each person's vote carries equal weight. Inasmuch as rights must be protected and the law enforced, it encompasses both the police and the military. The state is its administrative body. The modern national state, however, oversteps its essential boundaries, creating a kind of social indigestion in its attempts to legislate both in the domains of economics and of culture. Economic interests, in turn, influence legal judgments, often making a sham of human equality.

In the United States an important barrier to this overstepping is the constitutional doctrine of the separation of Church and State. The reasoning behind this doctrine has received considerable interpretation by legal experts and by the Supreme Court. Part of the discussion revolves around the ways in which people are considered equal. Thomas Emerson¹ argues that we are equal in one way through our need for self-fulfIllment or self-development, a fundamental aspect of which is belief formation. Consequently each individual has the right to form his or her beliefs without government interference. From this follows the separation of Church and State.

Religion is one pan of cultural life; another part is education. The separation of the three activities of society implies that education should be as independent of the state as is religion. In “The Separation of School and State” Stephen Arons presents a legal argument for this separation in the context of U.S. Constitutional law. He states that the case would have “for its central principle the preservation of individual conscience from government coercion. The specific application of this principle to education is that any state-constructed school system must maintain a neutral position toward parents' educational choices whenever values or beliefs are at stake. If schools generally are value-inculcating agencies, that fact raises serious constitutional questions about how a state can maintain a sufficiently neutral posture toward values while supporting a system of public education:”² In other words public schools as a matter of course tend to transmit those values deemed appropriate by the majority of the public. This implies choices among such conflicting values as competitiveness and cooperation, intellect and wisdom, and the status of manual work vis-a-vis intellectual work. Parents not accepting the majority view have the right to alternatives.

Current rulings protect the existence of private schools and their right to determine their own curricula with minimal state interference. These rulings exclude “any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.”³ Arons feels that their implications go further than is generally accepted. First, they can be interpreted as prohibiting state financing systems from favoring those who are in agreement with public school values. In effect every child has the right to the same educational support at the school of his or her parents' choice, whether public or private. Otherwise constitutional rights are reserved for the rich. Second, state regulation of private schools cannot effect value transmission unless there is legally compelling justification given by the state. Putting these implications into effect would increase the separation of school and state.

Steiner argues for separation of culture and state in order that the essential nature of each can find a healthy form. To understand the essential nature of the state we must recognize that people may differ among themselves with respect to musical and other talents, but that the same people are equal with respect to voting rights. The state will be healthy when it concerns itself strictly with those matters wherein people are equal. This human equality is fundamental to the state.

Freedom is the quality fundamental to the life of culture. It is interesting that freedom is often thought to be the characteristic of the political system. On reflection, however, it becomes clear that what is usually meant by freedom is equality under the law. Indeed, by majority consensus absolute freedom is limited. For example, a person is not free to murder or steal. A little reflection also reveals that people are not equal culturally. Few would deny the cultural superiority of Mozart, Hilbert, Schweitzer, or Emerson. Thus superiority does not effect the essential equality of all before the law. It does suggest that the highly gifted ought to be given more space and time than the merely moderately gifted to unfold their capacities for the benefit of society.

To understand Steiner's thinking consider briefly what is involved in a cultural creation, be it KeKule discovering the benzene ring, Saul Bellow writing a novel, or Joan of Arc planning a battle. Each of these activities originated in the creative depths of a unique individual. It issued forth from soul and spirit under the guidance of his or her own volition and intentionality. No external compulsion can bring forth inner creative activity. The individual does it freely or not at all.

Steiner's thinking about cultural life was directed more toward this inner activity than to its result or product. For him culture is that realm of society in which people acquire inner activity and mobility through interaction with others who have developed this mobility. In the essay “Cultivation of the Spirit and Economic Life” he says that cultural life

“aims at a form of cooperation among men to be based entirely on the free intercourse and free association of individualty with individuality. Here human individuality will not be forced into an institutional mold. How one person assists another, how one helps another advance will simply arise from what one, through his own abilities and accomplishments, is able to be for the other. It is no great wonder that presently many people are still able to imagine nothing but a state of anarchy as a result of such a free form of human relations in the social order's spiritual-cultural branch. Those who think so simply do not know what powers of man's innermost nature are hindered from expanding when man is forced to develop in the pattern into which the state and economic system mold him. Such powers, deep within human nature, cannot be developed by institutions, but only through what one being calls forth in perfect freedom from another being.”

As Steiner mentions above, real freedom in culture need not result in chaos. He provided an example of this in the Waldorf School, which he founded in Stuttgart in 1919. Based on that impulse the Waldorf Schools have grown in number to a worldwide confederation of over 350 independent private primary and secondary schools. The teachers in these schools retain complete control of the activities within their own classrooms, as well as of the operation of the school as a whole through a collegial administrative body. The heart of the pedagogy is a developmental picture of the child compatible with that of Piaget, whom Steiner predated. The developmental phases that are outlined in the essay “The Pedagogical Basis of the Waldorf School” provide a context for the Waldorf teacher's interaction with children of different ages. This interaction follows a structured curriculum, where subjects are chosen to assist the developmental process of each child. The curriculum and the concept of the developmental phases can be compared to an instrument that the teacher creatively plays in order to help the students actualize their potentials. In this way the schools provide an example of free creative activity within a structure. It is not chaos. Being personally acquairited with a number of Waldorf students, I can say that they come closer to realizing their own potentials than practically anyone I know.

This is in striking contrast to what one finds in the public primary and secondary schools in the United States. A recent study points to a catastrophic situation. The report titled A Nation at Risk⁴ literally states that if a foreign power had imposed our current educational system on us, we would have taken it as an act of war. Just how bad conditions are can be deduced from the results of an English proficiency exam, given this September to incoming freshmen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with a standard of passing which was embarrassingly low. Of 1131 students who took the exam, about 800 failed. Considering that MIT is among the highest quality institutions in the country, receiving applications only from top students and accepting only the best of them, it is clear that standards of mastery of their native language among average students in our secondary school system must be very low indeed.

The report goes on to urge that something must be done to improve this situation, giving two compelling reasons. The first is that without a better educated public the United States will be unable to compete with foreign economies in the struggle for markets. This is an economic reason. The second is a political one. Lacking an educated public America will not be able to keep up its military strength. In Steiner's terms the report suggests that we nurture the germ which is the underlying cause of the problem. It should be clear that if these two are the primary reasons for improving the educational system, then they will influence how it is “improved.” In reality it is exactly such influences from the state and from economics that have caused the current catastrophe.

Unhealthy connections and influences among the several activities of society have caused catastrophies in economic life as well. Two cases which illustrate this are developments in the American rail and steel industries since the second world war. At the beginning of the war the U.S. railroad system was quite superb. It covered the entire country and was fast and comfortable. But then companies like New York Central started examining themselves and decided the business they were really in was making money and providing dividends for their shareholders. On this basis they took their surplus funds and bought companies which were unrelated to railroading but which were judged more profitable than rail. Today we call this diversification. The deterioration of the railroads' infrastructure was the consequence. Within a decade the system was in disarray. Similar events took place in the U. S. steel industry. American steel became uncompetitive. Those foreign steel manufacturers who had decided that making steel was their business, and who consequently invested in renewal and improvement of their plant, became even more efficient while the American steel-making plant deteriorated.

The decline of American rail and steel can be traced to neglecting the essential nature of economic life: meeting human needs. They turned, instead, to the rights of owners, myopically pursuing shareholder profit and probably management compensation. This is the “pig principle.” The net impact on society can be found by adding the shareholder's gain to the external effects, such as the cost of finding and using alternatives to rail transportation, which are costs to society. The net, a big negative, is the logical outcome of economic activity losing its primary focus of meeting needs.

To be healthy economics must start from and keep this primary focus. Those at work in economic life concern themselves primarily with the production and circulation of commodities. What is produced is usually not consumed by those who produce it. The product serves the needs of others. For this reason Steiner used the term “brotherliness” (and we should add sisterliness) to characterize economic activity. He stressed that this applies only to economies in which the division of labor is the norm.

But to characterize actual economic life with the term “brotherliness” is to contradict much of modern economic thinking. Human economic activity is more usually characterized by terms like selfishness, personal gain, and survival. Steiner insists, however, that these ideas are inconsistent with fundamental economic realities. Since the division of labor, few individuals have really provided for themselves. We all rely on the efforts of thousands, indeed millions of others to produce the car we drive, the food we eat, and the clothes we wear. The reality of modern economic life is that we take care of one another, i.e., true brotherliness. Thinking that overlooks this fundamental reality is likely to misguide economic decisions, as in the two examples cited.

The proper separation of the three activities of society-economics, law, and culture-would make it possible for economic life to keep its focus on human needs and maintain its true brotherly character. Steiner envisioned this coming about through the working of motivational forces different from those to which we are accustomed. Self interest, profit, and personal gain could be replaced by the satisfaction of knowing one is working for the community good. Steiner argued that this is not a utopian dream; rather it is a motivation suitable to true human dignity. He also described new ways of working with wages, capital, and credit that would aid the advent of this new motivation. The key to its possibility and practicality is again the proper separation of the three activities.

He explains in the essay “Ability to Work, Will to Work, and the Threefold Social Order” that this socially responsible motivation would not arise from the economic life at all, because purely economic work has become inherently uninteresting since the division of labor became the norm. This was not the case for the medieval craftsman who produced his product in its entirety and then, taking pride in it, received thanks from his customer. The modern worker is confined to a task that, taken by itself, i.e., out of the macroeconomic context into which it fits, is meaningless. The existing economic motivation, money, leads people to do whatever is necessary to get paid. But it does not activate their interest in a task that is inherently uninteresting, with the consequence that absenteeism, alienation, and poor performance have reached alarming levels. Steiner recognized that socially responsible motivation could arise only from an independent cultural and political life. In the above mentioned essay he says that within the cultural life the individual

“learns in a living way to understand this human society for which one is called upon to work; a realm where one learns to see what each single piece of work means for the combined fabric of the social order, to see it in such a light that one will learn to love it because of its value for the whole. It aims at creating in this free life of spirit the profounder principles that can replace the motive of personal gain. Only in a free spiritual life can a love for the human social order spring up that is comparable to the love an artist has for the creation of his works.&rdquo

From a separate democratically ordered life of law there would also arise motives to work for society.

“Real relationships will grow up between people united in a social organism where each adult has a voice in government and is co-equal with every other adult: it is relationships such as these that are able to enkindle the will to work ‘for community.’ One must reflect that a truly communal feeling can grow only from such relationships, and that from this feeling the will to work can grow. For in actual practice the consequence of such a state founded on democratic rights will be that each human being will take his place with vitality and full consciousness in the common field of work. Each will know what he is working for; and each will want to work within the working community, of which he knows himself a member through his will.&rdquo

If we attempt to fInd examples of this type of motivation operative in contemporary society, we often fInd negative instances. This is nowhere better exemplified than at the highest levels of computer research at MIT. This research is paid for almost entirely by the military. While it is possible to view it, if one wears just the right kind of glasses, as a pure science and as “value free,” it is, in fact, in the service of the military. Scientific results are swiftly converted to the improvement of implements of mass destruction and of death. Young men and women work in these fields trying to maintain the illusion that they are doing abstract science, a “value free” science. They ultimately have to come to believe that they are not in any way responsible for the end use of their labor. It is often said that the computer is a tool having no moral dimension. Clearly this position can be maintained only if one thinks of human society in abstract terms, i.e. if one denies the concrete historical and social circumstances in which one lives and works.”

The effect of this situation on the researcher needs emphasis. It takes enormous energy to shield one's eyes from seeing what one is actually doing. The expenditure of this energy on the part of individuals is expensive in emotional terms. Ultimately this is the real tragedy, for it reduces the person to a machine.

There is a sort of irony involved, a chilling irony. A fear is often expressed about computers, namely that we will create a machine that is very nearly like a human being. The irony is that we are making human beings, men and women, become more and more like machines. For it is human to find the motive for work, consciously and with conscience and compassion, in the concrete historical and social context in which one lives. When this is not possible human beings are robbed of essential humanity.

The quest for a motive to work befitting human dignity extends from research scientist to factory worker. One might think, for example, that the steel worker, if he were educated to picture the use of the product of his work, would find in the pictures the motivation to work for social good instead of merely for a living. This presumably could be measured in higher quality work and reduced absenteeism. On closer inspection, however, it is doubtful that a look at the actual American context could bring about such motivation. A large percentage of steel manufactured in America is used for nothing but trivia. For example, there are on the order of ten million new automobiles produced in this country every year. If we restricted ourselves to a replacement market without model changes and alterations that are purely cosmetic, then we might easily get by, building, say, half a million cars a year. It is difficult to believe that the steel worker could be proud of his contribution to society if underneath he knew that the car his neighbor bought was unnecessary and that it might have been better to put the resources it required into feeding the 600 million people on the planet who are malnourished.

In a volume to be published subsequently to this one Steiner's concept of “unnecessary production,” i.e., trivia, planned obsolescence, etc., is introduced. With that discussion and much of what is presented in this volume it should be evident that Steiner's ideas will be of interest to those who concern themselves with issues of ecology and stewardship of the earth. In the broader context ecology must also encompass a social dimension, making it a social ecology that considers questions such as right motivation to work. In this sense Steiner's work also relates to the efforts of E.F. Schumacher, who read Steiner, and who tried to introduce us to ideas of appropriate scale and healthy approaches to post industrial society. These connections should help dispel any thought that this volume is dated. Rather, Steiner was far ahead of his time.

Joseph Weizenbaum
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1984

• 1. Toward a General Theory of the First Amendment (New York: Random House, 1966).
• 2. “The Separation of School and State: Pierce Reconsidered,” Harvard Educational Review, 46 (February 1976):1, pp. 96–97.
• 3. United States Supreme Court, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. at 535 (1925). 4. National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform; A Report to the Nation (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983).
• 4. National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform; A Report to the Nation (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983).

The idea of the Three-Membered Social Organism set forth in my book, The Threefold Commonwealth has grown out of perceptions which have ripened in view of the facts of modern social evolution, such as I attempted to describe yesterday. This idea of the threefold ordering of the social body aims at a practical solution of the problems of life and includes nothing Utopian. Hence, before writing my book, I presupposed that it would be received with a common instinct for actual facts, and that it would not be judged out of preconceived theories, preconceived party opinions. If what I said yesterday be correct and it is correct, undoubtedly, namely, that the social facts in the conditions of human life have grown so complicated that it is extremely difficult to survey them, a new method of dealing with the matters under discussion to-day will be necessary in order to enkindle the general social purpose. In view of this complexity of facts, it is only too comprehensible that there should be, for the time being, no understanding of the economic phenomena, except of such as have come within the experience of individual people; but everything of this nature is dependent upon the whole of economic life, and at the present time not only on the economic life of one country, but on that of the entire world. The individual human being will have, quite naturally and comprehensively, to judge the needs of world-economy from the experience of his own immediate circle. He will, of course, go astray. Anyone who knows the demands of thought that are in line with strict reality knows also how important it is to approach the phenomena of the world with a certain amount of instinct for the truth, in order to gain fundamental facts of knowledge. Such facts play the same part in life as fundamental truths in the knowledge gained at school.

Were we to try to acquaint ourselves with the whole of economic life in all its details and from it to draw our conclusions concerning the social purpose, we should never come to an end. In fact, we should just as unlikely come to an end as we would were we compelled to review all the details, let us say, of the application of the Pythagorean theorem in the technical field in order to recognize the truth of that theorem. We accept the truths of the Pythagorean theorem through certain inner thought-connections with it, and then we know that wherever it can be applied it must hold good. It is also possible to wrestle with the facts of social knowledge, until certain fundamental facts reveal themselves as truths to our consciousness by their inner nature. Our own sense of truth will then enable us to apply these facts everywhere as the occasion demands. In this way I should like my book, The Threefold Commonwealth, to be understood out of its own inner nature, out of the inner nature of the social conditions described. Emphatically, the whole idea of the Three-Membered Social Organism should be so understood. But I will particularly endeavor in these lectures to show that certain phenomena of social life give force to the conclusions arising from the idea of the threefold membering of the social organism. This idea is a result of the necessities of the present day and of the near future of humanity. I will also show how these confirmations may be arrived at.

But first it will be necessary to recall to you, as an introduction to my subject for to-day, the fundamental idea of the threefold membering of the social order. We have seen that our social life has three principal roots or members, from which spring its demands—in other words, that it is a question of culture, of State, law, politics, and of economics. Any one who studies modern evolution will find that these three elements of life, cultural, political, and economic, have intermingled gradually, until they now form a chaotic whole, and out of the amalgamation of these three elements the present evils of society have arisen.

If we thoroughly understand this—and these lectures are intended to help us do so—we shall find that the direction evolution must take in the future will be the ordering of public life and of the social organism so that there will be an independent cultural life, especially as regards general culture, education and teaching, an independent political, legal body, and a completely independent economic body. At present, a single administrative body embraces these three elements of life in our States, and when a three-membering is mentioned it is always misunderstood. It is taken to mean that an independent administration is demanded for the cultural life, another for the political life, and a third for the economic body—three parliaments instead of one. This is a complete misunderstanding of the threefold order, for that idea embodies the determination to do full justice to those demands which have shown themselves in the unfolding of history. Those demands, three in number, have come to be regarded as party cries, but if we look for their true meaning we shall find that there is an authentic historical impulse contained in them. These three demands contain the impulse of liberty in human life, the impulse towards democracy, and the impulse towards a social form of community.

But if these three demands are taken seriously they cannot be mixed up together under a single administration, because the one must always interfere with the other. If the cry for democracy has any real meaning at all, everyone must acknowledge that it can only flourish in a representative body or parliament, where every single man and woman of full age, being placed on an equality with his fellows, with every other adult in the democratic State, can make decisions from his own judgment.

Now, according to the idea of the threefold membering of the social body, there is a great region of life—that of law and equity, the State and politics—in which every adult has the right, out of his own democratic consciousness, to make himself heard. But if democracy is a reality, and all political life is to be entirely democratized, it is impossible either to include, on the one hand, the cultural life or, on the other, the economic life in the democratic sphere of administration. In the democratic administration a parliament is absolutely in its place, but questions belonging to the department of spiritual life, including education and teaching, can never be properly decided in such a democratic parliament. (I will here only touch upon this subject, as I will deal with it fully in my fourth lecture.) The threefold order strives to realize an independent life of thought, especially in public matters and in everything relating to education and the manner of giving instruction, that is, the State shall no longer determine the matter and manner of teaching. Only those who are actually teachers, engaged in practical education, shall be its administrators. This means that from the lowest class in the public schools up to the highest grade of education, the teacher shall be independent of any political or economic authority as regards the subject or manner of his teaching. This is a natural consequence of a feeling for what is appropriate to the life of thought within the independent cultural body. And the individual need only spend so much time in imparting instruction as will leave him leisure to collaborate in the work of education as a whole and the sphere of spiritual and cultural life in general.

I will try to show in my fourth lecture how this independence of thought places the whole spiritual constitution of man on quite a different footing, and how such independence will bring about precisely what is now believed, because of prevailing prejudice, to be impossible of realization. Through this independence, the life of thought will itself gain strength to take an active and effective part in the life of the State, especially in economic life. Independent thought, far from giving rise to hazy, theories or unpractical scientific views, will penetrate into human life, so that out of this independent thought-life the individual will permeate himself not with theories, but with knowledge that will fit him to take his place worthily in economic life. Because of its independence, the intellectual life will become practical, so that it may be said: practical and applied knowledge Will rule in the cultural sphere. Not that the opinion of every It person capable of forming a judgment will be authoritative. Parliamentary administration must be deprived of all authority over the cultural body. Whoever believes that it is intended that a democratic parliament should again rule here quite misunderstands the impulse for bringing into existence the social organism consisting of three members.

The same holds good in the economic sphere. The economic life has its own roots and must be governed in accordance with the conditions of its own nature. The manner in which business is carried on cannot be allowed to be judged democratically by every grown-up person, but only by someone who is engaged in some branch of economic life, who is capable in his branch and knows the links that connect his own branch with others. Special knowledge and special capacity are the only guarantees of fruitful work in economic life. Economic life, therefore, will have to be detached, on the one hand, from the political and, on the other hand, from the cultural body. It must be placed upon its own basis.

This is just what is most of all misunderstood by socialist thinkers of to-day. Such thinkers conceive of some form of economic life whereby certain social evils shall cease in the future. We have seen, as it is easy to see, that under the private capitalist order of the last few centuries, certain evils have arisen. The evils are evident enough: how do people judge them? It is said: It is the private capitalist order which is the cause of these evils; these will disappear as soon as we get rid of the system, when we replace it by the communal system. All the evils that have arisen are caused by the fact that the means of production are in the hands of individual owners. When this private ownership is no longer permitted, and the community is in control of the means of production, the evils will cease.

Now it may be said, socialist. thinkers have acquired certain isolated facts of knowledge and it is interesting to see how those isolated facts already have their effect in socialist circles. People are already saying that the means of production, or capital which is its equivalent, should be communally administered. We have seen, however, to what state-control of certain means of production has led, for instance of European post offices, European railways, and so forth. We cannot say that the evils have been removed, because the state has become the capitalist. Thus, neither by nationalization nor communalization, nor by the founding of cooperative societies by people who all need the same kind of articles, can any fruitful result be attained. According to the views of socialist thinkers, the people who regulate this consumption, and wish to regulate also the production of the goods to be consumed, become in their turn, as consumers, tyrants over production. The knowledge has, therefore, penetrated the minds of these socialists that nationalization and communalization, as well as the administration by cooperative societies, leads to tyranny on the part of the consumer. The producer would be subjected to the consumer's tyranny. Many therefore think that workers' productive associations in which everybody should have a voice in the management might be founded. In these the workers would unite and produce for themselves according to their own ideas and principles.

Here, again, socialist thinkers have perceived that nothing further would he attained than the replacement of the single capitalist by a number of capitalist working-men producers, who would not be able to do otherwise than the private capitalist. Thus, the Worker-Producers' Associations were also cast aside.

But all this fails to convince people that those separate associations cannot lead to fruitful results in the future.

Another scheme was that the whole population of a country, or some particular economic region, might be able to form a great federation in which all the members were to he both producers and consumers, so that no single individual could of his own initiative produce anything for the community. The community itself was to decide how the production should be carried on, how products should be distributed and the like. In short, a great federation embracing production and consumption would be substituted for the private administration now found in our present economic system!

Now anyone with a little insight into facts knows that the idea of founding this great federation in preference to smaller enterprises only arises from the fact that in a larger scheme the errors are less easily detected than in the schemes which propose to nationalize or communalize production and distribution schemes such as the Worker-Producers' Association and Cooperative Societies. In these latter the field to be surveyed is smaller and the faults committed in founding the enterprises are more easily seen. The great federation embraces a vast social area. Plans are made for the future; and no one sees that the same errors, which were easily discernible in the smaller undertakings, must inevitably again appear. They are not recognized in the larger scheme, because in it the promoters are incapable of taking in the whole matter at a glance. This is the explanation. And we must understand where the fundamental error in this kind of thought lies, an error which leads to the foundation of a great federation in which certain persons presume to take the whole administration of the entire production and consumption into their own hands.

What kind of thought leads to the imagination of such a project? This question can easily be answered if we consult the numerous party-programs at the present moment. What gives rise to these party-programs? Someone thinks: Here are certain branches of production; these must be managed by the community; they must then be united in larger branches, in larger administrative districts. Then there must be some kind of central management over the whole, and, above all those, a central board to control the whole consumption and production. What kind of thoughts and representations underlie such an economic scheme as this? Exactly those which are applicable to the political life of modern times. Those who today announce their economic programs have mostly had a purely political training. They have taken part in electioneering campaigns; they know what is expected of them when they are returned to parliament and have to represent their constituents. They are experienced in official and political life. They know the whole routine of political administration and see no reason why it should not be adapted to economic affairs—in a word, economic administration must be altogether modeled on political life.

What we are now so terribly in need of is to see for ourselves that the whole of this routine work, plastered on to the economic system, is something absolutely foreign to its nature. But by far the greater number of persons who now talk of reform, or even of a revolution in economic life, are, as a matter of fact, mere politicians, who persist in thinking that what they have learnt in politics can be applied in the management of economic affairs. A healthy condition of the economic system can, however, only prevail if that system be considered by itself and built up out of its own conditions.

What do these political reformers of the economic system want to bring about? They demand nothing less than that this hierarchy of the central management shall determine what is to be produced and how production is to be carried on and the whole manner and process of production brought under the control of the administrative offices. They demand that those persons who are to take part in the work of production shall be engaged and appointed to their places by the central office and that the distribution of raw material to the different works shall be effected by the central office. The entire production would therefore be subject to a kind of hierarchy of political administrators. And this is really typical of what is aimed at to-day in the greater part of the patent schemes for the reform of the economic system. The would-be reformers do not see that these measures would leave the economic system just where it is now; they would not remove its evils; on the contrary, they would immeasurably increase them. The reformers see clearly that nationalization, communalization, cooperative societies, worker producers' associations, are all alike useless; but what they do not see is that by their program they would only transfer to the communal administration of the means of production the very powers to which they object so severely in the private capitalist system.

It is this, above all, which really must be understood to-day. People must see that such measures and such institutions as those described will of a certainty bring about the conditions we see only too plainly in Eastern Europe to-day. There, certain individuals were able to carry out these ideas of economic reform and to realize them. People who are willing to learn from facts might see from the fate that threatens Eastern Europe and how these measures themselves lead ad absurdum. If people were less dogmatic in their ideas and more willing to learn from actual events, nobody would think of saying that the failure of the economic socialization of Hungary was caused by some unimportant factor or other. They would try to find out why it was bound to fail, and then they would be convinced that every such scheme of socialization can only bring destruction and cannot create anything fruitful for the future. But for vast numbers of people it is still very difficult to learn from facts in this way. This is best seen in things that are really often treated by socialist thinkers as of secondary importance. They say, it is true, that modern economic life has been transformed by modern technical science. But if they were to carry this train of thought further they would have to recognize the relationship between modern technical science and specialized knowledge and expert skill. They could not help seeing how modern technical science everywhere intervenes in industrialism. But they refuse to see it. So they say, in parenthesis, they will have nothing to do with technical science in the processes of production. It can take care of itself. They only wish to occupy themselves with the manner in which those who are engaged in production-processes live socially, what sort of social life they lead.

But if people will only open their eyes to facts, nothing can be more evident than the immense importance of the part directly played by technical science in economic affairs. One example, a really typical one, may be given here. By multiplying machines, technical science has, to put it in a few words, succeeded in providing commodities for public consumption and to the existence of this machinery is entirely due the fact that from four hundred to five hundred millions of tons of coal were brought to the surface per annum for industrial purposes before the War. Now if one calculates the amount of economic energy and power required by those machines, which are entirely the result of human thought and can only be worked by human thought, the following interesting result is arrived at. If we reckon an eight-hour day, we get the startling result that by these machines, i.e. through the human thought incorporated in the machines, through the inventive gift of the mind, as much energy and working force are used as could be produced by seven to eight hundred millions of men!

Hence, if you picture to yourself that the earth has a working population of about 1500 million men, it has gained, by the inventive genius of human beings in the recent periods of modern civilization, seven hundred to eight hundred millions more. Therefore, two thousand millions of human beings work, that is to say, the seven to eight hundred millions do not themselves actually work, but the machines work for them. What works in these machines? The human intellect.

It is of the utmost significance that facts like these, which might easily be multiplied, should be grasped. For they show that technical science cannot be treated with indifference and lightly put aside; but that it cooperates actively and ceaselessly in industrial life and is inseparable from it. Modern economic life is altogether unthinkable without the basis of modern technical science and without special knowledge and expert skill.

To overlook these things is to set out with preconceived ideas, inspired by human passions, and to close our eyes to realities. The idea of the Threefold Order of the Social Body is honest in its endeavors to solve the social problem. For that reason its standpoint cannot be the same as that of party-leaders, with catchwords and programs. The Threefold Order must start from facts. Hence, taking its stand on the realities of life, it must recognize that industry, especially in our complicated life, is based on the initiative of the individual. If we try to substitute for individual initiative the abstract community at large,¹ we give the death-blow to economic life. Eastern Europe will prove this, if it remains much longer under its present rule. It means extinction and death to the economic body when we deprive the individual of his initiative, which must proceed from his intellect and take part in the ordering of the means of production purely for the benefit of human society.

What is the origin of the evils we see to-day? The modern process of production, because of its technical perfection, necessitates the initiative of the individual and therefore necessitates that the individual shall have capital at his disposal, and that he shall be able to carry on production on his own initiative these are the results of the recent development of humanity. And the accompanying evils, as we shall see grow out of very different causes. If we want to know their origin, we must, in the first place, take our stand, not on the company-principle, not even on the great syndicate-principle, but we must take our stand on the principle of Association.

What do we mean by taking our stand on the principle of Association rather than on that of companies? We mean that whoever takes his stand on the company-principle² considers that all that is necessary is for individuals to join together, to confer together, and come to resolutions; then they can control the process of production. Thus the first thing is to join together, and form the company; then from this society, from this community of human beings, to start production. The idea of the Threefold Social Organism starts from realities. It requires, in the first place, that men should be there, who can produce, who have technical knowledge and special skill. On them must depend the business of production. And these experts in technical knowledge and skill must unite and carry on the economic activity founded on the production which springs from individual initiative. This is the true principle of Association. Commodities are first produced and then brought to the consumer on the basis of the union of the producers.

What may be called the misfortune of our age is that the difference, the radical difference between these two principles is not understood; for, as a matter of fact, everything depends on their being understood. Entirely wanting is the instinct to observe that every abstract community which attempts to control production must undermine the process. The associative community can only receive what is produced by the initiative of the individual who offers it to the community, to the consumer.

The most important aspect of these things is not perceived, for the reason which I gave yesterday. I said then that at about the time of the Renaissance, of the Reformation, at the beginning of modern history, the precious metals began to be introduced into Europe from Central and South America, and that this led to the substitution of the financial for the natural system of economy, up till then almost the only prevailing system. By this change, a very significant economic revolution was accomplished in Europe. Conditions then arose, to the influence of which we are still subject at the present day. These conditions have at the same time shut out the view like a curtain which prevents one from obtaining sight of true realities.

Let us look more closely at these conditions. Let us begin with the old system of natural economy, though it is not so much in evidence in our day. The only factor in the economic process is the commodity produced by the individual. This he can exchange for something produced by another; and in this natural economic system, according to which one product is exchanged for another, a certain standard of quality must be attained. For if I wish to barter one commodity for another, I must have something that I can exchange for it and that the other accepts as of equal value. This means that people are forced to produce if they want anything. They are forced to exchange something which has a real, an obviously real, value. In place of this exchange of commodities which have a real value in human life, we have introduced finance, and money has become the medium with which one buys and sells, as one buys and sells with real objects in the natural economic system. We need only recall the fact that money, by becoming a real object in economic transactions, deludes men as to its true nature and, by producing this imaginary effect, at the same time tyrannizes over them.

Take an extreme case. Let us assume that the credit system which I mentioned at the close of my lecture yesterday, makes its way into the economy of finance. As a matter of fact, it has done so of late in many cases. The following example shows the result of this. A government or an individual enterprise has for its object the installation of the telegraph. A very considerable amount of credit can be raised and the scheme is successfully carried out. Certain circumstances demand considerable amounts of money, and interest on these amounts must be paid; provision must be made for the payment of interest. And what do we find in many instances within our social structure especially when the state itself does this business? It happens most frequently in state enterprises that the object for which the money was provided and employed has long since become useless; it is no longer there but the public funds still go on paying off what was once demanded as credit. In other words, the object for which the debt was incurred has vanished, but the money is still an object of economic transaction. Such things have a world-economic significance. Napoleon III, who was completely under the spell of modern ideas, took it into his head to embellish Paris and he had many buildings erected. The Ministers who were his willing tools carried out the operations. It occurred to them that the national income might be applied to pay the interest. The result is that Paris has been very much improved, but the people are still paying the old debt. That is to say, long after the thing has ceased to have any real foundation, manipulations are still going on with the money which has itself become an economic object.

This had, to be sure, its advantages. When business was carried on in the old natural system of economy, the production of commodities was necessary. These were, of course, liable to spoilage; and people had to work, and to continue working, so as to keep up a supply of goods. This is not necessary with money. A man gives over money, lends it, insures himself; that is, money transactions are carried on quite independently of those who produce commodities. Money emancipates man in a certain sense from the actual economic process, just because it becomes itself an economic process. This is extremely significant. For in the old natural economy, one individual depended on another. Men were forced to work together, to bear with one another. They had to agree on certain arrangements, otherwise the economic life could not go on. Under the financial system the capitalist is, of course, also dependent on those who work. But he is quite a stranger to these workers. How close was the tie between consumer and producer in the old natural economy in which actual commodities were dealt with! How remote is the person who transacts business in money from those who work in order that his money may yield interest! A deep gulf has opened between one human being and another. They do not get near to each other under the financial system of economy. This is one of the first things to be considered, if we wish to understand how the masses of workers (no matter whether they are intellectual or manual workers) can again be brought together with those who also make business possible by lending capital. This, however, can only be done through the principle of Association, by which men will again unite with each other as men. The principle of Association is a demand of social life, but a demand such as I have described it, not one resembling those that often figure in socialistic programs.

What else has happened under the ever-increasing influence of modern finance? What is called human labor has become dependent upon it. The regulating of human labor in the social structure is a subject of dispute among socialists themselves, and excellent grounds can be found for and against what is said on both sides. One can understand—especially when one has learnt not to think and feel about the proletariat, but to think and feel with the proletariat—one can well understand why the proletarian says that his labor-power must no longer be a commodity. It must no longer be possible that on the one hand commodities are bought on the market, and on the other hand human labor is also bought on the labor market and paid for in the form of wages.

That is easy to understand. It is also easy to understand that Karl Marx had many followers when he calculated that the workman produces a profit and that he is not paid the full value of his labor, but that the profit produced by him goes to the employer. It is easy to understand that under the influence of such a theory, the workman should fight about this profit. But it is just as easy to prove on the other hand that wages are paid out of capital, and that modern economic life is altogether regulated by capitalism; that certain products create capital and, according to the capital created, wages are paid, labor purchased. That means wages are produced by capital. One argument can be proved as clearly as the other. It can be proved that capital is the parasite of labor; it can also be proved that wages are created by capital. In short, the opinions of either party may be defended with the same validity. This fact ought to be once for all thoroughly grasped. Then it will be understood why it is that, at the present day, when people seek to attain something, they do so preferably by fighting for it, not by progressive thought, and by accounting for circumstances. Work is by its nature so entirely different from commodities that it is quite impossible to pay money in the same way for goods and labor with out economic injury. But people do not understand the difference. They still do not see through the economic structure, especially in this section of it. There are countless economists in our day who say: “If money, the currency, either coin or paper money, is increased ad lib., it loses its value, and the necessaries of life, especially the most indispensable, go up in price.” We observe this and see the folly of simply increasing the currency, for the mere increase, as anyone can see, has only the effect of raising the price of the necessaries of life. The well-known endless screw is still turning!³

But there is another thing not understood: as soon as labor is paid for in the same way as commodities or products, it must happen as a matter of course that at that moment labor begins to fight for better and better pay, for higher and higher wages. But the money which labor receives as wages plays the same part in the determining of prices as the mere increase of the money in circulation. This ought to be understood. You may do as many a Minister of Finance has done and, instead of increasing production and taking care to improve it, you may simply issue banknotes and increase the currency. Then there will be more money in circulation, but all commodities, especially those indispensable to life, will be dearer. People see this for themselves; therefore they see how foolish it is simply to increase the money in circulation. But what they do not see is that all the money that is spent in order to pay labor actually has the effect of raising the price of commodities. For sound prices can only be fixed within an independent economic system. Sound prices can only be fixed when they develop in accordance with the true valuation of human activity. Therefore the idea of the Threefold Order of the Social Organism is to detach labor completely from the economic process. It will be my task especially tomorrow to go into this matter in detail.

Labor as labor has no place in the economic process. It may seem strange, or even paradoxical, to say what I am about to say, but many things now seem paradoxical which we must nevertheless understand. Consider how far people have fallen away from right thinking! For this reason they often find things absurd which must, nevertheless, be said because they are true. Let us suppose that a man gives himself up to sport from morning till evening; that he makes it his occupation. He expends exactly the same labor-force as one who chops wood, and in exactly the same manner. What is important is to use one's strength in working for the community at large. The sportsman does not do this; the most that can be said of him is that he makes himself strong, only, as a rule, he does not turn his strength to account. As a rule, it is of no importance to the community that a man make a profession of sport by which he tires himself as much as by chopping wood. Chopping wood is of some use. That is to say, the use of labor-power has no importance socially, but what results from such use has a meaning in social life. We must look at the result of the application of labor. That is valuable to the community. Hence, the only thing which can be of value in economic life is the product of labor-power. And the only thing with which the administration of economic life can have any concern is the regulation of the comparative values of products. Labor must lie quite outside the economic circuit. It belongs to the department of equity, of which we shall speak tomorrow, in which every adult human being has a right to make himself heard, on equal terms with every other human being. The manner and duration and the kind of work will be determined by the legal conditions prevailing between man and man. Labor must be lifted out of the economic process. Then there will remain to be regulated by the economic system only the valuation of commodities and of the service which one person should receive from another in exchange for his own service. For this purpose certain persons will withdraw from the Associations composed of producers of various things, or of producers and consumers, and so on. These people will occupy themselves with the fixing of prices.⁴ Labor will lie entirely outside the sphere to be regulated in the economic process; it will be banished from it. As long as labor is within the economic system, it must be paid out of capital. This is precisely the cause of all that we call striving for mere profit, the race for wealth in modern times. For in this process the man who has commodities to supply is himself part of the process which ends at last in the market. At this point it is very important that a highly erroneous idea should be corrected by all who wish to see things in their true light, We say the capitalist places his commodities on the market to make a profit from them. For a long time socialist thinkers have been saying with a considerable amount of justice that the moral law has nothing whatever to do with this production, but that only economic thought is concerned with it. Today, however, a great deal is said from the ethical standpoint on the subject of profit and gain. Here we are going to speak neither from an ethical, nor from a merely economic point of view; we speak from the point of view of the whole of human society. And the question must be asked: What is it that arises as gain, or profit? It is something which plays the same role in social economy that the rising quicksilver plays in the tube of the thermometer. The rising of the quicksilver shows that the temperature has risen. We know that it is not the quicksilver that has made the room warmer, but that the increased warmth is caused by other factors. The market profit resulting from present conditions of production is only a sign that commodities can be produced which yield a profit. For I should like to know how any one can possibly discover whether a commodity ought to be produced, if not from the fact that, when it has been produced and placed on the market, it yields a profit. This is the only sign showing that one may influence the economic system by bringing out this product. The only way in which we know whether or not a commodity should be produced is that it finds a sale when placed on the market. If there is no demand for it, there is no profit in it.

These are the facts, without all the rambling talk about demand and supply, which we find in the theories of so many economists. The consideration that lies at the root of the matter in this sphere is that the yielding of profit is at present the one and only thing that enables a man to produce a certain commodity, because it will have a certain value in the community. The remodeling of the market, which to-day operates in this way, will follow as soon as a real principle of Association finds a place in our social life. Then it will no longer be the impersonal supply and demand having nothing to do with the human being, which will determine whether a commodity shall be produced or not. Then, from those Associations, by the will of those working in them, other persons will be brought in, whose business it will be to find out the relation between the value of a manufactured commodity and its price. We may say that the value of a commodity does not come under consideration. It certainly gives the impulse to the demand. But the demand in our present social conditions is extremely doubtful because there is always the question whether there are sufficient means available to make the demand possible. We may want things; if we do not possess the means to satisfy our wants, we shall not be able to create a demand. What is essential is that a connecting link be formed between human needs, which give the commodities their value, and the value itself. For the commodity which we need acquires its human value always in accordance with that need. Institutions must arise out of the social order which form a link between the value attached to the commodities by human needs, and the right prices. The prices are now fixed by the market in accordance with the known purchasing power of potential buyers. A truly social order must be guided by the fact that those who quite justifiably must have commodities must be able to pay for them, i.e. the prices must fit the value of the commodities and correspond to it. Instead of the present chaotic market, there must be an arrangement by which the tyrannizing over human needs and the interference with consumption is eradicated. The methods of the Worker-Producers' Associations and the Cooperative Societies must cease, and research be made into the scope of consumption, and decisions reached on how consumption needs can be met.

For this purpose, and following the principle of Association, it will be possible to produce a supply of commodities corresponding to the needs which have been investigated. That is, arrangements must exist with persons who can study the wants of consumers. Statistics can only give the present state of affairs. They can never be authoritative about the future. The needs for the time being must be studied, and, in accordance with these, measures must be taken to produce what is needed. When a product shows a tendency to become too dear, that is a sign that there are too few workers engaged on it. Negotiations must then be carried on with other branches of production to transfer workers from one branch to another where the need lies, in order that more of the lacking products may be supplied. If a commodity tends to become too cheap, that is to say, to earn too little profit, arrangements must be made to employ fewer workers on that particular product. This means that in the future the satisfaction of the needs of the community will depend on the way in which men are employed in industry. The price of the product is conditional on the number of persons engaged in its production. But, through these arrangements, the price will really correspond to the value attached to the commodity in question by the community in accordance with its requirements.

So we see that human reason will take the place of chance, that as the result of the arrangements which will come into existence the price will express the agreements arrived at, the contracts entered into. Thus we shall see a revolution of the market accomplished by the substitution of reason for the chances of the market now prevailing.

We see, then, that as soon as we detach the economic body from the two other departments, which we shall discuss in the following lectures when we shall also treat of the relationship of the other departments to the economic body and of many things which must now seem difficult to understand—as soon as the economic body has been detached from the two others, the State or rights body and the spiritual or cultural body, the economic body will find itself on a sound and reasonable basis. For the only thing with which it will have to concern itself will be the manner of carrying on business. It will no longer be necessary to influence the prices of commodities by manipulating them so that these prices will determine how long or how much the people should work and what wages should be paid, and so on. The only thing that need be considered in economic life will be the relative values of commodities. In this way economic life will be placed on a sound basis, and this sound basis must be preserved for the whole economic life. Hence, in such an economic life as this there will be a return to a condition which has now almost ceased to exist because of the financial system in which money itself has become an object of economic business, a condition in which economic life will be re-established on its natural and worthy foundation. It will not be possible in future to carry on business by means of money and for money; for economic institutions will have to deal with the respective values of the commodities. That is to say, society will again return to goodness of quality, excellence of workmanship and the capability of the worker. The granting of credit will no longer depend on the condition that money is available or tight, or on the degree of the risk to be taken; it will depend entirely upon the existence of men capable of starting an enterprise or of producing something. Human ability will command credit. And since human capability will condition the amount of credit to be granted, that amount can never be given in excess of human capability. If you merely give money and allow it to be used, the object to which it has been applied may long have ceased to exist, but the money is still the object of transactions. If the money is given for human capability, when that human capability comes to an end the object for which the money is used also ceases to exist. We shall discuss this in the following lectures. Not until the economic body is supported by the two other departments of social life, the independent political and the independent cultural body, not until then can the economic system be established independently in a sound way on its own foundation. But, to this end, everything within the economic system must grow out of the conditions proper to itself. Material commodities are produced out of these conditions. We need only think of an instance in social life, of something which might be compared to a waste product of economic life, and we shall see how, as a result of true economic thinking, many a thing must be discarded which is now reckoned as a matter of course in the social order and is even defended as a progressive measure of social science.

Among all those who at the present day profess to be experts in practical life, there is not a single individual who doubts that an improvement has been made by the transition from all kinds of indirect taxation and other sources of national income to what we call the income tax, especially the graduated income tax. Everyone thinks it is unquestionably right to pay income tax and yet, however paradoxical this may sound to the modern mind, the belief that the imposition of a tax on income is a just measure is only an illusion resulting from the modern financial system of economy. We earn money; we trade with it. By money we detach ourselves from the sound productive process itself. Money is made into an abstraction, so to speak, in the economic process, just as thoughts are in the process of thought. But just as it is impossible to call up by enchantment real ideas and feelings from abstract thought, so it is likewise impossible to bring forth by enchantment something real from money, if that money is not merely a symbol for commodities which are produced. if it is not merely a kind of book-keeping, a currency system of book-keeping, in which every piece of money must represent a commodity. This subject will also be more fully discussed in the following lectures. Today it must be stated that in a period which is only concerned with turning money into an economic object, incomes cannot escape being considered an object of taxation.

But by imposing taxes we make ourselves co-responsible with others for the whole system of financial economy. Something is taxed which is not a commodity at all, but only a symbol for a commodity. We are dealing with an abstraction from the economic life. Money only becomes a reality when it is spent for something. It then takes its place in the circuit of economic life, whether I spend it on amusement, or for bodily or mental necessities, or whether I bank it to be used in the economic process. Banking my money is a way of spending it. This must, of course, be kept in mind. But money becomes a reality in the economic process at the moment it passes out of my possession into the process of economic life. If people would reflect, they would see that it is of no use for a man to have a large income. If he hoard it, it may be his; but it is of no use in the economic process. The only thing that benefits a person is the ability to spend a great deal. In public life to-day, in a life fruitful of results, the ability to spend a great deal is just the sign of a large income. Hence, if a system of taxation is to be created which constitutes a real service of the economic process to the good of the general community, instead of a parasitical growth upon it, capital must be taxed at the moment it is transferred to the economic process. And, strange to relate, income tax comes to be transformed into a tax on expenditure, which I beg you not to confound with indirect taxation. Indirect taxation is often the expression of the wishes of rulers at the present day, because the direct taxes and income tax do not ordinarily yield enough. We are not referring to either direct or indirect taxation, in speaking of the tax on expenditure; the point in question is that at the moment my capital passes into the economic process, and becomes productive, it shall be taxed.⁵

Precisely by this example of taxation, we see how very necessary is a change in our method of thinking, and how the belief that a tax on income is first in importance is an accompaniment of that financial system which has appeared in modern civilization since the Renaissance and Reformation. When the economic system is once placed upon its own basis, the only matter to be considered is that capital actually involved in the production of commodities shall supply the means for the manufacture of the products necessary to the community. It will then be a case of a tax on expenditure, but never one on income.

These are things we must relearn, and we must change our method of thinking. In these two lectures I have only been able to give a sketch of the matter with which I shall deal much more exhaustively in the next four lectures. Anyone who gives utterance to such things knows well that he will arouse opposition on all sides, that at first hardly anyone will agree with him; for all such matters are overlaid by party opinion. But no improvement can be hoped for until they are raised out of the sphere of party passions into that of true thought, resulting from close connection with life. How desirable it would be if people, on first hearing of the Three-Membered Social Organism, instead of judging in accordance with their party programs and opinions, would take their own instinct for truth to aid them in forming their judgments. Party opinions and principles have in many cases led people away from that feeling for truth. Hence, one finds over and over again that those who are more or less dependent on the mere consumption of commodities really find it easy, prompted by their own feeling for the truth, to understand what is the aim of such an institution as the Three-Membered Social Organism. But then come the leaders, especially those of the masses of the socialist party, and it cannot be denied that the leaders show no inclination to enter into consideration of reality. One thing, belonging more especially to economic life, is unfortunately evident, and this is one of the most urgent matters belonging to the social question.

I found, when speaking to the workers on the Threefold Order, that their own instinct for truth enabled them to understand well what was said. Then came the leaders who told them that what was proposed was only a Utopia. It certainly did not agree with their own thoughts or with all that had been working in their brains for decades. They told their faithful followers that these were Utopian ideas, without reality. And unfortunately blind faith has grown too strong in modern times, a blind following, a terrible feeling of subjection to authority in these circles. It must be said that all the respect for authority once shown to bishops and archbishops of the Catholic Church is nothing as compared with that shown by the masses of modern workers to their leaders. This makes it comparatively easy for those leaders to carry out their intentions. What I wish to do is to point out above all things what is honest and not what merely serves cut and dried party interest. If I should be able to succeed in these lectures in showing that what is sought for in the Threefold Organism is really honestly intended for the general welfare of all humanity, without distinction of class, conditions, and so forth, the main object of these lectures will have been achieved.

• 1. The system of collectivist economy developed through governmental administration in Russia since 1917, (these lectures were given in 1919) has proved that the effort of “the abstract community at large” could not he substituted for individual initiative. The latter had to be re-introduced, at least to a limited degree, in connection with the promotion of certain incentives to individual initiative. These incentives were not, nor are they now, drawn from the concept of an abstract community which, because of its very nature, cannot be raised efficiently to the level of a true motive of action. They are to be drawn from quite different sources. The latter can be found partly in the depths of the Russian people's nature, and partly in the old incentives, more or less disguised by opportunistic ideology. These old incentives are, for instance, individual egotism with all its political and economical ramifications, integrated and fostered by the nationalistic accumulation of egotistic tendencies.
  
  The emphasizing of the above is necessary, since the number of people is large who believe that the development and outward political success of the Russian collectivistic system offers evidence provided by history that Rudolf Steiner's statement is wrong. It seems wrong only to a superficial and wishful thinking which has lost the basis of an unprejudiced observation of facts.
• 2. It is necessary to discriminate between what Rudolf Steiner has characterized here as “company principle” and the “principle of association”. This becomes clearer by taking into account the fact that the companies (corporations, big business) start their practice with a method of financing, the aim of which is to increase the amount of monetary capital (by means of profit) with little or no consideration for genuine economic needs. The principle of association is inherent in the incentive for those having the individual capacities to associate in order to provide for the genuine needs of consumers. Investment-capital, placed freely at the disposal of able and trustworthy persons, in conformity with this associative principle, becomes the monetary medium for the realization of a conscious social purpose instead of remaining a purpose in itself.
  
  In accordance with other numerous expositions given by Rudolf Steiner on this subject of capital accumulation, transfer, and administration, without government interference, it can be said that the “company principle” means a maintenance of an artificial, lifeless separation of finance-capital from the human being in his true social relationships, whereas the “principle of association” in the economic sphere starts from the human being with all his a is capacities and abilities, working by means of capital placed at his disposal for really productive purposes for the common benefit of all.
• 3. This was pointed out in face of the postwar condition of European economy which already showed inflationary tendencies but, nevertheless, gave evidence of the possibility of halting them and avoiding the full-scale inflation of later years by following the expert advice given by Rudolf Steiner on many other occasions. This advice supported by every imaginable reason fell on the deaf ears of those who were responsible.
• 4. In his course on World Economy, Rudolf Steiner not only gave the reasons for the inescapable necessity of considering the question of price as the central problem in economy, but also the ideas whose realization is indispensable for the timely solution of this problem on the basis of a threefold membering of the body social.
• 5. Rudolf Steiner's repeated warning that outworn habits of thinking will prove stumbling blocks to many who seek to understand his ideas, refers especially to this recommendation of taxes on expenditure, preferably when applied to the investment of capital. This recommendation can only be rightly appreciated when it is borne in mind that the full realization of this tax principle demands the threefold membering of the social organism as a prerequisite. If this prerequisite is taken fully into account, it becomes evident that taxes on expenditure would not be inimical to the consumer nor to the producer. For it is presumed that the consumer enjoys a sufficient income so that when he is taxed on his expenditures, he will find it fair and equitable to pay taxes to the extent that advantage is taken of society's labor as a whole. He does this by buying goods, and investing money in their production. In any case, the amount of capital put at the unrestricted disposal of the producer will be sufficient for the production of essential gods, because decisions on capital transfer intended for productive investment will come from sources quite different from those to which we are accustomed at present.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! What I have to say in these introductory words will, of course, differ somewhat from the usual format of these evenings for the simple reason that I have, so to speak, turned up out of the blue and it is therefore not possible to immediately continue where we left off last time. So perhaps today the focus will have to be on the discussion itself, in which I ask you to participate in large numbers.

When we began here in Stuttgart ten months ago to popularize the ideas underlying the threefold social order, this undertaking was conceived entirely in the context of the events of the time. We, as members of the Central European state, spiritual and economic communities, were facing all those questions that had to be raised from the point of view of how we, as people of Central Europe, who were, let us say it dryly, “the defeated” at that time, should behave. And here the view had to be taken that - in view of the terrible experiences, not so much the events of the war as the outcome of the war, which, of course in a different way, are no less terrible than the events of the war themselves - understanding would have to be awakened in a sufficiently large number of people for those ideas of a social reorganization that could have led to a reconstruction of European affairs precisely from the circle of the defeated.

When you are dealing with the propagation of some idea or other, you very often hear the word that these are far-reaching ideas. It is said that one can perhaps hope that such far-reaching ideas will be realized in the distant future – and depending on one's greater or lesser optimism, longer or shorter periods of time are then given – one can only work towards humanity approaching such ideals and so on. But at the beginning of our work, the situation did not really challenge the ideas that were moving in this direction. What was meant at that time was that the next necessity was to create understanding in as many minds as possible for the impulse of the threefold social order: for an independent spiritual life, for an independent state or legal life and for an independent economic life. It was hoped that the bitter events could have brought this understanding to people. But it has been shown that at the time when it was necessary, this understanding could not actually be brought forth in a sufficiently large number of people — for reasons that should not be touched upon further today. And today the question is rightly being raised from many sides: Can this idea of threefold order actually be cultivated in the same way as before? Have we not already progressed too far in the dismantling of our economic life?

However, anyone who understands the workings of today's economy cannot simply — I deliberately say “not simply” — answer this question in the negative. For, let us put forward the hypothesis that at the time when we began our work last April, if a sufficiently large number of people had been willing to help — and could certainly have brought about a change in circumstances — we would have actually had the necessary success: then, of course, our economic life would be on a completely different footing today. It may seem presumptuous of me to say so, but it is true. And the various articles that have appeared in our threefolding newspaper can serve as proof of what I have just said.

If we, who are working on the continuation of the threefold social order ideas in a narrower circle, nevertheless firmly believe that the work must continue, we are also thoroughly convinced on the other hand that the path that has just been taken – to convince a sufficiently large number of souls of the necessity of threefolding – that this path cannot lead quickly enough to success today. Therefore, we must think today of immediately practical undertakings, the form of which is to be presented to our immediate contemporaries in the near future. We must think of achieving our goal through certain institutions that can replace what would have been achieved through the collaboration of a sufficiently large number of convinced people. We must at least attempt to create model institutions, through economic institutions, by means of which it will be seen that our ideas can be practically realized in such economic institutions. These can then be emulated in the sense that people will believe the facts, which they previously refused to believe despite our convincing words. On the other hand, these model institutions will actually be able to have such economic consequences that some of the economic servitude that has already occurred can be redressed. Indeed, a large number of people in this Central Europe have come to the point where they do not care where their profits come from. They allow the victors to give them directives and even the material documents, if only it makes it possible for them to make corresponding profits. The way in which some people in some circles today are thinking of helping themselves economically in Central Europe is downright shameful. The idea is to create practical institutions from the threefold idea itself, which can provide the proof - even under the already quite difficult conditions - that this threefold idea is not utopian but practical.

You see, when we started our work, we were often asked: Yes, can you give us practical points of view for individual institutions? How should this or that be done? — The person who raised such a question usually completely disregarded the fact that it could not be a matter of maintaining one or the other institution, which had just proved its uselessness, by giving good advice, but that it was a matter of bringing about a complete social reconstruction through transformation on a large scale, through which the individual institutions would then have been supported. For this, it would not have taken advice on this or that, but rather a broad realization of the ideas, that is, by a sufficiently large number of people – because ultimately all institutions are made by people.

So today we are faced with a kind of change of direction that has truly not been brought about by our believing that we have been mistaken in our ideas. Ideas of this kind must always take into account the phenomena of the time. And if humanity does not respond to these phenomena, then the ideas must change, must at least take a different course. This is how we have pointed out that our not-so-old threefolding movement actually already has a story that is very much rooted in today's conditions and speaks volumes – a story that might perhaps be instructive for some people after all, if they would only pay attention to it.

I would like to illustrate what I have just said with an example: anyone who takes on the book “The Key Points of the Social Question”, as it was written a year ago, based on the economic explanations, will find certain considerations on the organization of economic life, which should acquire a certain necessary independence, which must not be dependent in the future on state institutions, state administrations, which must be thoroughly based on its own foundations, and which must be built up from its own foundations on the principle of associations. Of course, I can only give a few points of view today, but perhaps the discussion will provide more.

What then should be the actual purpose of such associations in economic life? The purpose of these associations should be that first of all, professional circles that are somehow related, that must work together objectively, and that manage their economic affairs completely freely and independently, without being subject to any state administration, should come together. And then these associations of professional circles should in turn associate with the corresponding consumers, so that what occurs as exchange between the related professional circles, but then also between the producer and consumer circles, is in turn united in associations. What arises from the free movement of economic associations should take the place of today's economic administration.

Of course, this network of economic institutions also includes everything that otherwise works in the legal and political spheres, and in the sphere of spiritual life. Spiritual life as such stands independently on its own feet, but those who are active in spiritual life must eat, drink and clothe themselves; they must therefore in turn form economic corporations of their own, which as such must be incorporated into the economic body, associating themselves in the economic body with those corporations that can serve their interests. The same must be done with the corporation of those people who are involved in state life. Thus, everything that is human in the social organism will be included in economic life, just as everything human that belongs to the social organism is included in the other two links, in state life and spiritual life. It is only that people are included in the three links of the social organism from different points of view. What matters is that the social organism is not structured according to estates, but according to points of view, and that every person is represented in every part of the social organism with their interests.

What can be achieved through such an economic life based on the principle of association? - What can be achieved is the elimination of the damage that has gradually arisen from the production methods of the last few centuries, especially the 19th century, from economic life and thus from human life in general. These damages are first experienced by man today in his own body, I would like to say. They have arisen because in the course of the more recent centuries, other conditions have arisen from the earlier conditions in relation to production in economic life.

If you look back to the period from the 17th to the 18th century, you will find that the way in which production took place is still to some extent connected with the people and their organization itself. You can see that in those days, when prices were set, they were dependent not on those factors on which they depend solely today, but, for example, on the abilities of the people, namely, for example, on the extent to which a person is able to work for so many hours a day on this or that production with a certain devotion and joy. The price was therefore determined by the extent to which the person had grown together with his production. Today, however, this is only the case in certain branches of intellectual life. If someone writes a book, you cannot dictate how many hours of the day he should work and set a wage for so many hours of the day. If, for example, an eight-hour working day were introduced for book writing, something beautiful would come of it, because it could very easily be that you should work for eight hours and get a wage for it, but that you should not get any ideas for four hours through three weekdays. Just as there is an intimate bond between human abilities, between the human spiritual organization and the products produced, so it was also the case for many more material branches - yes, the further we go back in human development, for all material branches. It is only in more recent times that the bond between the product and the producer has been broken. Looked at as a whole, it is basically utter nonsense to want to maintain this separation of the product from the producer. In individual branches of production, this can be blatantly obvious. Take, for example, the manufacture of books, considered purely economically. Books have to be written; this cannot be subjected to the laws of remuneration as represented, for example, by today's Social Democracy for the world of production. But books have to be printed, and the person who types them can indeed rely on the principles of today's social democracy, on the union principle. Because for typesetting, nothing more needs to be invented; there is no need for an intimate bond between producer and production. But if you go back to the sources, you will find everywhere that precisely the work for which you do not need such a bond would not even exist if it were not for the work on which all this external work depends. If the master builder were not there, all the wage laborers who build the houses could not work. If the book writer were not there, the typesetter could not set type for books. These are trains of thought that are not employed today, but they must be taken as a basis in the most eminent sense in economic considerations.

I could not go into detail about all the life experiences that have been incorporated into the “Key Points”, because they are, of course, intended for thinking readers. And I can assure you that it is still quite useful today to do a little thinking when reading a book and not always say: This is so difficult to understand, you have to think, it should have been written much more popularly. — But through the articles in our threefolding newspaper, which illuminate the same events from the most diverse points of view, this bond between producer and production has been loosened more and more. And only because in recent times, under the influence of the materialistic way of thinking, attention has been focused on the mode of production and not on the condition and ability of the producer, has the view even arisen among abstract, socialist agitators and thinkers that production as such is the one thing that dominates the whole of history, the whole of human life. This view arose because, in fact, through modern technology and certain other social conditions, a domination of the product over the producing people has occurred. So that one can say: While in the past, until about three centuries ago, much else was still dominant for people, in social life the economic person has since become the one who appears decisive today – the economic person and the economic process. People like Renner, for example, who even managed to become Austrian Chancellor, have indeed stated that there should be no more talk of “homo sapiens”, who haunted people's minds in the last centuries, but that n could only be talked about “homo oeconomicus” - that is the only reality. But since the 19th century, because things in reality undergo transformations according to their own laws, not even homo economicus, the economic man, the economic process, has remained decisive, but we can say: roughly from around 1810 - to set a starting point - the banker has become the dominant man. And more than one might think, in the economic life of the civilized world during the 19th century, the banker, the moneychanger, the one who actually merely administers the money, has become dominant. All the events that have occurred since that time are more or less subject to the influence of this historical change: in the economic context, the economic man and the economic process have gradually become the banker, the moneychanger, the lender above all, and the public social process has become the financial administration, the money administration.

Now, however, money has very definite characteristics. Money is a representative of various things, but money as such is the same. I can acquire a sum of money by selling a piece of music – a spiritual product. Or I can acquire a sum of money by selling boots. The sum of money can always be the same, but what I sell can be very different. As a result, money takes on a certain abstract character in relation to the real process of life. And so, under the influence of the world banking system, the obliteration of the concrete interactions in human social intercourse, the obliteration of the concrete interactions [between product and producer, and there arose] the intercourse of mere representatives, of money.

This, however, has very definite consequences. It has the consequence that the three most essential components of our economic process – land, means of production and means of consumption – which, by their very nature, are involved in the economic process in very different ways, are not only conceptually, but actually, placed under the same power and treated in the same way. For someone who is only concerned with acquiring or managing a certain amount of money may be indifferent as to whether this sum of money represents land or means of production, that is, machines or the like that serve for other productions but have been made by people, or whether it represents consumer goods, immediate articles of use. What matters is only that he receives a certain sum of money for something, or that, if he has it, it bears interest, no matter from what. The idea had to increasingly come to the fore that the interests one has in the individual products and branches of production are extinguished and replaced by the abstract interest in capital, which extinguishes all these differentiations, that is, in money capital. But that leads to very specific things.

Let's take land, for example. Land is not just something arbitrary, but is situated in a particular place and has a relationship to the people of that place, and the people of that place also have interests in this land that can be described as moral interests, as interests of a spiritual kind. For example, it may be an important point for the general interests of culture and humanity that a certain product be planted on this land. I will draw a somewhat radical picture of the circumstances. They are not so radical in ordinary life, but the essential thing can be shown with it. Anyone who has grown together with the land through their entire life circumstances will have an insight into how, let us say, the production of this or that from the land is connected with the entire life circumstances. They have gained their experiences in being together with the land. Questions can be important for this, questions that can only be judged if one has grown together with the local conditions of an area.

You can only gain such knowledge through experience. You can now fully appreciate that it is beneficial for the general human condition when a piece of land is utilized in a certain way, but only yields a certain result from this utilization. These considerations immediately disappear when the principle of monetary capitalism takes the place of the people associated with the land. In this case, it is a matter of land simply passing from one hand to the other as a commodity. But the person who simply acquires land by spending money is only interested in seeing that the money yields interest in the appropriate way. An abstract principle is imposed on everything that used to be a concrete human interest. And the person in question, who only has the interest of money, wonders whether, under the circumstances that the other person, who has grown together with the land, recognizes as necessary, the matter will yield enough for him; if not, then the land must be used for something else. In this way, the necessary human relationships are destroyed only from the point of view of monetary capitalism.

And so the aspects of monetary capitalism have been applied to all human relationships. In economics, they have distracted people from what can only arise when people are connected to production, connected to land, and connected to the products of consumption that circulate among people in some area. This was certainly present in earlier centuries. This has already disappeared under the influence of the economic man, but mostly under the influence of the banker in the 19th century. While until about 1810 the national economy was dependent on the traders and the industrialists, in the 19th century the traders and the industrialists, even if they did not admit it, essentially became dependent on the national and international money economy, on the bankers.

You can only be driven completely into economic egoism by this kind of money economy. But this kind of money economy should not be confused, as often happens today, with mere capitalism. Mere capitalism – you will find this explained in more detail in my Key Points – is meant to make it possible for only those who are capable of using large amounts of capital, whether in the form of the means of production or of money, the representative of the means of production, to grow together with production. And they should only remain connected to it as long as they can use their abilities in the service of production. This bare capitalism is absolutely necessary for the modern national economy, and to rail against it is nonsense. To abolish it would mean undermining the entire modern national economy. It is essential that we look at reality, that we see the difference, for example, that the administration of a large complex of land, in which the combination of forest and land may be necessary can be necessary, will mean one thing in the hands of a capable person and another if someone separates the forest and the land, then parcelled out the land into small holdings and the like. This can be good for certain areas, but in others it would ruin the national economy. Everywhere it depends on the specific circumstances. And we must finally find our way back to the specific circumstances.

But this [lack of concreteness] is not only evident in the national economy, in the individual economy, but is becoming more and more evident in the international economic system. It is quite clear to anyone who studies the matter that people, even if they are capitalists, when they are left to their own devices and supply certain branches of production according to their abilities, do not interfere with each other, but on the contrary work in each other's hands. The real problem only begins when people in some way outgrow their ties to the branches of production. I will give just one example of where this has become particularly apparent under the influence of the monetary economy of the 19th and 20th centuries: in the formation of trusts and cartels. Let us assume that a number of branches of production join together to form a trust, a cartel. What is the consequence?

A trust or cartel must have some purpose, and it is obvious that people make more profit through the trust than they would without it. But they can only do that if they create monopoly prices, that is, if they sell above the usual competitive prices that would be formed. So you have to create the possibility of raising prices, that is, agreeing on prices that are above the usual competitive prices. Yes, such prices can be created, they have been created in many cases. But it did not come to [healthy] production. You see, you can't produce in a healthy way under the influence of this kind of profit. If you don't want to create a mismatch with the costs of the facilities, which would be far too expensive if you only produced what you produce above the competitive price, then you have to produce so much more that the costs for the machines and the entire facility are covered, and you have to produce so much more that you would produce if you only got the competitive price. But you can only sell as much as you sell at monopoly prices. Because if you were to produce at competitive prices, you would have to sell a lot more and therefore also produce a lot more than you sell at monopoly prices. That is an economic experience: you sell less when you sell at monopoly prices, but you cannot produce less because otherwise production will not pay for itself. What is the consequence? You have to go to the neighboring country and get your sales there; you sell below the cost of production. But now you are entering into international competition. This international competition has played an enormous role. If you only take into account the fixing of the price caused by the monetary economy, you create competition that would otherwise not be there by selling differently: in the immediate sales area [above the cost of production] and in the neighboring country below the cost of production. You can do that; if you only calculate accordingly, you will even make more, but you will harm the corresponding producer groups in the neighboring country. If you look for the causes of the moods that led to the causes of war in the West, you will find the causes in these things. Then we will find what a huge step lies in the [social] damage on the way from capitalism to trust formation, to cartel formation, to monopolization by cartels. The capitalist as such, who produces at competitive prices, never has an interest in protective tariffs. The protective tariff is also something that has played a role in the causes of war. There you have the damage done by the monetary economy in international life. All this is so clear to anyone who studies modern economic life that there is actually nothing that can be said against it. The question must therefore necessarily arise: how do we get beyond these damages? There is no other way to get beyond the damages than to reconnect the human being with the product, to once again directly establish the bond between the human being and production.

This is the aim of the economic idea of social threefolding: what used to exist between the individual human being and production as a bond under very different circumstances can only be brought about today by the fact that those who produce in the same way connect with each other and those who are united by profession in turn join together in circles, in associations, with the other branches of production and the corresponding consumers. In this way the associations, the united people, will know how to set production in motion, and not just the money that flows over production as something homogeneous. But this could in turn bring about in a very essential way that which only a prosperous economy makes possible for humanity.

You see, it was necessary for someone to take a good look at reality today, because all the socio-economic stuff that has been talked about in recent times is basically said without looking at reality. Of course, individual people have made apt remarks about one thing or another. But most of what has been said, and especially all that under the influence of which modern world capitalism on the one hand and wage-slavery on the other have developed, this cancer of modern life, has come about because people have no longer really looked into the lawful context of economic life, and because they no longer saw – while living as a human being in economic life – how the. because money has obliterated everything. But when the associations are there, it will be clear and obvious how one thing or another must be produced. Then the person who has something to produce will receive customers through the people who are in the appropriate associations, and it will be discussed and determined whether so much of this or that can be produced. Without the enforced economy of Moellendorff's loquacity, something can arise; because one person is taught by the other in free exchange, everything can be organized so that consumption is truly the decisive factor for all.

This was the point of the idea of threefold social order: to speak to humanity from the full reality. Because people are so unaccustomed to approaching reality in the present, that is why it is so difficult to understand the matter; people are unaccustomed to approaching reality. What do people understand of economic life as a whole? The architect understands something of building, the master carpenter of carpentry, the shoemaker of shoemaking, the barber of cutting beards, everyone understands something of the corresponding economic activity with which he is connected. But all that these “practitioners of life” somehow know about economic life is only connected with their own and not with that of others. That is why it is so abstract. It was necessary to speak to humanity from the real context of the whole of social life. Because people have become unaccustomed to using the experiences of life as a guide, they regard as utopian precisely that which is born out of reality. But that is why this idea of social threefolding is recognized as the counter-image to all utopia, as something that is born out of real life and can therefore be applied to real life. And that is the only thing that matters: that people should understand these things. Then everyone, whatever their background, will understand the idea of the threefold social order, especially if they understand the connection between their production and the world's overall economic process. This idea of the threefold social order does not shy away from close scrutiny by those who understand something of economic life through their whole relationship to life. But today not many people understand anything about economic life or social life at all; they let themselves drift and are best off when they do not need to participate in any kind of decision-making about the social order, but when the government takes care of it for them. That is why people come up with such complicated ideas that they regard what is real in life as utopian. Of course, the situation today is somewhat obscured by the fact that the Western powers have fought for and won the opportunity not to come up to date. What is demanded today in the idea of threefolding is demanded by the times. This is the point that human development has reached today. The victory of the Western powers means nothing more than a reprieve to remain under the old social conditions. The Western Powers can afford this luxury; they have fought for it. But the Central Powers cannot afford this luxury; they are dependent on satisfying the demands of the time. If they satisfy them, it will have an effect on the whole world. If they do not satisfy them, they will perish.

This must be stated quite clearly today, because today it is an either/or situation. That is why it is so frivolous when clever people keep saying, for example, “Now there will be a disagreement between the French and the English.” The English do not want to conclude a militaristic alliance with the French out of their old traditions; they also do not want to grant any loans; they also do not completely agree with the intentions of the French regarding the Rhine border, and so on. This is the continuation of what had such a devastating effect during the war and before the war. There was always speculation: Now the enemies are once again at odds; perhaps we can make a separate peace with someone. With this diplomacy, they have finally managed to have almost the whole world against them. If people of this caliber continue to corrupt people's ideas and continue to speculate that the French and the English are once again at odds, then that is a pipe dream; it is not a grasp of reality. It is a continuation of the old diplomatic way of thinking, which Czernin described so well in his book, in which he demands that the extraordinary importance of diplomats must be recognized. But the extraordinary importance of diplomats consisted in their being able to move in the appropriate salons, observing the mood there and then writing long letters about this mood and so on. During the war, this was continued very nicely, as far as one could, only there one judged the mood more on secret paths. The catastrophe of the war was partly caused by this assessment of the mood before the war. And now people are starting to speculate in the same way again. But when people wake up, they will see that in reality they have only managed to sit between two chairs themselves. There is talk of a deep gulf opening up between the French and the English; the clever people are talking about it today. When people wake up, they will see that this gulf is indeed there, but people agree that they themselves are sitting in the middle of the deep gulf. The impulse for the threefold social organism is based on the realization that this way of thinking, which is so disastrous for humanity, must give way to a way of thinking that is in line with reality. And when this is understood, people will turn to this threefold social organism with an inner necessity.

After Rudolf Steiner's introductory words, the discussion was opened; various personalities spoke:

Georg Herberg believes that in view of the price increases in recent years - as an example, he cites the price of a ton of iron, which used to cost 13 marks but now costs 1700 marks - it is necessary to take a closer look at the price problem. In doing so, the opposite pole of consumers, that is, the producers, must be considered.

Before the actual discussion begins, Siegfried Dorfner would like to draw the attention of those present to three fundamental facts that could be seen as typical of the whole situation in the work of threefolding: firstly, party leaders had been invited for this evening; however, they are not present. Secondly, when they do come, they usually remain silent in the discussions; there are no speakers. Thirdly, the attitude of followers of anthroposophy is very often: “I like anthroposophy, but not the threefold social order.” And so the lack of success of the whole threefold social order efforts is not surprising. Carl Unger would like to come back to the above and points out the importance of trusts in today's economic life. The example of iron was mentioned; there one must assume that one was dealing with a steel trust in this area. The German sugar factories also have a similar monopoly position; there are an infinite number of beet fields in Germany, but the price is inflated compared to this large supply.

Walter Johannes Stein believes that the situation in the German sugar industry points to a very central problem, to the relationship between land and the means of production in general. The question arises, for example, of whether a cow is a means of production or whether it belongs to the land. But the matter becomes even more complicated when the cow is finally slaughtered; whether it then does not take on the character of a commodity. So he asks Rudolf Steiner to explain in more detail the relationship between land, means of production and goods.

Rudolf Steiner: My dear friends! Regarding the distinction between land and the means of production, the essential thing is that land is limited, it is not elastic, and in a certain sense it cannot be increased, while the means of production, which themselves arise through human labor, can be increased, and by increasing the means of production, production can in turn be increased.

Now, when making such distinctions, it is often necessary to start from different points of view. By distinguishing land from the means of production, one designates what is there first and has not been made by human hands as “land”. From the point of view of the political economist, a cow, which man by his labor does not himself manufacture, simply belongs to “land and soil” as long as it is not slaughtered; when it is slaughtered, it is of course a commodity. But then it appears in a very specific way on the commodity market, and we are dealing with two facts: firstly, the fact that it is withdrawn from the productive power of the land, and secondly, the fact that it appears as a commodity; in a sense, the cow is a marginal product. Such marginal products are everywhere. But the point is to, so to speak, hold on to what you have in mind by using the terms that can be taken from the respective characteristic representative.

Is that not so? In the economic process, we are dealing, firstly, with what is necessary for production but cannot itself be produced. This includes land itself and a number of other things; we simply summarize this under “land”. Secondly, everything that serves to produce something else but must first be produced itself, such as machines, is part of the economic process. In the context of the national economy, the process of working, the labor that must be used to produce the means of production, does not apply to land. This is the essential economic point: the labor equivalent is only a valid way of looking at the means of production until the means of production are actually ready for use in production. At the moment the means of production are available, they are actually integrated into the economic process in exactly the same way as land. As long as one is working on the means of production and has to make use of the national economy in order to be able to work on the means of production, a distinction must be made between how the means of production and land are placed in the national economy. At the moment when the means of production are finished, they are subject to the same economic category as land. As long as I still have to fabricate the locomotive, I have to assess the economic process in which the fabrication of the locomotive takes place differently than in the moment when it is finished. When it [as a finished means of production] is on the rails and is moved by people for further production, it is just as much a part of the economic process as land. The difficulty in the distinction is that the finished means of production actually falls under the same category as land. What labor has to be expended to create a means of production is the essential thing, and that is added to the means of production and is lacking in land. Of course, this is connected with the following. If land were elastic, it could be increased. It would either have to grow by itself or people would have to produce it. But I do not want to discuss this question further. The fact that land is available to a certain extent is what distinguishes it from the means of production. It can only be used to a greater or lesser extent, which makes it similar to the means of production.

Now, of course, we must also consider the third element, the actual commodity. It is characterized by the fact that it is consumed. In the economic process, this makes it something essentially different from the means of production, which itself is not directly consumed, but only worn out. Thus, a commodity is also something different from land, which also serves little for consumption, but at most needs to be improved, and so on.

Thus, these three things are to be distinguished as essentially different in the economic process: 1. land, which [exists] without human labor having been expended on it; 2. the means of production, which begins when human labor has been used; both – land and means of production – are not there for immediate consumption; 3. the commodity, which is there for immediate consumption.

But you see, the thing is that the whole thing is also a question of time. Because the moment you think about the fact that means of production, for example of a mechanical nature, are used up within a certain time, the moment you do that, the means of production appear to you as a commodity – only as a commodity that takes a longer time to be used up. When you make distinctions in life, these distinctions tend to be highly inconvenient; they are never such that you can make a strict division. You have to remain flexible on these issues. Because in fact, the means of production also have a commodity character to a certain extent. Land does not have this commodity character, which the means of production can have, in the same way, which is why you have to make a stricter distinction there. It is nonsense to apply the concept of the commodity to land from a purely monetary-capitalist point of view. So you see, if you apply something in reality, you cannot stop at abstract concepts. That is something that people who read the “Key Aspects of the Social Question” raise as an objection: they want nicely boxed terms. Then what they read is nice for them; then you know after reading half a page what you have read. In reality, however, a means of production can only be grasped if one knows: it is not consumed at first, but if one uses it over a longer period of time, it is the same as a commodity. So you have to keep in mind that the means of production has both the property of being consumed and of not being consumed, and the concept must correspond to that.

We need to have flexible concepts. People today do not want that; they want nested concepts. They do not want to think their way out into reality at all. Otherwise, things like this could not arise: people saying, for example, “I like anthroposophy quite well, but I don't want to know anything about threefold social order.” Those who speak in this way are rather like someone who says, “Yes, I am interested in the spiritual, but this spiritual must not encroach on the political; this spiritual must be independent of the political.” Yes, my dear friends, that is precisely what the threefold social order seeks to achieve. But because the spiritual is nowhere independent today, it is an illusion to believe that you can only be interested in the spiritual. In order for your abstract ideal to become concrete, so that you have something to take an interest in that is not influenced by politics, threefolding must first conquer such a field, so that there is a field in which one does not need to take an interest in politics. Threefolding is fighting for precisely that in which sleepy souls want to feel at home, but only have it as an illusion. These sleepy souls, oh, how we would like to wake them up! They feel so tremendously at ease when they are inwardly mystics, when they grasp the whole world inwardly, when they discover God in their own soul and thereby become such perfect human beings! But this inwardness has value only when it steps out into life. I would like to know if it has any value when, in this day and age, when everything is in a rush and the world is on fire, people cannot find their way to have their say in public affairs. That is a nice interest in anthroposophy, which only wants to be interested in anthroposophy and does not even find the opportunity to have a say in what anthroposophy wants to inspire. Those anthroposophists who are only interested in anthroposophy and not in what can become of anthroposophy in relation to life are like a person who is charitable only with his mouth, but otherwise quickly closes his pockets when he should really be charitable. Therefore, what is found in people who only want to take an interest in anthroposophy in their own way is anthroposophical chatter. But the reality of anthroposophy is what is transferred into life.

Afterwards, a discussion about the future work on threefolding with the leaders of the local groups takes place. There are three main questions for discussion. First: Is it permissible to compromise? Second: Should one participate in the elections? Third: In what form should propaganda for the threefolding idea be carried out?

Paul Kretschmar, from Cologne, argues that one should try to influence the existing works council and parliament. The newspapers would play a not insignificant role in this regard. One would therefore have to form a kind of journalistic office to write articles for trade journals. It was also important to train competent speakers; these would have to be able to rely on a kind of primer on the threefold order, similar to the way Damaschke had published a brooch. It was also necessary to found a publishing house to effectively support newspaper propaganda. Basically, even participation in the elections should be considered.

Mr. Klug, also from Cologne, warns against participation in the elections that is completely independent. At most, it is debatable whether it would be possible to proceed together with other independent parties. Furthermore, it would be important to discuss whether consumer associations could be formed.

Hermann Heisler believes that a kind of “Catechism of Threefolding” is really needed; this should provide a guide to how threefolding can be introduced into practical life, especially into economic life. In the present situation, three questions arise in particular. Firstly, how could threefolding, if it were actually realized in Central Europe, counteract the expected European famine? Secondly, what goal must be given to the working class now? Thirdly, how far can one go in the practical events of the political parties and profess the objectives of threefolding?

Siegfried Dorfner is convinced that the best way to propagate the threefold order is to leave the party.

Walter Conradt believes that, as far as the treatment of the press is concerned, it must be assumed that a decentralization of opinions has occurred on the other side. As for the treatment of the proletarian party, however, the events of the last year – especially in connection with the “poster mission” – have shown that the proletariat has been “moved” for a year, so it can no longer be counted on for the time being.

Richard Seebohm says that it has certainly happened that a newspaper has addressed individual questions, but one should not forget that even if state supervision has now been lifted, the newspapers are still under the control of industry. And it should not be overlooked that there are also threefoldingers who do not want to have anything to do with anthroposophy. For these reasons, it is important to stand behind the existing threefolding newspaper.

Paul Kretschmar mentions the Cologne “Generalanzeiger”, in which articles on threefolding could certainly be accommodated.

Ernst Uehli mentioned a foreign friend who had confirmed to him that the press could not be won over for big ideas; in general, it could be said that the idea of threefolding was much criticized in the newspapers. The pursuit of true “humanity” and the press could not be reconciled, as the German philosopher Karl Christian Planck had already established.

Emil Molt points out that the Federation for Threefolding intends to conduct a course for agitators — a course for speakers — under the direction of Rudolf Steiner.

After the discussion, Rudolf Steiner is asked to comment on the various questions raised, despite the late hour.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved attendees! First of all, I would just like to say that I will be obliged to speak in brief hints, and I ask you to take this into account. So the individual questions asked can no longer be discussed in detail. Perhaps we can do that next time.

First of all, we want to pick out the relatively most important question, the question:

How would the threefold social order work in the context of the coming European famine?

I would like to say, although it may seem strange to some, that there is a completely different question behind this one that makes answering difficult. But in general, the following must apply to this question. Isn't it true that, say, ten years ago, the world did not have what is called a famine, at least not what can and probably will come as famine in the near future, since souls sleep. But we must consider the following, however simple and primitive they may appear: there are no fewer raw materials in the ground than there were ten years ago; there are no fewer fields than there were ten years ago; and there are essentially no fewer human workers than there were ten years ago – millions have perished in the war, but not only as producers, but also as consumers. So in general, the economic possibilities and conditions are exactly the same as they were ten years ago.

It was perhaps eight weeks ago when a letter written by the well-known politician, the Russian Prince Kropotkin, was published in the newspapers, in which he made two curious statements. One is that he is now working on an ethics - interesting that he is now beginning to write an ethics. The other message is that there is now only one thing that is being delivered from the West to Russia: food, bread. Of course, it is easiest when there is no bread to take it from the side where it is available. Well, other people also have such views sometimes. A fortnight ago I received a letter from a lawyer and notary in central Germany. The letter sounded very much like a lawyer and notary, for it was coarse and stupid. But it also said that you can't lure a dog out from behind the stove with some kind of idealism, that it's a matter of fighting for the naked loaf.

Now, you see, everything I have just explained does not take into account the simplest and most primitive. Because if you take that into account, you will know that it is only a matter of getting people to organize in such a way that it can and will be done from the antecedents that exist now as they did ten years ago. This will certainly not be achieved if people are fobbed off with either what the old “Czernine” regard as state and popular wisdom, or the old “Bethmänner”, written with or without h, nor what the old Social Democrats, this particular kind of “negative Bethmänner”, suggest; but what matters is that people are given goals again, that they see what we are working towards. And that can be given through the movement of threefolding. What matters is not to say what many people say today, even if it is relatively correct: We will not have a famine or we can overcome it if people work again. Yes, if! But when people face the hopelessness of work that arises from the old programs and old machinations, then they do not want to work. But if you bring something to humanity that ignites, so that people see something ahead of them that can lead them to a dignified existence, [then they will want to work], and then bread will also be able to be produced. This is an important prerequisite for making bread: trust in humanity. If we do not gain this trust, then famine will come with certainty. But in order for trust to arise, threefolding is necessary. I can only hint at this in this context. But if you pursue this thought, you will see that famine can essentially only be prevented by propagating threefolding. However, one necessity exists: that this idea of threefolding must take root in as many minds as possible, so that these minds do not fall for anything that is just a continuation of the old system. This continuation of the old system is becoming very, very widespread – only in a seemingly new form. Because, you see, on certain sides today it is as if the leading personalities had set themselves the task of bringing about famine. Today, all kinds of prices are rising in an incredible way. But prices only make sense if they are relative to each other. The prices of the most important foodstuffs are being artificially kept down today. I am not saying that they should go up, but they must not be disproportionate to the prices of other things. This disproportion prevents anyone from wanting to devote themselves to the production of raw products, of food, in the near future. The production of a famine has thus become a government measure. This must be seen through.

Secondly, it must be emphasized that this is indeed an international issue and the question can be raised:

Can anything be achieved in Central Europe alone by introducing the threefold order – or whatever it is called?

I must refer you to what I have written in the threefolding newspaper, and I have done so repeatedly and from a wide variety of perspectives: if only people would really pluck up the courage to propagate the threefolding, even under the most unfavorable conditions, even during a famine – that would have an effect if people in the western or eastern regions could see something positive being done by us.

So today we still stand on the same position as the world did when the peace offer was sent out to the world in 1916, where phrase after phrase was used, but nothing concrete was said before the world. Just try it out and see how it would work in international life if you came up with something that has hand and foot, that has substance and content like the idea of the threefold social organism. At present, we see how, for example, British statesmen in particular are becoming more and more afraid from week to week of what is happening in Germany. It is actually something highly unfamiliar to them. And because they cannot make head or tail of it, they are seized with fear that something worse than Bolshevism could arise here than in Russia. But if they knew Bauer, Ebert and Noske better, it would even be a good remedy for their fear. Because the truth is that nothing is happening here, that in reality month after month passes without anything happening. Just imagine what it would mean for international life if something substantial were to come out of Central Europe. Only when one is clear about these things can one approach such a question as how threefolding will work in the event of a famine; in relation to everything else, that is not the question. It is true that only the threefold order is capable of bringing about an organization in which work will be done again and trust can be restored. Then famine can be prevented.

In order to be effective internationally, however, the idea of threefolding must take root in people's minds. Then I would not be worried that it will not work in international relations. As long as negotiations are conducted only out of chauvinism, no progress will be made. If something of significance were invented here in Central Europe, it would gain international recognition. If sound ideas take hold here, international barriers will fall away by themselves; for people will act according to their interests and take what is good where they can find it.

And I wanted to give you a few more suggestions on the newspaper question: I do not want to deny that some of what has been said is very important. And it will be commendable if one or the other of our friends gets an article published in some newspaper or another. But the essential thing remains that just as little can be achieved by crawling to the parties, little can be achieved by crawling to the other newspapers. It can be done, but it is actually the same thing, only in a different color. I do not criticize it; I am quite in agreement when it happens. But I would see the positive side in our friends promoting our newspaper, our threefolding newspaper, as much as possible. You may say: That is all very well, but the newspapers in which we want to place articles are only available to people who already subscribe to them. They have to subscribe to them in addition. Not all of them will do it, but a number of them will. Then we will be able to transform the threefolding newspaper into a daily newspaper. Only then will we be able to publish the articles we want to publish; then it will be effective. So the point is to work so hard for the threefolding newspaper, which is still a weekly paper, that it can be converted into a daily paper through its own earnings. Then we won't have to “crawl” to the others; that's what matters. Why shouldn't it be possible to put something that is of such eminent importance on its own two feet!

Then various other points were made. Regarding participation in the elections, I would just like to say the following: Of course, in abstracto one can certainly say that participating in the election and entering parliament and working there supports the present state. - You can't say that just like that. I don't even want to speak so strongly for or against; whether or not to participate in the election depends on the various specific circumstances. But if you take a strict view of threefolding, it is not entirely right in principle not to participate in parliament. The right thing to do in principle, consistently thought out in terms of threefolding, would be to participate in the elections, have as many people elected as can be elected, enter parliament and obstruct all questions relating to intellectual and economic life. That would be consistently thought out in terms of threefolding. The point is to separate off the middle part, the life of the state. This can only be achieved if the other parts on the left and right are discarded. The only way to do this is to actually get elected, enter and practice obstruction in all that is negotiated and decided in the fields of intellectual and economic life. That would be a consistent way of thinking in terms of the threefold social organism. This idea is something that must be thought through consistently and can also be thought through consistently in relation to concrete circumstances, because it is derived from reality. — That would be to say in relation to the most important questions.

Regarding the new goal that should now be given to the workers, I have to say that, based on my experiences with the works councils, it seems to me to be more of an academic question. The question will have to be approached differently; [we have to ask] whether such a goal should be set at all. The question of the works council has been raised. Every possible effort has been made to get the works councils going. The workers have promised all sorts of things and kept none of them. At first they turned up at the meetings, then they stopped coming. The same thing would happen again with the next new goals if they were carried into the current workers' organizations.

Socialistic thinkers believe that what they designate as the socialistic economic order is an immediate and causal continuation of what has gradually arisen within the economic order during the past centuries of human development. Those. who now adopt the proletarian socialistic conception of life, think as it were, that the capitalistic economic order must gradually, and of its own accord, pass over to the socialistic economic order, for the simple reason that the socialistic economic order is already contained within that which has developed through capitalism during the past centuries. In order to define this train of thought more precisely some people say: When any human order, or any life-structure has reached its culminating point, the summit of its development, then it already contains the seed of the following course of development.

You see, from an external aspect, from a statistical aspect as it were (and socialistic scientists above all love statistics),. there is a great deal in what I have explained to you as the socialistic order. The process can shortly be characterised as follows: In certain spheres, modern technical engineering has led over into industry a process which was formerly entrusted to the individual human being, and which could be fully surveyed by him. As a very characteristic example, it suffices to consider the modern steel industry; quite a number of manipulations had to be comprised within it. Finally, these all culminated in the production of certain goods, which could only be produced by amalgamating certain complicated processes. Great masses of capital are needed in order to run the gigantic industrial concerns which modern economic life has called into existence, great accumulations of capital, against which the economic life of earlier times appears ridiculous. This accumulation of capital enables individual owners, or group of owners of such gigantic concerns to employ a large number of workmen. Through the fact that these industrial concerns have taken on such a gigantic size, they are able to assemble and to employ a large number of workmen. Moreover, the conditions of transport have led, to the circumstance that these large concerns cannot isolate themselves, because they must reckon with competition, so that, in a certain way, they had to amalgamate, thus creating still larger groups of employers and of workmen belonging to certain definite spheres of life. Modern socialists believe that the modern socialistic idea has led to the socialisation of industry, and that the accompanying phenomena of this socialisation must necessarily continue the whole process.

The continuation of this process would be that a community of workmen is no longer brought together by individual employers, but that they are instead employed by a common body, the State, the Commune, or Syndicates. Consequently, the socialistic process which has already been called into existence by the technical economic life of modern times, can continue in a regular way.

The above idea has a tremendously suggestive influence upon the modern proletariat. If the conditions of social: life are to be understood, it is also necessary to study the soul constitution of the modern proletariat. There we find that such ideas exercise a strong, suggestive power over the minds of modern proletarians, which consists therein that workmen believe that they are completely at the mercy of their employers. They think that they can only escape from this bondage if they have a share in the activities of the employers.

It is characteristic trait of modern men (and this is due to many reasons) that they have a predilection for one-sided thoughts. Yet many conditions of the present can only be healed if modern men lose this habit of surrendering to one-sided ideas, and if they learn to consider things from all sides. If we view the development of capitalism end the technical economic life of the present merely from the aspect that it must finally culminate in the socialisation of industrial life, we simply apply modern natural-scientific ideas to economic life. I have already explained this to you yesterday, from another standpoint.

But if we merely consider things from a natural-scientific aspect, if we merely apply to them the natural-scientific forms of thought developed in modern times, certain impulses necessarily fall away, remain unnoticed. Of course, when such things are explained, many things can be misunderstood and consequently contested. But you know what methods are required, particularly from a spiritual-scientific aspect, so that it will not be difficult for you to see that the following explanations throw light upon things only from one aspect, namely from the aspect which is required in this particular case.

The purely natural-scientific aspect, which considers things only in accordance with the law of cause and effect, can be applied both to a sound and to an unsound organism. A sound organism can be studied from a physiological aspect, and by following natural science it will always be possible to ascertain the connections of cause and effect, But if this abstract connection of cause and effect is maintained, this same manner of thinking can just as well be applied to a diseased organism, it can be studied in this way from a pathological aspect. Even in a diseased organism, everything can be found to be in accordance with the law of cause and effect. But if we base a sequence of events upon this one-sided, abstract foundation, the law of cause and effect, then the impulse which must in one case be designated as impulse of health, and in the other case as the impulse of disease, necessarily falls away, remains unnoticed. It is not contained in such a manner of contemplating things. This has no serious consequences in natural science itself, and in tasks immediately connected with natural science. But if the natural-scientific way of thinking is applied to the study of social processes, it can have very serious consequences, for it is not possible to distinguish without further ado the difference between something that is sound or unsound in the course of human development. This is impossible

It must be emphasized that the way in which people now face social questions, which have become so urgent, does not enable them to distinguish whether a process is sound or unsound, whether it should be furthered of healed. Indeed, we can say that the deep tragedy of the present has befallen humanity, because people cannot see this difference, which has just now been characterised to a certain extent.

If we consider the development of humanity during the past three or four centuries, if we study above all the development of what has been designated as capitalism, another standpoint must be borne in mind, as well as the one that smaller industrial concerns were swallowed up by the gigantic industries of modern times, etc. We must, for example, face this question, which is a decisive on: What position does the capitalistic production take up within the social process of humanity as a whole?

Things can only be judged in the right way if we compare the modern capitalistic production to the craftsmanship of past times, and if we make this comparison from a certain definite standpoint. The artisan of olden times produced his goods and delivered them to the consumer, and the money which he thus earned enabled him to live, provided the foundation for his existence.

If we study the life of such a craftsman and the industrial process of the past, if we go back to about 1300 B.C., we shall find that people were paid for the goods which they had made, or else they exchanged them for other goods. The articles which they manufactured, provided the foundation of their existence.

In a certain sense, this economic life was a restricted one, but it was closely linked up with the individual human being., Lad every form of production was therefore linked up with personal skill, personal diligence, and the personal ambition to do something as well as possible, and so forth. Significant moral impulses were connected with economic life in those days of simple craftsmanship.

During the past three to four centuries all this changed. After a period of transition, which went from the 15th century to about the 16th/17th century, a complete change took place during the past three to four centuries. For, what may be designated as the capitalistic production, as capitalistic industry, only developed during the past three to four centuries.

If we wish to understand that which really lies at the foundation of the social question, if we do not only base ourselves upon that which people think, the following characteristic must be borne in mind: For a capitalist, in so far as he is a member of the capitalistic economic order, the essential point is not that of providing for his own existence, of forming a life foundation through his capital, but the essential point is for him that of increasing his capital, of seeing to it that it grows. This increase in capital constitutes the profit. Consequently, the aim of the capitalistic economic order is not that of earning money enabling the capitalists to meet their cost of living, but its aim is that of making profits, of increasing the capital. This is its characteristic trait, and this gives capital, as such, a high degree of independence.

When the process of production or the industrial process grows in the course of the years through the accumulation of capital, when this industrial process grows and forms the incentive of accumulating capital, then the chief element in this economic process really becomes separated from the individual human being from every personal element. If we wish to understand the social question, we must bear in mind above all the following standpoint: that the economic process becomes emancipated from the personal element, from the individual human being.

Unfortunately to-day only a small minority belonging to the cultivated classes really feels inclined to deal with such things; for if people were to occupy themselves with such matters they would see that the human being has, as it were, become separated from everything which constitutes the economic process. Tell me, where can we find to-day genuine pleasure in the production of goods, and with the exception of a few restricted circles, where do people find true enjoyment in the production of goods? The decisive element of past economic orders, that, for instance, a man felt the keenest pleasure in every key made by his own hands, and that he saw a point of honour in making it as perfect as possible—this belongs to the past. The human beings have become separated, as it were, from the economic process as such. Only in the artistic field or in that which is related to the sphere of art, we may still come across that element which once permeated craftsmanship.

Even in spiritual life, we cannot say that man is still connected with what he brings forth. Think of all the professors who are active in his or in that field; and ask yourselves whether they are really humanly connected with what they produce!

But these are facts which are intimately connected with the capitalistic economic order, which extends its influence over everything. The concluding remarks of yesterday's lecture will have shown this to you.

The fundamental character of the capitalistic economic order reveals that in regard to his personal aspirations, man is; as it were, cut off from the economic process which has become more and more objectivated, This has brought about a far-reaching result, which influences the whole socialistic conception of today, for it has given rise to the belief that it is necessary to establish this unnatural separation within the economic order of the present time, so that the human being himself is cut off from that which interests him. Where do we find people to-day who think that it is necessary to re-establish the connection between the human being and that which he produces?

We do not find them anywhere. On the contrary, people think that the economic process should be distanced as far as possible from man, should be separated from the human being. What is the result of this? All that is connected with the human personality; the needs of the human being as such, have to satisfied in other spheres. This is the consequence of that prejudice which is designated as the socialistic ideal.

Let us now consider what this socialistic ideal really means to-day among large circles:

There are four points which recapitulate everything that constitutes the socialistic ideal, as far as the structure of the social organism of humanity is concerned. In the first place, the socialistic ideal aims at appropriating all industrial concerns for the community, no matter whether this community is the State, the Commune, or a Syndicate. In other words, industrial concerns or means of production which are private property are to be eliminated, so that these concerns are run by a community.

The second aim of the socialistic ideal is that production be regulated according to the requirement, or the demand, that is to say, production should no longer be regulated by the free market, where offer and demand hold sway, but when there is a demand for some article in this or in that direction, a corresponding branch of production should be opened, with the provision that the State, the Commune or a Syndicate determine, as it were, that this article is needed and that the community accordingly opens an industrial concern for the production of this article.

The third point is the democratic regulation of the conditions of work and pay.

The fourth point is that profits belong to the community.

This constitutes more or less the four points of the socialistic ideal, which we have now set before you.

You see, millions and millions of people see in these four points the aim of their ambitions. In view of these facts, it is absolutely necessary to ask ourselves: How can we make people realise that these four so-called ideals are absolutely impossible within a real human community?

If thirty years ago there had been as much zeal for social questions as is the case to-day in countries where the old governments have been chased away (a genuine interest in social questions has not yet awakened in countries where. the old governments still exist);we might even say, if thirty years ago people had shown the same interest for social problems which they show for them to-day, matters might have taken another course of development, a better course of development. But unless people are near to drowning, no genuine interest can be awakened to-day for social questions. What the leading men of the so-called intelligent bourgeoisie have missed in this direction, during the past two or three decades, is immense. And they continue in this direction, they go on ignoring this, but in another sphere.

What is needed to-day, above everything else, is that people should realise that not only the individual human organism, but also the social organism, must now be understood in a spiritual-scientific manner. Meaningless abstractions must be abandoned. For a connection can be found with deeper human interests, with deeper human impulses, and these are beginning to work in the present epoch of human development.

The sleepiness of modern humanity is immense, and an awakening is urgently needed. Where spiritual science is at all noticed to-day, we frequently hoar the strange view that people who believe, do not need spiritual science, that it is not needed by those who are Christians in the good old meaning. We also hear the argument that faith is simple and spiritual science complicated, so why should simple faith be replaced by something so complicated. Yet this comfortable adherence to faith, this truly nefarious simple faith, the comfortable argument, “We don't need to think of such things, we don't, need' to investigate truth, for we have it through faith”, this is, in a deeper sense, responsible for the catastrophic events of the present. Again and again it must be emphasized that this easy way of thinking is the cause of the present catastrophe!

Great would be the misfortune if not enough people could be found whose hearts and minds are inclined to devote themselves to the investigation of truth, in earnest fruitful, inner thought-activity!

The time of mere belief in the spiritual world is past; it is no longer possible, at present, to be bone-lazy and to believe that we shall be saved by spiritual powers about whom we do not concern ourselves, confiding in the fact that they will do their best to save us: The essential point for the progress of human development is that we should not content ourselves with mere belief in God and in divine beings, but that we should allow God and the divine beings to be active within us, so that the forces of the spiritual world flow into our own deeds, into everything which we do in everyday life. From morning to night, our actions should be done in such a way that a divine-spiritual power is contained in them. This spiritual power will only permeate our actions if it is contained, above all, in. our thoughts. The task of modern humanity is to take in God's essence not only as a content of faith, but as an active force. We should not only think of God, but we should think in such a way that God lives in our thoughts. This is the essential point! If we surrender to such an ideal, we shall surely develop the required interest in things for which the great majority of modern men unfortunately has shown no interest whatever during the past decades.

The chief point is to find the possibility to make people understand that a change is needed in the field of thought. The whole way of thinking must be transformed. It is high time for this. The intellectuals have neglected to work in this direction, and as a result, the most repulsive instincts of humanity are now awakening in the whole civilised world, at least in a great part of the civilised world. The most repulsive human instincts are waking up! Do you think that it will be easy to drive away these instincts, when they have reached a certain climax, a certain culminating point ? A long, longtime will elapse before they die of their own accord. These instincts in humanity can only be controlled or subdued through the influence of good teachings or by good example, for a certain length of time. This beast in man breaks through, because the nobler human instincts have been neglected. Here we have come to a point which 'renders it necessary that we should speak of the moral aspect of the social problem of the present time.

I have already explained to you that the increase of capital, the growth of capital, which I designated as characteristic trait of the capitalistic economic order, because it does not strive after achievements, but after gain and profit:, separates the human being from that which he produces. This separation of the human being from that which he produces, is an essential characteristic of the whole course of development of modern humanity.

In the surrounding world, we generally find that one phenomenon does not appear without another, and that different phenomena are connected in different ways. You cannot walk over a soft ground without impressing your footmarks upon it. This is an example which can be applied everywhere, in order to show that in the world of reality one thing is always connected with another. The m0dern world has been driven in the direction of capitalism and increase of capital. And this development of capitalism is on the other hand connected with the lack of interest which modern men have for the deepest impulses of the human soul. This lack interest in the deeper things of life characterizes modern humanity.

We have oh the one hand the emancipation of the human personality from .the economic process, and on the other hand the fact that the human personality which has thus been separated from the economic process has become withered and dry; the most intimate qualities of man's soul-spiritual being have grown dry and withered. Both these things are connected. Both factors have given rise to that terrible activity which exists in a modern metropolis, where capitalism has set up its thrones. We have there, on the one hand, the influence exercised by capitalism, and on the other, the lack of interest in the most intimate questions concerning man's innermost being.

In the external phenomena these things are to a great extent hidden and they only become manifest to a closer observation. Of course you may say: There are many people who are not involved in the modern capitalistic process. To be sure, there are but a few who are directly involved in it, but indirectly, the whole of modern humanity, particularly civilised modern humanity, is involved in the capitalistic process, through the fact that the existence of many people depends upon the capitalistic economic order. An artist who would, in the past, have worked for a prince or for the Pope, must now work for the capitalist. If you follow the threads which lead, as in the case of art, from different spheres of life into capitalism, you will see that capitalism stretches out its tentacles in every direction, particularly in the direction of spiritual life.

Of course, these things contain many unconscious elements, which do not immediately manifest themselves if we merely look upon the surface of life. Let me now characterize to some extent an unconscious or subconscious process, for the objectivation of the process of production and its emancipation from human aspirations, must in a certain way be explained and justified. People. always need justification for their actions, and when they wish to justify themselves, they do not bother about investigating the truth, for their chief aim is to justify themselves.

Let us take tin example. The Entente “won” the war—this victory had to be justified. Consequently the things which were said about the Entente were not said because they were true, but because the victory had to be. justified. It is the same in the case of individual men. Do most people care at all for a real investigation of truth? No, their chief interest is to justify the things which they do. And this is the aim of capitalism: it seeks above all to justify its existence. But it can only justify it by turning its attention to the most material economic process in its mirrored reflexion, the increase of capital. If the capitalistic economic order is to justify its existence in the physical world, it must, however, do away with every soul-spiritual interest. Soul-spiritual things must be reserved to a special sphere. Let clergymen preach as they like of things connected with faith—I may believe and others may believe, or I may not believe and others may not believe—clergymen talk of things pertaining to quite another world. But in the real world in which we live, things do not take their course in accordance with the sermons of clergymen; they follow the capitalistic course of development.

Extreme capitalism thus has on the one hand this terribly abstract moral-spiritual life, which seeks to separate itself entirely from all the external realities of existence. There is, however, another attitude in modern life which has exercised just as evil an influence: as materialistic capitalism, namely that attitude which induces people to say: “What do I care about Ahriman! Let Ahriman be Ahriman; I devote myself to the impulses of my innermost soul, I surrender to the spiritual world. I seek the spiritual world within my own being; my chief interest is the soul and its concerns. What do I care for Ahrimanic things, such as credit, money, income and property! What do I care for the difference between profit and assets, etc! I care for the things which concern my soul!” But even as man unites within himself body, soul and spirit, which are linked together during the life between birth and death, at the impulses which we may find through our soul's innermost structure are connected, in external physical life, with the impulses contained in the external economic order. Those who are merely devout, even devout in spiritual science, are just as much responsible for the catastrophes of the present time as the capitalists with their materialistic attitude and mentality; they are just as guilty as the capitalists, through the fact that they enclose spiritual-scientific truths within their own abstract limits and are not willing to permeate everyday reality with penetrating thoughts.

This fact has again and again induced me to tell you that the Anthroposophical spiritual movement should not be regarded as something which gives you the opportunity to listen to Sunday afternoon sermons, which caress the soul because they speak of an everlasting life, and so forth, but the Anthroposophical movement should be taken as a path which enables us to cope in a real, concrete way with the modern problems of life, the burning problems of the present. One of the first requirements is this: to understand from where we must set out, and that everything will be of no use whatever unless people find access to a really unprejudiced way of thinking.

Now, at the conclusion of my lecture, let me express something which I shall explain further tomorrow, from a practical. social aspect. What I shall tell you now, is apparently far away from socialistic thoughts, from thoughts concerning the socialistic question, but tomorrow you will see that apparently distant connections: are in reality closely related, so that we shall be able to throw light on the four points which I have designated as the parts of the socialistic ideal. People frequently say that opinions differ, that there are different convictions in life, for one believes this and the other that… Does it not seem as if one person may cherish this thought, and the other that idea, and that the ideas of both can be justified? Apparently it is so, but in reality this is not the case at all. Taking into consideration the circumstance that in a higher meaning every characterization of something is, as it were, a photograph from one aspect only, so that things can be viewed from many sides—by taking for granted that this must be considered, we nevertheless find that in the innermost-depth of their being all men have the same view concerning one and the same thing. We cannot find two people in the world (as stated, the above condition must be taken for granted) who do not have the same opinion. But why do they speak of different opinions? Because egoistic prejudices insert themselves between truth and that which people gather from their inner being; emotions and egoistic prejudices distort things and turn them into caricatures. People only differ in regard to their emotions, but not in regard to concepts and ideas. If a real concept has once been gained, we cannot think of it differently from others, who have also gained access to this concept. It is the greatest soul-frivolity to think that we are entitled to have subjective opinions. We do not have the right to cherish subjective opinions, but as human beings it is our duty to go beyond our subjective views to objective truths! In order to have a clear outlook in this point it is necessary to bear in mind all the sources of error which result from human emotions. A man may believe that he is fully convinced of something. Yet the reason why he believes that he is fully convinced of something may frequently be the fact that he is too lazy to penetrate into the idea. Indeed, my dear friends, it is necessary to indicate this inner moral side of human nature, if we wish to indicate that which the present time really needs

The present time is, above all, filled with pride and with emotions, even in regard to what is designated as objective science and it is not at all inclined to discover the judgment contained in, real ideas, in real concepts. But what will be our goal, if the burning social riddles which now confront us, are to be solved emotionally, out of human emotions?

You know that there are imaginations, inspirations and intuitions In reality, everything connected with economic, economic-juridical questions, should be grasped through imaginations, it is contained in imaginations. In the case of most people, these imaginations can only well up from unconscious depths, in the form of vague notions. But these are better than the constructed ideas which now come to the fore so eloquently and play a certain role. Everything contained what we may call spiritual life, the spiritual life which we have characterised as a part of the future social structure, is based upon inspirations. And ever thing which may exist apart from the human being, which must indeed be separated from him, that wherein all human beings must be equal, equal—so to speak—before the law—all that can only be based upon intuitions. This constitutes as it were the foundation of the political organism.

Imagination: Economic organism.

Inspiration; Spiritual organism.

Intuition: Political organism.

This is how inspiration, intuition and imagination must work together in order to shape the conditions of life. And we should bear in mind that this is so. For then we shall realise that in reality the social questions which do not only confront us to-day, but which burn like fire, can only be solved with the aid of spiritual-scientific methods. The essential point is that we should discard carelessness and laziness of thought, and really set out in the direction of that which connects the human soul with reality. This alone can lead as to the goal which we must reach in the present time. To-morrow we shall characterize and discuss the four parts of the so-called socialistic ideal from this standpoint.

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

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

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

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

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

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