The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When you consider the fundamental basis of our anthroposophically oriented science of the spirit in comparison with other so-called world views—and there are many now appearing—you will note especially one characteristic. This is the fact that spiritual science as a view of the world and of life endeavors actually to apply to the whole of human life, to everything that the human being encounters in life, what it seeks to establish through research in the spiritual worlds. Whoever has a feeling for what is essential in the urgent problems and impelling forces of our present time will probably be able to achieve for himself an understanding of the fact that the tremendous need of the present and of the immediate future is to be found just here, that is, in connecting directly with life itself the comprehensive ideas constituting world conceptions. Among the causes that have brought about the present catastrophic situation of humanity, not the least significant is the fact that the world views held by human beings, whether rooted in religion, science, or aesthetics, have all gradually lost their connection with life in the course of time. There has existed a tendency—we might call it a perverse tendency—to separate the so-called daily practical life, in the most comprehensive sense of the word, from what men seek in their effort to satisfy their needs in the realm of religion and world conceptions. Just reflect how life during the last centuries has gradually taken on such form that people have carried on their external activities, were practical men as the saying goes, and conducted their lives according to practical principles, and then applied half an hour each day more or less, or no time at all, or Sunday, to the satisfaction of those needs of the heart and soul that impel them to seek for a connection with the divine spiritual element permeating the world.

All this will be utterly changed if an anthroposophically oriented science of the spirit can take possession of the minds and hearts of men. This will take on such a character that thoughts will stream forth from this world view that will be applicable to life itself in all its aspects, thus enabling us to judge life with true insight. The principle of the Sunday vesper sermon shall by no means be that of our anthroposophically directed world conception, but the whole of life shall be permeated on all days of the week and on Sunday forenoon as well with what can be given to humanity by the anthroposophical comprehension of the world. Because such has not been the case up to the present time, the world has gradually drifted into chaos. People have neglected to direct their attention to what has really been happening in their immediate vicinity and they are now surprised because the results of this oversight are clearly manifest. They will be still more surprised in the future as these results become more clearly manifest.

Under no circumstances should we fail to pay attention today to what is spreading among people over the entire earth. With the powers of judgment that enable us to see into the great impulses at work in world events, we must endeavor to find our way into what confronts human hearts and minds today, in part in such an enigmatic way; that is, into what is threatening to transform the social structure into a chaos. It will not do to continue further in such a way that we decide simply to let come what may without endeavoring to penetrate into things with a sound power of judgment.

It is necessary to abandon the basic maxim that says,“This is an everyday matter, this is secular, it belongs to the external life; we turn our backs on this and direct our attention toward the spiritual and divine.” This must come to an end. The time must begin in which even the most trivial everyday matter must be brought into connection with the spiritual and divine; that is, the time in which what is derived from the spiritual life shall no longer be viewed only from the most extremely abstract point of view.

In the course of these reflections, I have stated that a favorable change in the social movement cannot come about in any other way than through an increase in the interest that a person feels in another human being. A social structure is something men create in company with one another. Its ills cannot be healed unless the person knows that he is really within this order, unless he is within the social structure in his attitude of mind. The unsound element in the present epoch, which has brought about this catastrophe, lies in the neglect of people to acquire any sort of attitude of mind toward the way in which a person belongs to a social community. The interest that binds us as human beings to other human beings has come to an end in spite of the belief frequently manifested by people that they do have such an interest. Most certainly the past theosophical maxim, “I love all human beings; I have an interest in all human beings,” is not effective; it is abstract; it does not lay hold upon real life and laying hold upon real life is what really matters. This must be understood in a deeper sense. A lack of understanding of real life has been the characteristic of recent centuries. Now, these recent centuries have brought about the present situation without a realization of this process on the pap of humanity, and they will cause future situations. In the historic life of humanity, conditions cannot be what they should be unless people accompany what is happening, what occurs among them in the social life, with their thinking. But the events that have occurred over a relatively long time cannot be accompanied thus unless we acquire a sound sense for certain phenomena.

To an objective observer it has been all too obvious that administrations and governments have been conducted and are being conducted according to fundamental principles that were really out of date centuries ago, whereas life has naturally moved forward during recent centuries. An essential element that has entered into the evolution of humanity is modern industrialism, which has created the whole modern proletariat. But this genesis of the modern proletariat has not been accompanied by thinking. The leading classes have continued to live in the old manner, administering their positions of leadership as they have been accustomed to do for centuries. Without their doing anything about it, without their having even accompanied the process of world history with their thinking, the modern proletariat has evolved out of the existing facts, actual occurrences, and the rise of modern industrialism. This began essentially with the invention of the mechanical loom and spinning machine in the eighteenth century. Thus the destiny of world history for the present and the immediate future depends upon what is going on in the world in the heads of the modern proletariat—what haunts them, you may say, like a specter. This proletariat is striving for power through majority control and it is to be considered in its actions just as we consider the results of natural events and elemental occurrences. It should not be looked upon as something to be criticized that may please or displease us. The proletariat must be judged in its actions somewhat as we judge an earthquake or a tidal wave of the sea, or anything else of the kind.

We are now seeing the preliminary stages of what takes its rise from the modern proletariat—or, better expressed, from the tendencies and feelings of the modern proletariat. Like the action of an advance guard we observe what is known to us in a certain aspect in Russian bolshevism. This Russian bolshevism as I have often declared, is not in harmony with the original disposition of the Russian people. It has been introduced from without. But this is not a matter of any consequence if we wish to face the facts since it actually exists within the regions that formerly constituted the Empire of the Czar. It has taken root there, and it must be observed like a phenomenon of nature that has the tendency to spread. In observing such a thing as Russian bolshevism it is most important of all to disregard secondary phenomena. We must pay attention to the matter of main importance. The fact that bolshevism had its beginning in 1917, and that it was accompanied by certain external phenomena, may have been determined by certain obvious causes. I have said to you that even the incompetence of Ludendorff and also various other things have not been free of responsibility for the actual outbreak of bolshevism. But all this must be eliminated if we wish to view things in a fruitful way, and we must pay attention to the active forces that are alive in this Russian bolshevism. We must simply ask ourselves as a mere matter of fact what the objective of Russian bolshevism is and how it is related to the whole evolution of humanity. Beyond question, it is not something ephemeral and transitory. Rather, it is a phenomenon of far-reaching consequences in world history. It is exceedingly important that we should examine the basic structure as visualized by Russian bolshevism in order to be able to reflect upon it in a certain way as it emerges from deeper impelling forces of the world.

If we consider the fundamental characteristics of Russian bolshevism, we must conclude that its first endeavor aims at the destruction of what we have characterized in the marxian sense as the bourgeoisie. It is a fundamental maxim, so to speak, to destroy, root and branch, as something harmful in the evolution of humanity according to their point of view, everything that has taken its rise in the evolution of history as the bourgeois class. Bolshevism is to arrive at this objective in various ways. First, it aims at the removal of all class distinctions. Bolshevism does not direct its efforts toward such factual removal of the distinctions into classes and ranks as I have presented them to you. Bolshevism itself thinks in a wholly bourgeois manner, and what I have introduced to you is not conceived in a bourgeois but a human manner. Bolshevism intends to overcome the differentiation among classes and ranks in its own way. It says to itself that the contemporary states are constructed on the basis of the bourgeois conception of life, so the forms of the contemporary states must disappear. Everything that is a subordinate outgrowth of the bourgeois social class in the contemporary states such as the police system, the military system, the system of justice must disappear. In other words, what has been created by the bourgeoisie for its security and its administration of justice must disappear with the bourgeois class. The whole administration and organization of the social structure must pass into the hands of the proletariat. Through this process the state, as it has existed until now, will die away and the proletariat will administer the whole human structure, the whole community life of society.

This cannot be achieved by means of the old system of arrangements that the bourgeois class had created for itself. It cannot be achieved by the election of a Reichstag or any other sort of body of representatives of the people, chosen on the basis of any sort of suffrage, as this has been done under the conception of life characteristic of the bourgeois class.

If such representative bodies continued to be elected, only the bourgeois class would perpetuate itself in these bodies. In other words, such representative bodies, under whatever system of suffrage chosen, would not render possible the attainment of the goals that are there striven for. Therefore, the matter of importance is that such measures shall now really be applied as have their origin in the proletariat itself, such as cannot come to birth in any middle class head, since a middle class head inevitably conceives only such regulations as must be abolished. Nothing whatever can be expected, therefore, from any kind of national or state assembly, but something is to be expected solely from a dictatorship of the proletariat. This means that the entire social structure must be handed over to a dictatorship of the proletariat. Only the proletariat will have the inclination actually to eliminate the bourgeois class from the world because, should persons of the bourgeois class be members of representative bodies, they would have no inclination to eliminate themselves from the world. That is what is really necessary, that the whole bourgeois class shall be deprived of its rights. Thus, the only persons who can exercise an influence upon the social structure must be those who belong to the proletariat in the true sense, that is, only those who perform labor, who are useful to the community.

Consequently, according to this proletariat world conception, a person who causes others to perform any sort of service for him, and remunerates them for this, cannot have the right to vote. That is, whoever employs persons, engages persons to serve him and remunerates them for their service, has no right to participate in any way in the social structure, and has no right, therefore, to a vote. Neither does anyone possess the right to vote who lives on income from his property or who profits from income. Nor does a person who is engaged in trade have the right to vote or one who is a distributor and does not perform any practical labor. In other words, all who live by means of income, who employ other persons and remunerate them, who are engaged in trade or are middle men, are excluded from being representatives of the government when the dictatorship of the proletariat takes control. During the continuance of this dictatorship of the proletariat, there is no general freedom of speech, no freedom of assembly, no freedom to organize, but only those who are engaged in actual labor can hold meetings or form organizations. All others are deprived of freedom of speech, the right to assembly, and the right to organize societies or unions. Likewise, only those enjoy the freedom of the press who perform practical labor. The press of the bourgeois class is suppressed, and not tolerated.

These are, in a general way, the guiding principles, we may say, during the transitional stage. After these principles have been dominant for a certain length of time the proletariat world conception expects from their operation that only men engaged in practical labor will exist. Only the proletariat will continue to exist. The bourgeois class will have been exterminated.

To these things, which have primary importance for the transitional period, will then be added those that have permanent significance. To these belongs, for example, the universal obligation to work. Every person is under obligation to produce by labor something useful to the community.

A decisive principle of a permanent character is the termination of the right to private ownership of real estate. Larger estates are handed over to agricultural communes. According to this proletariat world view, there will exist in future no private ownership of land. Industrial establishments, establishments of entrepreneurs are confiscated and passed under the control of society, being administered by the centralized administration of the workers, at the head of which is the Supreme Soviet for the national economy. This is simply bolshevism in Russia. Ranks are taken over by the state. A universal system of bookkeeping is instituted, embracing the entire community and comprising all production. All foreign trade of this single communal entity is made communal, that is, the establishments are taken over by the state.
These are, in a general way, the fundamental principles constituting the ideal of Trotsky and Lenin, and you will see clearly in them the cardinal points of what is willed by the modern proletariat.

It does not suffice, of course, to be informed each day by the newspapers that a certain number of bloody deeds have been done by bolshevism. If we compare the bloody deeds done by bolshevism with the immense number of those done by reason of this war, the deeds of bolshevism obviously become an insignificant affair. The really important thing is to see what has been hitherto overlooked and neglected in order that the evolution of humanity may in the future be followed with our thinking. It is really necessary that we fix our attention, first in our hearts and then with our minds, upon these things that are so intimately connected with the progressive evolution of humanity. It is precisely the mission of the science of the spirit to fix our attention upon these things with our minds and hearts. The time must come to an end in which lazy pastors and priests preach to the people from the pulpit every Sunday theoretical stuff having no connection with life for the so-called warming of their souls. On the contrary, a condition must begin in which everyone who desires to participate in spiritual life shall be in duty bound to look into life, to establish an immediate connection with life. No small share in the responsibility for the misfortune of the present time rests upon the fact that those who have been custodians of the religious feelings of humanity for a long time past have preached to people from their pulpits such things as actually have no relationship whatever with life. They have directed discourses for the sole purpose of providing the people with insipid stuff for their hearts and souls that affected them in a pleasant way but never grasped life. It is for this reason that life has remained without spirit and has finally fallen into chaos. You may seek for much of the responsibility, for which recompense is required at present, precisely in the stupid discourses of those who have been the custodians of the religious feelings of people and who have had no relationship with life. What have they achieved of all that must take place in the epoch during which a whole new humanity in the form of the proletariat has evolved? What have these people achieved who have proclaimed useless stuff from their pulpits, such stuff that it has been desired by people only because they wished to delude themselves with all sorts of illusions regarding the realities of life? This is a serious time and things must be viewed in a serious light.

What has been said regarding the necessity for individuals to acquire an interest in one another must not be regarded only in a manner harmonizing with the mood presented in the Sunday vesper sermon. It must be considered according to the profound indication it gives in regard to the social structure of the present age.

Consider a concrete example. How many people there are today who have an abstract and confused conception of their own personal lives! If they ask themselves, for example, “What do I live on?”—for the most part, they do not do this, but if they did it once, they would say to themselves, “Why, on my money.” Among those who say to themselves, “I live on my money,” there are many who have inherited this money from their parents. They suppose they live on their money, inherited from their fathers, but we cannot live on money. Money is not something on which we can live. Here it is necessary at last to begin to reflect. This question is intimately connected with the real interest that one individual has in another. Anyone who thinks he lives on the money he has inherited, for example, or has acquired in any way whatever except by receiving money for work, as is the custom today—whoever lives in this way and supposes that he can live on money has no interest in his fellow men because no one can live on money. We must eat, and what we eat has been produced by a human being. We must have clothing. What we wear must be made through the labor of people. In order that I may put on a coat or a pair of trousers, human beings must expend their strength in labor for hours. They work for me. It is on this labor that I live, not on my money. My money has no value other than that of giving me the power to make use of the labor of others. Under the social conditions of the present time, we do not begin to have an interest in our fellow men until we answer that question in the proper way, until we hold the picture in our minds of a certain number of persons working for a certain number of hours in order that I may live within the social structure. It is of no importance to give ourselves a comfortable feeling by saying, “I love people.” No one loves people if he supposes that he is living on his money and does not in the least conceive how people work for him in order to produce even the minimum necessary for his life.

But the thought that a certain number of persons labor in order that we may possess the minimum necessities of life is inseparable from another. It is the thought that we must recompense society, not with money but with work in exchange for the work that has been done for us. We feel an interest in our fellow men only when we are led to feel obligated to recompense in some form of labor the amount of labor that has been performed for us. To give our money to our fellow men only signifies that we are able to hold our fellow men on a leash as bound slaves and that we can compel them to labor for us.

Permit me to ask whether you cannot answer out of your experience the question how many men realize that money is only a claim upon human strength employed in labor, that money is only a means for gaining power. How many persons really see clearly that they could not even exist in this physical world but for the labor of other persons upon which they depend for what they demand for their lives? The feeling of obligation to the society in which we live is the beginning of the interest that is required for a sound social order.

It is necessary to reflect about these things, otherwise we ascend in an unwholesome way into spiritual abstractions and do not rise in a wholesome way from physical reality to spiritual reality. The lack of interest in the social structure has characterized precisely these last centuries. During recent centuries, men have gradually formed the habit of developing a real interest in the matter of social impulses only with regard to their own respected persons. In greater or lesser degree everything has borne in a roundabout way only upon one's personality. A wholesome social life is possible only when interest in one's own respected personality is broadened into a genuine social interest. In this connection the bourgeoisie may well ask themselves what they have neglected.

Just consider the following fact. There is such a thing as a spiritual culture. There are cultural objects. To select one example, there are works of art. Now, ask yourselves to how many people these works of art are accessible. Or, rather ask yourselves to how many persons these works of art are utterly inaccessible. For how many persons do these works of art actually not exist. But just calculate how many persons must labor in order that these works of art may exist. One or another work of art is in Rome. One or another bourgeois can travel to Rome. Just add up the total of how much labor must be performed by creative workers, etc., etc.,—these etceteras will never come to an end—in order that this bourgeois, when he travels to Rome, may see something that is there for him because he is a bourgeois, but is not there for all those persons who are now beginning to give expression to their proletariat conception of life. This very habit has taken form among the bourgeois of looking upon enjoyment as something self-evident. But enjoyment should really never be accepted without repaying its equivalent to the whole of society. It is not because of any element in the natural or spiritual order that some part of society should be deprived. Time and space are only artificial hindrances. The fact that the Sistine Madonna remains forever in Dresden, and can be seen only by those persons who are able to go to Dresden, is only a by-product of the bourgeois world conception. The Sistine Madonna is movable, and can be taken to all parts of the world. This is only one example, but the necessary steps can be taken to make sure that whatever is enjoyed by one may also be enjoyed by others.

Although I have given only one example, I always choose them to exemplify and clarify everything else. We need only to strike such a note, as you see, in order to touch upon many matters that people have really not thought of at all, but have simply taken as something self-evident. Even within our own circle, where this could so easily be understood, people do not always reflect that everything we receive obligates us to return an equivalent to society and not simply enjoy.

Now, from all that I have presented to you as examples, which could be multiplied not only a hundredfold but a thousandfold, this question will be obvious to you. “How can the situation be otherwise if money is really only a means for acquiring power?” This is already answered in that fundamental social principle I introduced last week because that is a peculiarity of what I introduced to you as a sort of social science taken from the spiritual world. It is just as certain as mathematics. In connection with the things I have presented to you, there is no question of anyone's looking into practical life and saying, “Now then, we must first investigate whether things really are so.” No; what I introduced to you as a social science derived from spiritual science is much like the theorem of Pythagoras. If you consider Pythagoras's theorem, if you know that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides of a right angle triangle, it is impossible that anything should exist within the world of experience to contradict this. On the contrary, you must apply this fundamental principle everywhere. So it is with the fundamental principle I introduced to you as underlying social science and social life. Everything that a person acquires in such a way that it is received in exchange for his work within the social system has an unwholesome effect. A wholesome condition results within the social system only when the human being has to support his life, not by his own work, but from other sources within society. This seemingly contradicts what I have just said, but only seemingly. What will render work valuable will be the fact that it will no longer be remunerated.

The goal toward which we must work—of course, in a rational and not a bolshevistic way—must be that of separating work from the provision of the means of existence. I have recently explained this. When no one is any longer recompensed for his work, then money will lose its value as a means for acquiring power over work. There is no other means for overcoming the misuse that has been perpetuated with mere money than by forming the social structure in such a way that no one be recompensed for his work, and that the provision of the means of existence shall be achieved from an entirely different source. It will then naturally be impossible to use money for the purpose of compelling anyone to work.

Most of the questions that now arise appear in such a form that they are confusedly understood. If they are to be lifted into a clear light, this can happen only by means of spiritual science. Money must never in future be the equivalent for human labor, but only for inanimate commodities. Only inanimate commodities will be acquired in future by means of money, not human labor.

This is of the utmost importance. Now, just consider the fact that in the proletariat world conception the idea that labor is a commodity stares us in the face in all sorts of forms. Indeed, the fact that labor in modern industrialism has become in the most conspicuous way a commodity is one of the fundamental principles of marxism, one of those fundamental principles by means of which Marx was most successful in winning followers among the proletariat. Here you see that a demand appears from an entirely different quarter and in a confused and chaotic fashion, that must, nevertheless, be fulfilled, but from an entirely different direction. This is characteristic of social demands of the present, that, to the extent that they appear instinctively, they are due to entirely justified and sound instincts. They arise, however, from a chaotic social structure. For this reason they are in a confused form that necessarily leads to confusion. So it is in many fields. It is necessary for this reason really to lay hold upon a spiritual-scientific view of the world because only this can result in true social healing.

Now, you will ask whether this will bring about a change. For example, if a person inherits his money, he will still continue to purchase commodities with the money he inherited, and the labor of other persons is surely concealed in these commodities. So nothing is changed, you will say. Certainly, if you think abstractly, nothing is changed. But, if you will look into the whole effect that comes about when the provision of the means of existence is separated from labor, you will form a different opinion. In the sphere of reality, the situation is not such that we simply draw abstract conclusions, but there things produce their actual results. If it actually comes about that the provision of the means of existence is separated from the performance of labor, inheritances will no longer exist. This will produce such a modification of the social structure that people will not come into possession of money in any other way than for the acquisition of commodities. When something is conceived as a reality, it has all sorts of effects. Among other things this separation of the provision of the means of existence from labor has one quite peculiar effect. Indeed, when we speak of realities, we cannot so express ourselves as to say, “But I do not see why this should be so.” You might just as well say, “But I do not see why morphine should cause sleep.” This also does not come to you as a conclusion out of a mere interrelationship of concepts. It becomes manifest only when you actually trace the effect.

There is something extremely unnatural today in the social order. This consists in the fact that money increases when a person simply possesses it. It is put in a bank and interest is paid on it. This is the most unnatural thing that could possibly exist. It is really utterly nonsensical. The person does nothing whatever. He simply banks the money, which he may not even have acquired by labor but may have inherited, and he receives interest on it. This is utter nonsense. But it will become a matter of necessity when the provision of the means of existence is separated from labor that money shall be used when it exists, when it is produced as the equivalent of commodities that exist. It must be used. It must be put into circulation and the actual effect will be that money does not increase but that it diminishes. If at the present time a person possesses a certain sum of money, he will have approximately twice that amount in fourteen years under a normal rate of interest, and he will have done nothing except merely to wait. If you think thus of the transformation of the social order, as this must occur under the influence of this one fundamental principle that I have presented to you, then money will not increase but will diminish. After a certain number of years, the bank notes I acquired before the beginning of those years will no longer have any value. They will have matured and become valueless.

In this way the trend will become natural in the social structure toward bringing about such conditions that mere money, which is nothing more than a note, an indication that a person possesses a certain power over the labor of human beings, will lose its value after a certain length of time if it has not been put into circulation. In other words, it will not increase, but will progressively diminish and, after fourteen years or perhaps a somewhat longer time, will reach the zero point. If you are millionaires today, you will not be double millionaires after fourteen years but you will be broke unless you have earned something additional in the meantime.

Of course, I am aware that people wriggle as if they had been bitten by fleas when this is mentioned at the present time—if you will permit such a comparison. I know this, and I would not have employed this comparison but for the extraordinary movements I observed in the audience!

Since, however, the situation is such that this matter causes people to feel as if fleas had bitten them, we have bolshevism. Just search for the true causes and there they are. You will never be able to free the world of what is coming to the surface unless you determine really to penetrate into the truth.

The fact that the truth is unpleasant makes no difference. An essential part of the education of humanity today and in the immediate future will consist in putting an end to the belief that truths can be controlled according to subjective estimates, subjective sympathies and antipathies. But spiritual science, if it is grasped with a sound human intelligence, can solve this problem of money because it can also be considered spiritually.

Nothing is accomplished by that vague way of talking I have heard even among anthroposophists who hold money in their hands and say, “This is Ahriman.” At present money signifies an equivalent for commodities and labor. It constitutes a claim upon something that actually occurs. If we pass over from mere abstractions to realities, if we reflect, then, when a person has ten one hundred mark notes and pays these to someone, he causes the labor of a certain number of persons to pass as an equivalent from hand to hand. Because these notes possess the power to cause a certain number of persons to work, he then actually stands within life with all its branches and impulses. He will no longer continue to be satisfied with the mere abstraction, the unthinking abstraction, of the payment of money, but he will ask himself, “What is the significance of the fact that I cause ten one hundred mark notes to pass from hand to hand, thus bringing it about that a certain number of persons endowed with head, heart and mind must perform labor? What is the significance of that?”

The answer to such a question can be afforded, in the last analysis, only by a spiritual observation of the matter. Let us take the most extreme example. Suppose someone who has never put forth an effort in behalf of humanity has money. There are such cases. I will consider this extreme instance. Someone who has never put forth an effort in behalf of humanity has money. He buys something for himself with this money. Indeed, he is enabled to fashion for himself an altogether pleasant life by reason of the fact that he possesses this money, which is a claim upon human labor. Fine! This person is not necessarily a bad human being. He may even be a good man; indeed, he may be an industrious person. People frequently simply fail to see into the social structure. They do not possess an interest in their fellow men, that is, in the real social structure. People suppose that they love human beings when they buy something for themselves with their inherited money, for example, or when they even give it away. When it is given away, the only result is that we cause a certain number of persons to work for those to whom the money is given. It is simply a means for acquiring power. The fact that it is a claim upon labor makes it the means for acquiring power.

But this situation has simply come into existence and developed to this stage. This is a reflection of something else. It is a reflection of what I mentioned in the preceding lecture. I there called your attention to the fact that the Jehovah divinity has controlled the world for a certain length of time through the fact that he won a complete victory over the other Elohim, and that he can no longer save himself from the spirits thus aroused. He drove his companions, the other six Elohim, from the field. Because of this, what the human being experiences even in the embryo has acquired complete dominance in human consciousness. The six other forces, which are not experienced by man in the embryo, have thereby been rendered inactive. They have thereby come under the influence of lower spiritual entities. In the fifth decade of the last century, as I have said, Jehovah could no longer save himself. Since the Jehovah wisdom acquired in the embryonic state renders it possible to grasp the conception of providence only in external nature, crass atheistic natural science has invaded the world. The reflection of this, the fact that money simply passes from one person to another without any transfer of commodities, consists in the circulation of money apart from the circulation of commodities.

No matter with what energy a person may exert himself in any field, the ahrimanic power lives in what seems to be produced by money as money. You cannot inherit without having a certain amount of ahrimanic power transferred with the money. There is no other possibility of possessing money within the social structure in a wholesome way than by possessing it in a Christian way; that is, by acquiring money only by means of what one develops between birth and death. In other words, the way in which a person comes into possession of money must not be a reflection of what is related to Jehovah even though the fact that we are born, that we pass from the embryo into the external life, is something that pertains to him. The reflection of this, I say, is the fact that we inherit money. Those characteristics that we inherit with the blood are inherited through the laws of nature. Money that we inherit and do not earn would be a reflection of this.

The fact that Christian consciousness has not yet taken its place in the world, that the social structure is still brought about by means of the ancient Jehovah wisdom or its specter, the Roman conception of the state, has brought about everything that has led to one aspect of the present unfortunate situation.

I said that the matter must not be considered so abstractly when money produces money, but we must view it in its reality. Whenever money produces money it is something that occurs only on the physical plane, whereas what constitutes the human being is always connected with the spiritual world.

What are you doing, then, when you perform no labor but you have money that people must work to get? The human being then has to bring to market what constitutes his heavenly share and you give him only what is earthly. You pay him with the merely earthly, the purely ahrimanic. You see, this is the spiritual aspect of the matter. Wherever Ahriman is at work, only destruction can come about.

This, again, is an unpleasant truth. But it does not help at all when a person says to himself, “Now, really, I am otherwise a respectable individual and I am doing nothing wrong, therefore, when I use my income to pay for this or that.” The actual fact is that you give Ahriman in exchange for God. Of course, we are frequently compelled to do this within the present social structure, but we should not play the ostrich game and conceal this fact from ourselves. Rather should we face the truth because what the future is to bring depends upon our doing so. Much of what has broken in upon humanity with such calamitous results has occurred for the reason that people close their eyes and the eyes of their souls in the presence of the truth. They have fabricated for themselves abstract concepts of right and wrong, and have been unwilling to deal with the real and the concrete. In regard to this we shall speak further tomorrow, when we shall lift our discussion into spiritual heights.

The tasks assigned to the humanity of the present and of the immediate future are great, significant, and peremptory; and it is really necessary to bring forth a strong soul courage in order to do something toward their accomplishment. Anyone who today examines these tasks closely, and tries to get a true insight into the needs of humanity, must often reflect how superficially so-called public affairs are treated. We might say that people today talk politics aimlessly. From a few emotions, from a few entirely egotistic points of view—personal or national—people form their opinions about life, whereas a real desire to gain the factual foundations for a sound judgment would be more in conformity with the seriousness of the present time. In the course of recent months, and even years, I have inquired into the most varied subjects, including the history and the demands of the times, and have given lectures here on such subjects, always with the purpose of furnishing facts which will enable people to form a judgment for themselves—not with the purpose of placing the ready-made judgment before them. The longing to know the realities of life, to know them more and more fundamentally, in order to have a true basis for judgment—that is the important thing today. I must say this especially because the various utterances and written statements which I have made regarding the so-called social question, and regarding the threefold structure of the social organism, are really taken much too lightly, as anyone can clearly see, for the questions asked about these things are concerned far too little with the actual, momentous, basic facts. It is so difficult for people of the present time to arrive at these basic facts, because they are really theoreticians in all realms of life, although they will not acknowledge it. The people who today most fancy themselves to be practical are the most decidedly theoretical, for the reason that they are usually satisfied to form a few concepts about life, and from these to insist upon judging life; whereas it is possible today only by means of a real, universal, and comprehensive penetration into life to form a relevant judgment about what is necessary. One can say that in a certain sense it is at least intellectually frivolous when, without a basis of facts, a man talks politics at random, or indulges in fanciful views about life. It makes one wish for a fundamentally serious attitude of soul toward life.

When in the present time the practical side of our spiritual scientific effort, the Threefold Social Order, is placed before the world as the other side has been, it is a fact that the whole mode of thought and conception employed in the elaboration of this Threefold Social Order is met with prejudices and misgivings. Where do these prejudices and misgivings originate? Well, a man forms concepts about truth (I am still speaking of the social life), concepts about the good, the right, the useful, and so forth, and when he has formed them, he thinks they have absolute value everywhere and always. For example, take a man of western, middle, or eastern Europe with a socialistic bias. He has quite definite socialistically-formulated ideals; but what kind of fundamental concepts underlie these ideals? His fundamental concept is that what satisfies him must satisfy everyone everywhere, and must possess absolute validity for all future time. The man of today has little feeling for the fact that every thought that is to be of value to the social life must be born out of the fundamental character of the time and the place. Therefore he does not easily come to realize how necessary it is for the Threefold Social Order to be introduced with different nuances into our present European culture, with its American appendage. If it is adopted, then the variations suited to the peoples of the different regions will come about of themselves. And besides, when the time comes, on account of the evolution of humanity, that the ideas and thoughts mentioned by me in The Threefold Commonwealth are no longer valid, others must again be found.

It is not a question of absolute thoughts, but of thoughts for the present and the immediate future of mankind. In order, however, to comprehend in its full scope how necessary is this three-membering of the social organism in an independent spiritual life, an independent rights and political life, and an independent economic life, one must examine without prejudice the way in which the interaction of the spiritual, the political, and the economic has come about in our European-American civilization. This interweaving of the threads—the spiritual threads, those of rights or government, and the economic threads—is by no means an easy matter. Our culture, our civilization, is like a ball of yarn, something wound up, in which are entangled three strands of entirely different origins. Our spiritual life is of essentially different origin from that of our rights or political life, and entirely different again from that of our economic life; and these three strands with different origins are chaotically entangled. I can naturally give only a sketchy idea to-day, because I shall briefly follow these three streams, I might say, to their source.

First, our spiritual life, as it presents itself to one who regards as real the external things, the obvious, is acquired by people through the influence of what still persists of the ancient Greek and Latin cultural life, the Greco-Latin spiritual life, as it has flowed through what later became our high schools and universities. All the rest of our so-called humanistic culture, even down to our elementary schools, is entirely dependent upon that which, as one stream let us say, flowed in first from the Greek element (Diagram 13. orange); for our spiritual life, our European spiritual life, is of Greek origin; it merely passed through the Latin as a sort of way-station. It is true that in modern times something else has mingled with the spiritual life which originated in Greece: namely, that which is derived from what we call technique in the most varied fields, which was not yet accessible to the Greek, the technique of mechanics, the technique of commerce, etc., etc. I might say that the technical colleges, the commercial schools, and so forth, have been annexed to our universities, adding a more modern element to what flows into our souls through our humanistic schools, which reach back to Greece—and by no means flows only into the souls of the so-called educated class; for the socialistic theories which haunt the heads even of the proletariat are only a derivative of that which really had its origin in the Grecian spiritual life; it has simply gone through various metamorphoses. This spiritual life reaches back, however, to a more distant origin, far back in the Orient. What we find in Plato, what we find in Heraclitus, in Pythagoras, in Empedocles, and especially in Anaxagoras, all reaches back to the Orient. What we find in Aeschylus, in Sophocles, in Euripides, in Phidias, reaches back to the Orient. The entire Greek culture goes back to the Orient, but it underwent a significant change on its way to Greece. Yonder in the Orient this spiritual life was decidedly more spiritual than it was in ancient Greece; and in the Orient it issued from what we may call the Mysteries of the Spirit—I may also say the Mysteries of Light (Drawing). The Grecian spiritual life was already filtered and diluted as compared with that from which it had its origin: namely, the spiritual life of the Orient, which depended upon quite special spiritual experiences.

Naturally, we must go back into prehistoric times, for the Mysteries of Light, or the Mysteries of the Spirit, are entirely prehistoric phenomena. If I am to represent to you the character of this spiritual life, the manner of its development, I must do so in the following way: We know, of course, that if we go very far back in human evolution, we find increasingly that human beings of ancient times had an atavistic clairvoyance, a dream-like clairvoyance, through which the mysteries of the universe were revealed to them; and we speak with entire correctness when we say that over the whole civilized Asiatic earth, in the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha, there dwelt people to whom spiritual truths were revealed through clairvoyance—a clairvoyance that was completely bound to nature, to the blood, and to the bodily organization. This was true of a widely dispersed population; but this atavistic clairvoyance was in a state of decline, and became more and more decadent. This “becoming decadent” of the atavistic clairvoyance is not merely a cultural-historical phenomenon, but is at the same time a phenomenon of the social life of mankind.

Why? Because from various centers of this wide-spread population, but chiefly from a point in Asia, there arose a special kind of human being, so to speak, a human being with special faculties. Besides the atavistic clairvoyance, which still remained to these people in a certain sense—for there still arose out of their inner soul-life a dream-like comprehension of the mysteries of the world—besides this they also had what we call the thinking faculty; and indeed they were the first in the evolution of humanity to have this power. They were the first to have dawning intelligence.

That was a significant social phenomenon when the people of those ancient times, who had only dream-like visions of the mysteries of the world arising within them, saw immigrants enter their territories whom they could still understand, because they also had visions, but who had besides something which they themselves lacked: the power of thought. That was a special kind of human being. The Indians regarded that caste which they designated as Brahman as the descendants of these people who combined the thinking power with atavistic clairvoyance; and when they came down from the higher-lying regions of northern Asia into the southern regions, they were called Aryans. They formed the Aryan population, and their primal characteristic is that they combined the thinking-power with—if I may now use the expression of a later time—with the plebeian faculties of atavistic clairvoyance.

And those mysteries which are called the Mysteries of the Spirit, or particularly, the mysteries of Light, were founded by those people who combined atavistic clairvoyance with the first kindling of intelligence, the inner light of man; and our spiritual culture derives from that which entered humanity at that time as an illuminating spark—it is nothing but a derivative of it.

Much has been preserved in humanity of what was revealed at that time; but we must consider that even the Greeks—just the better educated personalities among them—had seen the ancient gift of atavistic clairvoyance gradually wane and become extinguished, and the thinking-power remained to them. Among the Romans the power of thought alone remained. Among the Greeks there was still a consciousness that this faculty comes from the same source as the ancient atavistic clairvoyance; and therefore Socrates still clearly expressed something which he knew as experience when he spoke of his Daemon as inspiring his truths, which were of course merely dialectic and intellectual.

In art, as well, the Greeks significantly represented the pre-eminence of the intelligent human being, or better, the development of the intelligent human being from the rest of humanity; for the Greeks have in their sculpture (one need only study it closely) three types differing sharply from one another. They have the Aryan type, to which the Apollo head, the Pallas Athene head, the Zeus head, the Hera head belong. Compare the ears of the Apollo with those of a Mercury head, the nose of the Apollo with that of a Mercury head, and you will see what a different type it is. The Greek wanted to show in the Mercury-type that the ancient clairvoyance, which still persisted as superstition and was a lower form of culture, had united with intelligence in the Greek civilization; that this existed at the bottom of Greek culture; and that towering above it was the Aryan whose artistic representation was the Zeus head, the Pallas Athene head, and so forth. And the very lowest races, those with dim remnants of ancient clairvoyance—who also still lived in Greece but were especially to be observed near the borders—are plastically preserved in another type, the Satyr-type, which in turn is quite different from the Mercury-type. Compare the Satyr nose with the Mercury nose, the Satyr ears with the Mercury ears, and so forth. The Greek merged in his art what he bore in his consciousness concerning his development.

What gradually filtered through Greece at that time, by means of the Mysteries of the Spirit or of the Light, and then appeared in modern times, had a certain peculiarity as spirit-culture. It was possessed of such inner impulsive force that it could at the same time, out of itself, establish the rights life of man. Therefore we have on the one hand the revelation of the gods in the Mysteries bringing the spirit to man, and on the other, the implanting of this spirit acquired from the gods into the external social organism, into the theocracies. Everything goes back to the theocracies; and these were able not only to permeate themselves with the legal system, the political system, out of the very nature of the Mysteries, but they were able also to regulate the economic life out of the spirit. The priests of the Mysteries of Light were at the same time the economic administrators of their domains; and they worked according to the rules of the Mysteries. They constructed houses, canals, bridges, looked after the cultivation of the soil, and so forth.

In primitive times civilization grew entirely out of the spiritual life, but it gradually became abstract. From being a spiritual life it became more and more a sum of ideas. Already in the Middle Ages it had become theology, that is, a sum of concepts, instead of the ancient spiritual life, or it had to be confined to the abstract, legalistic form, because there was no longer any relation to the spiritual life. When we look back at the old theocracies we find that the one who ruled received his commission from the gods in the Mysteries. The last derivative is the occidental ruler, but he no longer gives any evidence of having originated from the ruler of the theocracy, with his commission from the gods of the Mysteries. All that remains is crown and coronation robe, the outer insignia, which in later times became more like decorations. If one understands such things it may often be observed that titles go back to the time of the Mysteries; but everything is now externalized.

Scarcely less externalized is that which moves through our secondary schools and universities as spiritual culture, the final echo of the divine message of the Mysteries. The spiritual has flowed into our life, but this has now become utterly abstract, a life of mere ideas. It has become what the socialistically-orientated groups latterly call an ideology, that is, a sum of thoughts that are only thoughts. That is what our spiritual life has really become.

Under its influence the social chaos of our time has developed, because the spiritual life that is so diluted and abstract has lost all impulsive force. We have no choice but to place it again on its own foundation, for only so can it thrive. We must find the way again from the merely rational to the creative spirit, and we shall be able to do so only if we seek to develop out of the spiritual life prescribed by the State the free spiritual life,¹ which will then have the power to awake to life again. For neither a spiritual life controlled by the Church, nor one maintained and protected by the State, nor a spiritual life panting under economic burdens, can be fruitful for humanity, but only an independent spiritual life.

Indeed the time has come for us to find the courage in our souls to proclaim quite frankly before the world that the spiritual life must be placed on its own foundation. Many people are asking: Well, what are we to do? The first thing of importance is to inform people about what is needed: to get as many people as possible to comprehend the necessity, for example, of establishing the spiritual life on its own foundation; to comprehend that what the pedagogy of the 19th century has become can no longer suffice for the welfare of mankind, but that it must be built anew out of a free spiritual life. There is as yet little courage in souls to present this demand in a really radical way; and it can be thus presented only by trying to bring to as many people as possible a comprehension of these conditions. All other social work today is provisional. The most important task is this: to see that it is made possible for more and more people to gain insight into the social requirements, one of which has just been characterized. To provide enlightenment concerning these things through all the means at our disposal—that is now the matter of importance.

We have not yet become productive with regard to the spiritual life, and we must first become productive in this field. Beginnings have been made in this direction, of which I shall speak presently—but we have not yet become productive with regard to the spiritual life; and we must become productive by making the spiritual life independent.

Everything that comes into being on earth leaves remnants behind it. The Mysteries of Light in the present-day oriental culture, the oriental spiritual life, are less diluted than in the Occident, but of course they no longer have anything like the form they had at the time I have described. Yet if we study what the Hindus, the oriental Buddhists, still have today, we shall be much more likely to perceive the echo of that from which our own spiritual life has come; only in Asia it has remained at another stage of existence. We, however, are unproductive; we are highly unproductive. When the tidings of the Mystery of Golgotha spread in the West, whence did the Greek and Latin scholars get the concepts for the understanding of it? They got them from the oriental wisdom. The West did not produce Christianity. It was taken from the Orient. And further: When in English-speaking regions the spiritual culture was felt to be very unfruitful, and people were sighing for its fructification, the Theosophists went to the subjugated Indians to seek the wellsprings for their modern Theosophy. No fruitful source existed among themselves for the means to improve their spiritual life: so they went to the Orient. In addition to this significant fact, you could find many proofs of the unfruitfulness of the spiritual life of the West; and each such proof is at the same time a proof of the necessity for making the spiritual life an independent member in the threefold social organism.

A second strand in the tangled ball is the political or rights current.

There is the crux of the cultural problem, this second current. If we look for it today in the external world, we see it when our honorable judges sit on their benches of justice with the jurors and pass judgment upon crime or offence against the law, or when the magistrates in their offices rule throughout the civilized world—to the despair of those thus ruled. All that we call jurisprudence or government, and all that results as politics from the interaction of jurisprudence and government, constitutes this current (see drawing, white). I call that (orange) the current of the spiritual life, and this (white) the current of rights, or government.

Where does this come from? As a matter of fact this too goes back to the Mystery-culture. It goes back to the Egyptian Mystery-culture, which passed through the southern European regions, then through the prosaic, unimaginative Roman life, where it united with a side branch of the oriental life, and became Roman Catholic Christianity, that is, Roman Catholic ecclesiasticism. Speaking somewhat radically, this Roman Catholic ecclesiasticism is also fundamentally a jurisprudence; for from single dogmas to that great and mighty Judgment, always represented as the Last Judgment throughout the Middle Ages, the utterly different spiritual life of the Orient, which had received the Egyptian impulse from the Mysteries of Space (see drawing), was really transformed into a society of world-magistrates with world-judgments and world-punishments, and sinners, and the good and the evil: it is a jurisprudence. That is the second element existing in our spiritual tangle which we call civilization, and it has been by no means organically combined with the other. That this is the case anyone can learn who goes to a university and hears one after the other, let us say a juridical discourse on political law, and then a theological discourse even on canonical law, if you like, for these are found side by side. Such things have shaped mankind; even in later times, when their origins have been forgotten, they are still shaping human minds. The rights life caused the later spiritual life to become abstract; but externally it influenced human customs, human habits, human systems.

What is the last social offshoot in the decadent oriental spiritual current, whose origin has been forgotten? It is feudal aristocracy. You could no longer recognize that the aristocrat had his origin in the oriental, theocratic spiritual life, for he has stripped off all that; only the social configuration remains (drawing). The journalistic intelligence often has very strange nightmarish visions. One such it had recently when it invented a curious phrase of which it was especially proud: “spiritual aristocracy”—this could be heard now and then. What is that which passed through the Roman Church system, through theocratising jurisprudence, juridical theocracy, became secularized in the civic systems of the Middle Ages, and completely secularized in modern times—what is it in its ultimate derivative? It is the bourgeoisie (drawing). And thus are these spiritual forces in their ultimate derivatives actually jumbled up among men.

And now still a third stream unites itself with the other two. If you would observe it today in the external world, where does this third current appear in an especially characteristic way? Well, there actually was in Central Europe a method of demonstrating to certain people where these final remnants of something originally different were to be found. It happened when the man of Central Europe sent his son to an office in London or New York to learn the methods of the economic system. In the methods of the economic life, whose roots are to be found in the popular customs of the Anglo-American world, the final consequence is to be seen of that which has been developed as outgrowths from what I might call the Mysteries of the Earth, of which, for example, the Druid Mysteries are only a special variety. In the times of the primitive European people the Mysteries of the Earth still contained a peculiar kind of wisdom-filled life. That European population, which was quite barbaric, which knew nothing regarding the revelations of oriental wisdom, or of the Mysteries of Space, or of what later became Roman Catholicism—that population which advanced to meet the spreading Christianity possessed a strange kind of life-steeped-in-wisdom, peculiar to it, which was entirely physical wisdom. Of this one can at best study only the most external usages, which are recorded in the history of this current: namely, the festivals of those people from whom have come the customs and habits of England and America. The festivals were here brought into entirely different relations from those in Egypt, where the harvest was connected with the stars. Here the harvest as such was the festive occasion; and the highest solemn festivals of the year were connected with other things than was the case in Egypt: namely, with things that belong entirely to the economic life. We have here without doubt something which goes back to the economic life.

If we wish to comprehend the whole spirit of this matter, we must say to ourselves: Over from Asia and up from the South men transplanted a spiritual life and a rights life which they had received from above and brought down to earth. Then, in the third current, an economic life sprang up which had to develop of itself and work its way up, which really was originally so completely economic in its legal customs and in its spiritual adaptations that, for example, one of the yearly festivals consisted in the celebration of the fructification of the herds as a special festival in honor of the gods; and there were similar festivals all derived from the economic aspect of life. If we go through the regions of northern Russia, middle Russia, Sweden, Norway, or into those regions which until a short time ago were parts of Germany, or to France, at least northern France, and to what is now Great Britain—if we go through these regions, we find dispersed everywhere a population which, before the spread of Christianity in ancient times, undoubtedly had a pronounced economic life. And what ancient customs can still be found, such as festivals of legal practices and festivals in honor of the gods, are an echo of this ancient economic culture.

This economic culture met what came from the other side. At first it did not succeed in developing an independent rights life and spiritual life. The primitive legal customs were discarded because Roman law flowed in, and the primitive spiritual customs were cast aside because the Greek spiritual life had entered. And so this economic life becomes sterile at first, and only gradually works its way out of this sterility; it can succeed in this, however, only by overcoming the chaotic condition created by the introduction of the spiritual life and rights life from outside. Consider the present Anglo-American spiritual life. In this you have two things very sharply differentiated from one another. First, you have everywhere in the Anglo-American spiritual life, more than anywhere else on earth, the so-called secret societies, which have considerable influence, much more than people know. They are undoubtedly the keepers—and are proud to be the keepers—of the ancient spiritual life, of the Egyptian or oriental spiritual life, which is completely diluted and evaporated into mere symbols,—symbols no longer understood but having a certain great power among those in authority. That, however, is ancient spiritual life, not spiritual life grown in its own soil. Side by side with this there is a spiritual life which does grow entirely in economic soil, but hitherto it has produced only very small blossoms, and these in abundance.

Anyone who studies such things and is able to understand them knows very well that Locke, Hume, Mill, Spencer, Darwin, and others, are nothing but these little blossoms springing from the economic life. You can get quite exactly the thoughts of a Mill or a Spencer from the economic life. Social democracy has elevated this to a theory, and considers the spiritual life as a derivative of the economic life. That is what we encounter first: everything is brought forth from the so-called practical—actually from life's routine, not from its real practice. So that going along side by side are such things as Darwinism, Spencerism, Millism, Humeism—and the diluted Mystery teachings, which are perpetuated in the various sectarian developments, such as the Theosophical Society, the Quakers, and so forth. The economic life has the will to rise, but has not yet made much progress, having produced thus far only these small blossoms. The spiritual life and the rights life are exotic plants and—I beg you to note this well—they are more and more exotic the farther we go toward the West in the European civilization.

There has always been in Central Europe something—I might say like a resistance, a struggling against the Greek spiritual life on the one hand and against the Roman Catholic rights life on the other. An opposition has always been there. An illustration of it is the Central European philosophy, of which really nothing is known in England. Actually, Hegel cannot be translated into the English language; it is impossible. Hence, nothing is known of him in England, where German philosophy is called Germanism, by which is meant something an intelligent person cannot be bothered with. In just this German philosophy, however—with the exception of one incident, namely, when Kant was completely ruined by Hume, and there divas brought into German philosophy that abominable Kant-Hume element, which has really caused such devastation in the heads of Central European humanity—with the exception of this incident, we have later, after all, the second blossoming of this struggle in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; and we already have the search for a free spiritual life in Goethe, who would have nothing to do with the final echo of the Roman Catholic jurisprudence in what is called the law of nature. Just feel the legal element in the shabby robes and the strange caps which the judges still have from ancient times, and feel it likewise in the science of nature, the law of nature—the legal element is still there! The expression “law of nature” has no sense in connection, for example, with the Goethean science of nature, which deals only with the primordial phenomenon, the primordial fact.

There for the first time is radical protest made; but naturally it remained only a beginning. That was the first advance toward the free spiritual life: the Goethean science of nature; and in Central Europe there already exists the first impulse even toward the independent rights life, or political life. Read such a work as that of Wilhelm van Humboldt, who was even Prussian minister of public instruction—read The Sphere and Duties of Government,² and you will see the first beginning toward the construction of an independent rights life, or political life, of the independence of the true political realm. It is true it has never gone beyond beginnings, and these are found as far back as the first half of the 19th century, even at the end of the 18th century. It must be borne in mind, however, that there are nevertheless in Central Europe important impulses in this very direction, impulses which can be carried on, which must not be left unconsidered, and which may flow into the impulse of the Threefold Social Organism.

In his first book Nietzsche wrote that passage that I have quoted in my book on Nietzsche³ in the very first pages, a premonition of something tragic in the German spiritual life. Nietzsche tried at that time in the foreword to his work, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, to characterize the events of 1870–71, the founding of the German Empire. Since then this strangulation of the German spirit has been thoroughly accomplished; and when in the last five or six years three-fourths of the world fell upon this former Germany (I do not wish to speak about the causes or the guilty, but only to sketch the configuration, the world situation), it was really then already the corpse of the German spiritual life. But when anyone speaks as I did yesterday, characterizing the facts without prejudice, no one should infer that there is not still in this German spiritual life much that must come forth, that must be considered, that intends to be considered, in spite of the future gypsy-like condition. For what was the real cause of the ruin of the German people? This question must also be answered without prejudice. They were ruined because they too wanted to share in materialism, and they have no talent for materialism. The others have good talents for it. The Germans have in general that quality which Herman Grimm characterized excellently when he said: The Germans as a rule retreat when it would be beneficial for them to go boldly forward, and they storm ahead with terrific energy when it would be better for them to hold back. That is a very good description of an inner quality of character of this German people; for the Germans have had propulsive force throughout the centuries, but not the ability to sustain this force. Goethe was able to present the primordial phenomenon, but he could not reach the beginnings of spiritual science. He could develop a spirituality, as, for example, in his Faust, or in his Wilhelm Meister, which could have revolutionized the world if the right means had been found; but the outer personality of this gifted man achieved nothing more than that in Weimar he put on fat and had a double chin, became a stout privy counselor, who was also uncommonly industrious as minister, but still was obliged at times to wink at certain things, especially in political life.

The world ought to understand that such phenomena as Goethe and Humboldt represent everywhere beginnings, and that it would really be a loss to the world and not a profit, to fail to take into account what lives in the German evolution in an unfinished state, but to which must come forth. For after all, the Germans do not have the predisposition which the others have in such remarkable degree the farther we go toward the West: namely, to rise on all occasions to ultimate abstractions. What the Germans have in their spiritual life is called “abstractions” only by those who are unable to experience it; and because they themselves have squeezed out the life, they believe others lack it too. The Germans have not the talent for pressing on to ultimate abstractions. This was shown in their political life, in their most unfortunate political life! If the Germans had had from the beginning the great talent for monarchy which the French have preserved so brilliantly to this day, they would never have become the victims of “Wilhelmism”; they would neither have countenanced this strange caricature of a monarch, nor have needed him. It is true that the French call themselves republicans, but they have among them a secret monarch who firmly holds together the structure of the state, who keeps a terribly tight rein on the people's minds; for in reality the spirit of Louis XIV is everywhere present. Naturally, only a decadent form remains, but it is there. There is no doubt that a secret monarch is there among the French people; for it is really shown in every one of their cultural manifestations. And the talent for abstraction demonstrated in Woodrow Wilson is the ultimate talent for abstraction in the political field. Those fourteen points of the world's schoolmaster, which in every word bear the stamp of the impractical and unachievable, could only originate in a mind wholly formed for the abstract, with no discernment whatever for true realities.

There are two things which the cultural history of civilization will doubtless find it difficult to understand. One I have often characterized in the words of Herman Grimm—the Kant-Laplace theory, in which many people still believe. Herman Grimm said so finely in his Goethe: People will some day have difficulty in comprehending that malady now called science, which makes its appearance in the Kant-Laplace theory, according to which all that we have around us today arose through agglomeration, out of a universal world-mist; and this is supposed to continue until the whole thing falls back again into the sun. A putrid bone around which a hungry dog circles is a more appetizing morsel than these fanciful ideas, this fantastic concept of world-evolution. So thinks Herman Grimm. Naturally, there will some day be great difficulty in explaining this Kant-Laplace theory from the standpoint of the scientific insanity of the 19th and 20th centuries!

The second thing will be the explanation of the unbelievable fact that there ever could be a large number of people to take seriously the humbug of the fourteen points of Woodrow Wilson—in an age that is socially so serious.

If we study the things that stand side by side in the world we find in what a peculiar way the economic life, the political rights life, and the spiritual life are entangled. If we do not wish to perish because of the extreme degeneration which has come into the spiritual life and the rights life, we must turn to the Threefold Social Order, which from independent roots will build an economic life now struggling to emerge, but unable to do so unless a rights life and a spiritual life, developed in freedom, come to meet it. These things have their deep roots in the whole of humanity's evolution and in human social life; and these roots must be sought. People must now be made to realize that way down at the bottom, on the ground I might say, crawls the economic life, managed by Anglo-American habits of thought; and that it will be able to climb up only when it works in harmony with the whole world, with that for which others also are qualified, for which others also are gifted. Otherwise the gaining of world dominion will become a fatality for it.

If the world continues in the course it has been taking under the influence of the degenerating spiritual life derived from the Orient, then this spiritual life, although at one end it was the most sublime truth, will at the other rush into the most fearful lies. Nietzsche was impelled to describe how even the Greeks had to guard themselves from the lies of life through their art. And in reality art is the divine child which keeps men from being swallowed up in lies. If this first branch of civilization is pursued only one-sidedly, then this stream empties into lies. In the last five or six years more lies have been told among civilized humanity than in any other period of world history; in public life the truth has scarcely been spoken at all; hardly a word that has passed through the world was true. While this stream empties into lies (see drawing), the middle stream empties into self-seeking; and an economic life like the Anglo-American, which should end in world-dominion—if the effort is not made to bring about its permeation by the independent spiritual life and the independent political life, it will flow into the third of the abysses of human life, into the third of these three. The first abyss is lies, the degeneration of humanity through Ahriman; the second is self-seeking, the degeneration of humanity through Lucifer; the third is, in the physical realm, illness and death; in the cultural realm, the illness and death of culture.

The Anglo-American world may gain world dominion; but without the Threefold Social Order it will, through this dominion, pour out cultural death and cultural illness over the whole earth; for these are just as much a gift of the Azuras as lies are a gift of Ahriman, and self-seeking, of Lucifer. So the third, a worthy companion of the other two, is a gift of the Azuric powers!

We must get the enthusiasm from these things which will fire us now really to seek ways of enlightening as many people as possible. Today the mission of those with insight is the enlightenment of humanity. We must do as much as possible to oppose to that foolishness which fancies itself to be wisdom, and which thinks it has made such marvellous progress—to oppose to that foolishness what we can gain from the practical aspect of anthroposophically-orientated spiritual science.

My dear friends, if I have been able to arouse in you in some measure the feeling that these things must be taken with profound seriousness, then I have attained a part of what I should very much like to have attained through these words.

When we meet again in a week or two, we shall speak further of similar things. Today I wished only to call forth in you a feeling that at the present time the really most important work is to enlighten people in the widest circles.

• 1. The human being is essentially a spiritual being. When he is engaged in art, science, and religion, he is active spiritually; this activity is his spiritual life.—Editor.
• 2. Translated by Joseph Coulthard, London, 1845.
• 3. “Extirpation des deutschen Geistes zu Gunsten des deutschen Reiches,” Extirpation of the German Spirit in favor of the German Empire—quoted in Friedrich Nietzsche, ein Kampfer gegen seine Zeit (not translated).

Anyone who wants to become an esoteric in the theosophical sense must train his thought life so that every thought is thought through sufficiently. Short thinking is the sign of a materialist. Theosophical esoterics must not fall into comfortable thinking. Take the thought of social democracy: Change the circumstances and a man will have better living and working conditions—that's a belief of materialism, short and deceiving. This belief is very paralyzing for every study of social life. Now how can a theosophist free himself from this materialistic belief that existence and even morality would improve if one would just improve outer conditions? Let's begin with the reflection that every change has to be made by human beings and that therefore every condition that's brought about for the social order arises from human thoughts and feelings. Once one has this thought firmly in mind one can free oneself from the materialistic view that everything is brought about by external conditions.

A budding esoteric should gather proofs that no improvement of the world occurs through the creation of better outer conditions. Theosophy tells us that the social order is created by men and that it's the result of human thoughts and feelings. So one should cultivate thoughts and feelings and not change the social order. An esoteric asks: Where does this condition that's worthy of being changed come from? And if the condition is not veiled by nature he sees that the condition was brought about by the thoughts and will impulses of men who lived before him. So conditions are the way they are now because men made them that way through their inadequate thoughts and feelings. Spiritual science wants to implement a mighty education of our innermost soul forces so that the social life will shape itself out of other thoughts and feelings. What this means is that spiritual science has no patented recipe about how this or that is supposed to be done on this or that post, it doesn't judge anyone, but it's very confident that everyone will arrive at a right judgment if he's permeated by the fundamental truths. One such truth is that poverty, misery and suffering are nothing but the result of egoism. One should look upon this as a law of nature. A man is egotistical as soon as he lives in accordance with the principle: I must be remunerated personally, I must be paid for the work that I do. An esoteric must ask himself whether work is really what sustains life. Work is of no importance if it isn't directed wisely. What serves men can only be produced and made through the wisdom that men put into it. One who doesn't understand this and who sins against it even slightly, sins against the social thinking of the present time.

Reflection on this in all of its possible phases strengthens thinking. A social democrat who reflects on how to create work to get rid of joblessness is thinking antisocially in the highest degree. Instead the main thing is that work should only be used for human beings, to create valuable produce. In a social community the work impulse must lie in devotion for the whole, and never in a man's personality. It follows from this that real social progress is only possible if I work for the good of the whole. In other words: The work I do mustn't be for myself. Social progress is completely dependent on the acceptance of this statement, that one doesn't want to get paid personally for one's work. A man owes work to the social community. Conversely, a man must restrict his existence to what the social community gives him. The counterpart to such social thinking must also be followed exactly. You know the example that a seamstress works for little pay and that social democrats tell the workers: You're being exploited. But now the seamstress goes out and buys a cheap dress to go dancing on Sunday. She asks for a cheap dress. But why is the dress cheap? Because another worker was exploited. So in the end, who's exploiting the worker? Certainly the seamstress who wears a cheap dress to go dancing on Sunday. One who can think clearly here already gets away from the distinction between rich and poor, for this has nothing to do with wealth and poverty. Therefore the foundations must first be created so that in future men will work hard and devotedly without thinking of personal advantage.

Suppose that someone invents a remedy and wants to patent it right away. This shows that he was thinking of a personal advantage and that he isn't filled with love for all mankind. For if men's health was the most important thing for him he would be anxious to report what's in the remedy and how it's made. And something else would happen—he'd be convinced that the remedy that was made with his sentiments was the better one.

Here we've come to a statement that's very important in esotericism: Ways of ennobling the soul must be arrived at. One who uses his thinking to attain beneficial progress must first see to it that human souls are ennobled.

Therewith we'll place the Rosicrucian verse at the end:

Recent lectures given at the Goetheanum have laid repeated emphasis on the fact that the Spiritual Science cultivated here must work fruitfully upon the whole scientific mind of to-day and also upon the various branches of science. This is perhaps brought home to us most strongly of all when we realise the light that is shed by Spiritual Science upon the problems of history. And so far as the limits of two brief lectures allow, we will try to go into this matter.

On many sides to-day it is being said that the science of history is facing a crisis. Not so very long ago, among certain circles in the days of the historian Ranke, it was held that history must be made into an ‘exact’ science—exact in the sense in which this expression is used in connection with ordinary scientific research. We often hear it said by those to whom ‘exact research’ implies the methods current in the domain of external science, that all historical writings are inevitably coloured by the nationality, temperament and other personal propensities of the historian, by the element of imagination working in the condensation of the details, by the depth of his intuitive faculty and the like. And as a matter of fact in the most recently written histories it is abundantly evident that the presentation of objective facts and events varies considerably according to the nationality of the historian, according to his power of synthesis, his imagination and other faculties.

In a certain respect, Spiritual Science is well fitted to cultivate an objective outlook in the study of history. It is, of course, not to be denied that the measure of talent possessed by the historian himself will always play an important part. Nevertheless, in spite of what our opponents choose to say to the contrary, it is precisely in the study of history that a quality essentially characteristic of Spiritual Science comes into play.

By its very nature Spiritual Science must begin with a development of the inner, subjective faculties in the being of man. Forces otherwise latent in the soul must be awakened and transformed into real faculties of investigation. The subjective realm, therefore, is necessarily the starting-point. But in spite of this, the subjective element is gradually overcome in the course of genuine spiritual research; depths are opened up in the soul in which the voice of objective truth, not that of subjective feeling, is speaking. It is the same in mathematics, when objective truths are proclaimed, in spite of the fact that they are discovered by subjective effort.

From this point of view I want to speak to you of a chapter of history which cannot but be of the deepest interest to us in this modern age. I will choose from the wide field of history the more spiritual forms of thought which came to the fore in the nineteenth century, and speak about their origin in the light of Spiritual Science. To-day I propose to deal with the more exoteric aspect—if I may use this expression—and pass on in the next lecture more into the realm of the esoteric connections and deeper causes underlying the facts of the spiritual and mental life of humanity.

As we look back to the nineteenth century—and the character of the first twenty years of the twentieth century is really very similar—the impression usually is that thought in the nineteenth century developed along an even, regular course. But those who go more deeply into the real facts discover that this was by no means the case. About the middle of the century a very radical change came about in the development of thought. The mode of thinking and outlook of men underwent a metamorphosis. People began to ask questions about the nature of the impulses underlying social life in the past and present. It is only possible to-day to indicate these things in a few characteristic strokes, but this we shall try to do.

Leading minds in the first half of the nineteenth century were all characterised by certain spiritual and idealistic aspirations, in spite of the fact that they were the offspring of the kind of thought that had become habitual in the domain of natural science. These leading minds were still, to a certain extent, conscious of their dependence upon an inner guidance A few definite examples will show that this changes entirely in the second half of the century. In following up this particular line of development we shall not be able to concentrate upon those who were either scientists or artists in the narrower sense. We shall have to select typical representatives of scientific thought at that time who set themselves the task of clarifying the problems of the social life which had become more and more insistent in the course of the nineteenth century. More and more it was borne in upon eminent thinkers that the only way of approach to the problems of the social life was, on the one hand, to emphasise the importance of the results achieved by science and, on the other, to deal with the depression which had so obviously crept into the life and impulses of the soul.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, we find a representative personality in Saint-Simon, a son, as it were, of the French Revolution, and who had thoroughly imbibed the scientific thought of his time. Saint-Simon was one whose mind, at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, may be taken as a typical example of the scientific thinking of the day. He was also deeply concerned with the social problem. He had experienced the aftermath of the French Revolution and had heard the cry for Liberty, Equality, Fraternity resounding from the depths of the human soul. But it had also been his lot to experience the disappointments suffered by Europe alter the Revolution. He witnessed the gradual emergence of what, later on, became the burning social question. And if we study the whole temper and outlook of Saint-Simon's mind, it is clear that he was a firm believer in the fact that knowledge can ultimately lead to ideas which will be fruitful for the social life, provided always that these ideas are in inner harmony with the demands of the times. He was convinced that study, understanding and enthusiasm for the tasks of social life would lead to the discovery of something which could be communicated to men, and that they would respond to knowledge born of enthusiasm for the betterment of social life and presented to them in a form suited to the conditions of the age. Betterment and progress—so thought Saint-Simon—will come about in the social life of Europe through the co-operation of individuals who have both understanding and strength of will. Saint-Simon was imbued with the firm belief that it is possible to convince human beings when one's own mind has grasped the truth and is capable of presenting it to others in the proper scientific form. And so he tries to base all his work upon the spiritual and mental conceptions of his day. He looks back to times which, in his opinion, had already fulfilled their mission; he thinks of the power once possessed by the nobles and the military class, and says to himself: In earlier times the nobles and the military class had their purpose and function. The nobles provided military forces for the protection of those who desired to devote their energies to the so-called arts of peace.

But—thought Saint-Simon—in earlier times the priesthood too was a factor of great significance. For long ages the instruction and education of the people were in the hands of the priesthood and the priests were the bearers of the spiritual life. But this state of things has long since passed away. The nobles and the military class, nay even the priesthood, have lost their raison dêtre. And on the other hand, an entirely new line of activity has established itself in civilised life. Saint-Simon was well aware of all that the development of industry and industrial science meant in the evolution of humanity. He said to himself: This industrial development will in its turn give rise to a kind of thinking that has already been adopted by natural science, is employed in physics, chemistry, biology, and will inevitably spread to the other sciences. In astronomy, chemistry, physics and physiology we find evidences of the kind of thinking that is current in the modern age.

But it is also essential to inaugurate a science of man, in other words, psychology and sociology. The principles of physics must be introduced into political science and then it will be possible to work and act effectively in the domain of social life. What is needed—so said Saint-Simon—is a kind of ‘political physics,’ and he set out to build up a science of social life and action that should be in line with the principles of chemistry, physics and physiology. Saint-Simon considered that this kind of thinking was evitable because of the overwhelming importance which industrial life was beginning to assume in his day, and he was convinced that no further progress would be possible in industry if it remained under the old conditions of subordination to the military class and to the priesthood.

At the same time Saint-Simon indicated that all these changes were to be regarded as phases. The priests and the nobility had had their function to perform in days gone by and the same significance was, he said, now vested in the scholars and the industrialists. Although in former times a spiritual conception of life was thoroughly justified, the kind of thought that is fitting in the modern age, said Saint-Simon, is of a different character. But something always remains over from earlier times. Saint-Simon's rejection of the older, sacerdotal culture was due to his intense preoccupation with the industrialist mode of thinking that had come to the fore in his day. He spoke of the old sacerdotal culture as a system of abstract metaphysics, whereas the quest of the new age, even in the sphere of politics, must be for philosophy concerned as directly with concrete facts as industrial life is concerned with the facts of the external world. The old sacerdotal culture, he said, simply remains as a system of metaphysical traditions, devoid of real life, and it is this element that is found above all in the new form of jurisprudence and in what has crept into political life through jurisprudence. To Saint-Simon, jurisprudence, and the concepts on which it was based, were remnants and shadows of the time when sacerdotalism and militarism had a real function to perform in the life of the people.

The views of a man like Saint-Simon are born of the scientific mode of thinking which had become so widespread in the eighteenth century, and even before that time. It is a mode of thinking which directs all inner activity in man to the external world of material facts. Saint-Simon's attitude, however, was influenced by yet another factor, namely, the demand for individual freedom which was at that time arising from the very depths of man's being. On the one side we find the urge to discover natural law everywhere and to admit nothing as being ‘scientific’ which does not fall into line with this natural law.—And on the other side there is the insistent demand for individual freedom: Man must be his own matter and be able in freedom to find a place in the world that is consistent with the dignity of manhood. These two demands are, as a matter of fact, in diametrical opposition to one another. And if we study the structure of the life of thought in the nineteenth century, we realise that the mind of Saint-Simon and others like him was faced continually with these great problems: How can I reconcile natural law—to which man too must, after all, be subject—with the demand for human freedom, for freedom of the individuality.

In the French Revolution a materialistic view of the universe had been mingled with the inner demand for individual freedom. And it was the voice of the French Revolution, sounding over into the nineteenth century, which led men like Saint-Simon to this bitter conflict in the realm of knowledge.—The laws established by natural science hold good and are universal in their application. They obtain also in the being of man, but he will not admit it because within this body of scientific law he cannot find his freedom as an individual.

And so at the beginning of the nineteenth century, men like Saint-Simon stood as it were without ground under their feet before two irreconcilable principles. In trying to solve the problems of social life it was a question, on the one side, of keeping faith with science and, on the other, of discovering a form of social life wherein the freedom of true manhood is preserved and maintained.

Saint-Simon tried hard in every direction to find ideas for the institutions of industrial life and of human life in general which might bring him satisfaction. But again and again he was baffled by the incompatibility of these two demands of his age. The conflict, moreover, did not only make itself manifest in individual minds. Over the whole of the thought-life and its offspring, namely, the political and economic life of the beginning, of the nineteenth century, there loomed the shadow of this conflict. On the one side men yearn for unshakable law and, on the other, demand individual freedom. The problem was to discover a form of social life in which, firstly, law should be as supreme as in the world of nature and which, secondly, should offer man the possibility of individual freedom. The shrewdest minds of the age—and Saint-Simon was certainly one—were not able to find ideas capable of practical application in social life. And so Saint-Simon prescribes a social system directed by science and in line with scientific habits of thought.—But the demand for individual freedom finds no fulfilment.

A cardinal demand had thus obtruded itself in the life of the times, and is reflected in many a mental conflict. Men like Goethe, not knowing where to turn and yet seeking for a reconciliation of these two opposing principles, find themselves condemned to a life of inner loneliness. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there is a feeling of despair in face of the fact that human thinking, in spite of every effort, is incapable along these lines of discovering a practicable form of the social organism. And the consequence of this is that minds of another character altogether begin to make a stir—minds not fundamentally under the influence of scientific thought nor desirous of applying the abstract demands of the French Revolution but who aim at establishing some permanent principle in the social life of a Europe shaken by the Revolution and the deeds of Napoleon. And support is forthcoming for a man like de Maistre who points back to conditions as they were in the early centuries of Christendom in Europe.

De Maistre, born in the South of France, issued his call to the French Nation in the nineties of the eighteenth century, wrote his striking work on the Pope and also his Soirées de St. Petersbourg. He is the most universal mind among the reactionaries in the first half of the nineteenth century—a shrewd and ingenious thinker. He calls the attention of those who are willing to listen to the chaos that must gradually ensue if men prove incapable of evolving ideas upon which a social order may be built up. From this point of view he criticises with considerable acrimony those whom he considers responsible for the chaos in modern thought, among them, Locke, and he lays it down as an irrefutable principle that no social order worthy of the name can arise unless the civilisation of Europe is imbued once again with the old Catholic spirit of the early centuries of Christendom.

We must be absolutely objective in our study here and try to put ourselves in the place of a man like de Maistre and of those who even to-day still think more or less as he did. We must be able to see with the eyes of one who is convinced that no true social science can be born of modern scientific thought and that if no spiritual impulse can find its way into the social organism, chaos must become more and more widespread. It is, of course, true that neither de Maistre himself nor those who listened to his impassioned words perceived the reality of a new spiritual impulse. De Maistre pointed back to olden times, when the building of social order had actually been within the capacity of men. In the world of scientific thought to-day his voice has to all intents and purposes died away, but on the surface only.

Those who perceive what is really happening below the surface of civilised life, who realise how traditional religions are stretching out their tentacles once again and trying desperately to ‘modernise’ know how strongly the attitude of men like de Maistre is influencing ever-widening circles of reactionary thought. And if no counterbalance is created this influence will play a more and more decisive Part in our declining civilisation.

An objective study of de Maistre makes it abundantly evident that there is in him no single trace of a new spirit but that he is simply an ingenious and shrewd interpreter of the ideas of Roman Catholicism. He has worked out the principles of a social system which would, in his opinion, be capable of calling forth from chaos a possible (although for the modern age not desirable) social order, directed by ecclesiasticism. A strange situation has arisen at this point in the life of modern thought.

In a certain sense, another man who is also a typical representative of modern thinking came strongly under the influence of de Maistre. He gave an entirely different turn to the ideas of de Maistre but we must not forget that the actual content of a thought is one thing and the mode of thinking another, and it may be said with truth that the reactionary principles of de Maistre appear, like an illegitimate child of modern culture, in an unexpected place. Not from the point of view of content but from that of the whole configuration of thought, Auguste Comte, sometimes called the ‘father of modern society,’ is a true disciple of de Maistre for whom, moreover, he had considerable admiration. On the one side, Comte is a disciple of Saint-Simon, on the other, of de Maistre. This will not readily be perceived by those who concentrate on the actual content of the thoughts instead of upon the whole trend and bent of the mental life. Comte speaks of three phases in the evolution of humanity.—There is, firstly, the ancient, mythological period—the theological stage—when supremacy was vested in the priesthood. This, in his view, was superseded by the metaphysical phase, when men elaborated systematic thoughts relating to things super-physical. This stage too has passed away. The transition must now be made to a kind of political physics, in line with the idea of Saint-Simon. Science of given facts—this alone is worthy of the name of science. But there must be an ascent from physics, chemistry, biology, to sociology, and thus, following the same methods, to a kind of political physics.

Comte outlines a form of society directed by positive thinking, that is to say, by thought based entirely upon the material facts of the external world. In this social structure there is, naturally, not a single trace of Catholic credulity to be found. But in the way in which Comte builds up his system, the way in which he substitutes the authority of the senses for the super-sensible authority of the Church, putting humanity in the place of God, declaring that it is the individual who acts but humanity who guides—all this is simply another way of saying: Man thinks and God guides.

All this goes to show that the essentially Catholic, reactionary thought of de Maistre is working in the positive philosophy of Auguste Comte which is directed entirely to the things of the material world. Catholic thought is being promulgated in this sociology. And yet we must admit that there was an idealistic tendency too in the thought of Auguste Comte. He believes, provided always that his thought is in conformity with the spirit of the age, that he can discover in the social structure something that will be a blessing to man; he believes, furthermore, that this can be brought home to men and that a beneficial and desirable form of social life may thus be achieved. Implicit in every thinker during the first half of the nineteenth century there is a certain confidence in ideas that can be born in the mind of man and then communicated to others. There is a certain confident belief that if only men can be convinced of the truth of an idea, deeds of benefit to human life will spring from a will that is guided by intelligence. This attitude of confidence expresses itself in many different ways and is apparent in all the thinkers of the first half of the nineteenth century. Their individual views are, of course, partly influenced by nationality and partly by other factors, but this attitude is none the less universal.

Consider for a moment how men like Saint-Simon, Comte or Quételet conceive of the social order. They work entirely with the intellect and reasoning faculty, systematising, never departing from the principles of mathematical calculation, building up statistics and orderly systems with a certain elegance and grace. And then think of a man like Herbert Spencer in England during the first half of the nineteenth century. Herbert Spencer is absolutely typical of the English outlook. He does not systematise like Saint-Simon and Comte, nor does he work with statistics. Economic and industrial thinking, the way in which the problems of industrial life are interlinked—all these things which he has learnt from the others, he then proceeds to build up into a social science. On the basis of scientific and economic thinking Herbert Spencer evolves a kind of ‘super-organism’. He himself does not use this expression but many other thinkers adopted it, and indeed it became a habit in the nineteenth century to place the prefix ‘super’ before anything of which they were unable to form a concrete idea. This may be quite harmless in the realm of lyrical thought, but when it becomes a question of raising the concrete to a higher level simply by using the prefix ‘super’—as was usual at one time—then one is stumbling about in a realm of confused thoughts and ideas. In spite of this habit, however, eminent minds in the first half of the nineteenth century were all possessed of a certain confidence that the power of the spirit would ultimately lead them to the right path.

In the second half of the nineteenth century there is a complete change. From many points of view, Karl Marx may be regarded as an outstanding figure of this period. He too, in his own way, tries to give to the social life a lead based upon modern scientific thought. But the attitude of Karl Marx is very different from that of Saint-Simon, of Auguste Comte, of Herbert Spencer. Karl Marx has really given up the belief that it is possible to convince others of something that is true and capable of being put into practice, once the conviction has been aroused. Saint-Simon, Comte, Herbert Spencer, Buckle and many others in the first half of the nineteenth century had this inner belief, but in the second half of the century it was not, could not be there. Marx is the most radical example, but speaking quite generally this trust in the spirit was simply non-existent. So far as Karl Marx is concerned, he does not believe that it is possible to convince men by teaching. He thinks of the masses of the proletariat and says to himself: These men have instincts which express themselves as class instincts. If I gather together those in whom these class instincts are living, if I organise them and work with what is expressing itself in these class instincts, then I can do something with them, I can lead them in such a way that the inauguration of a new age is possible.

Saint-Simon and Comte are like priests who have been transported into the conditions of the modern age. They at least believe that conviction can be aroused in the hearts of men, and this was actually the case in the first fifty years of the nineteenth century. Karl Marx, however, sets to work like a strategist, or a General who never gives a thought to the factor of conviction but simply sets out to organise the masses. And there is really no difference between drilling soldiers and then the masses in order to prepare them for the field of battle, and marshalling the class instincts that already exist in human beings. And so we find the old sacerdotal methods in men like Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and militaristic methods in men like Karl Marx who being out-and-out strategists have given up the belief that men can be convinced and through their conviction bring about a desirable state of affairs. Such thinkers say to themselves: I must take those whom I can organise just as they are, for it is not possible to convince human beings. I will organise their class instincts and that will achieve the desired result.

A very radical change had come about in the course of the nineteenth century and anyone who studies this change deeply enough will realise that it takes place with considerable rapidity and is, moreover, apparent in another sphere as well.

The natural scientific mode of thinking came to the fore in the modern age, during the first half of the nineteenth century. We have only to think of men like Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. In their days, men still had faith in the spirit and believed that the spirit would help them to fathom the world of nature; they believed that nature was in some way directed by the spirit. But later on, just as faith in the creative spirit was lost in the domain of sociological thinking, so too was faith lost in the sphere of the knowledge of nature. Men placed reliance alone upon observation and experiment, and confidence in the creative spirit died away entirely. The spirit, they said, is capable only of recording the results of observation and experiment. And then, when this attitude creeps into the realm of social science, the scientific mode of observation is applied, as in Darwinism, in the study of the evolution of man. Benjamin Kidd, Huxley, Russell, Wallace and others in the second half of the nineteenth century are typical representatives of this kind of thinking The spirit is materialised and identified with external things both in the realm of social life and in the realm of knowledge.

It is strange how in the nineteenth century the human mind is beset by a kind of inner agnosticism, how it gradually loses faith even in itself. There was a radical increase of this agnosticism in the middle of the nineteenth century. Those who observe the way in which thoughts are expressed—and when it is a matter of discovering historical connections this is far more important than the actual content of the thoughts—will realise that these voices of the nineteenth century were the offspring of a tendency that was already beginning to make itself felt in the eighteenth century. It is possible, too, to follow the line of development back into the seventeenth, sixteenth and fifteenth centuries. We shall not there find direct evidence of the urge that became so insistent in the nineteenth century to unfold a new conception of the social order, in spite of a realisation that the goal was impossible of achievement, but we shall find nevertheless that the change which took place in men's thinking in the middle of the nineteenth century had been gradually working up to a climax since the fifteenth century. We find too, as we follow the development of thought back to the time of the fifteenth century, that concepts and ideas are invariably intelligible to us as thinkers living in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

But this is no longer the case as soon as we get back to the time preceding the fifteenth century and towards the Middle Ages.

I could tell you of many ideas and views which would prove to you the difference of outlook in these earlier centuries, but I will give one example only.—Anyone who genuinely tries to understand writings which deal with the world of nature, dating from the time preceding the fifteenth century, will find that he must approach them with an attitude of mind quite different from that which he will naturally bring to bear upon literature of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Before the fifteenth century, all the writings on the subject of nature indicate quite clearly that anyone who experiments with processes of nature must be filled with a certain inner reverence. Experiments with mineral substances, for instance, must only be carried out in a mood that finds favour in the eyes of certain Divine Beings. Experiments with the processes of nature must be accompanied by a moral attitude of soul—so it was said.

But just think of what would happen to-day if it were demanded of someone working to produce a chemical reaction in a laboratory, that his soul must first be suffused with a mood of piety! The idea would be ridiculed. Nevertheless, before the fifteenth century, and more strongly so in earlier times, it was quite natural that this demand should be made of those who were in any way working with the processes of nature. It was the aim of a man like de Maistre to bring to life again in the modern age, concepts that had really lost the vital meaning once attaching to them, and above all he tried to bring home the difference between the concepts of sin and of crime.

According to de Maistre, the men of his day—he is speaking of the beginning of the nineteenth century—had no insight into the difference between sin and crime. The two concepts had become practically synonymous. And above all there was no understanding of the meaning of ‘original sin.’

Let me now try to describe the idea men had of original sin before the days of the fifteenth century. Modern thought is altogether unfitted to grasp the real meaning of original sin, but some measure of understanding at least must be present in studying the development of thought through the centuries. We must here turn to fundamental conceptions resulting from spiritual investigation. For it is only by independent research that we can understand the character of a mental outlook quite different from our own. When we peruse books on the subject we are simply reading so many words and we are dishonest with ourselves if we imagine that the words convey any real meaning. Enlightened minds before the fifteenth century would have set no store by such definitions of original sin as are given by modern theology. In those days—and I repeat that these things can only be discovered nowadays by Spiritual Science—it was said: The human being, from the time of his birth, from the time he draws his first breath, until his death, passes through certain processes and phases in his inner life. These inner processes are not the same as those at work in the world of nature outside the human being. It is, as a matter of fact, a form of modern superstition to believe that all the processes at work in the being of man can also be found in the animal. This is mere superstition, because the laws of the animal organisation are different from those of the human organism. From birth until death the organism of the human being is permeated by forces of soul. And when we understand the nature of the laws and forces at work in the human organism, we know that they are not to be found in outer nature. In outer nature, however, there is something that corresponds in a certain sense with the laws at work during the period of embryonic development, from the time of conception until birth. The processes at work in the being of man between birth and death are not to be explained in the light of the processes of outer nature. Nevertheless, if it is rightly applied, the knowledge gleaned from a study of external nature enables us to understand the processes at work during the embryonic period of the life of a human being. It is not easy for the modern mind to grasp this idea, but my object in speaking of it is to give an example of how Spiritual Science can throw light upon conceptions of earlier times. Not of course with clear consciousness, but out of dim feeling, a man engaged in the investigation of nature before the fifteenth century said to himself: Outer nature lies there before me, but the laws of this outer nature work only in the processes of my physical body as it was before birth. In this sense there is something in the inner being of man that is openly manifest in outer nature. But the evolution of the human being must not be subject to the laws and processes of external nature. Man would be an evil being if he grew as the plant grows, unfolding its blossom in the outer world of space.

Such were the views of an earlier time. It was said that man falls into sin when he gives himself over to the forces by which his development in the mother's womb was promoted, for these forces work as do the forces of nature outside the human being. In nature outside the human being, these forces are working in their proper sphere. But if, after birth, man gives himself over to the forces of nature, if he does not make his being fit to become part of a world of super-sensible law—then he falls into sin. This thought leads one to the concept of original sin, to the idea of the mingling of the natural with the moral world order. Processes which belong to outer nature are woven, as it were, into the moral world order and the outcome is the birth of a concept like that of ‘original sin’ which was an altogether scientific concept before the days of the fifteenth century. De Maistre wanted to bring this concept of original sin again to the fore, to make a connecting link between natural science and the moral world. In the nineteenth century, however, the only possible way of preserving this concept of original sin was to bring about an even more radical separation of religion and scientific knowledge. And so we find great emphasis being laid upon the cleft between faith and knowledge. In earlier times no such cleft existed. It begins to appear a few hundreds of years before the fifteenth century but becomes more and more decisive as the centuries pass, until, in the nineteenth century, religion says: Let science carry out its own methods of exact research. We on our side have no desire to use these methods. We will ensure for ourselves a realm where we need simply faith and personal conviction—not scientific knowledge. Knowledge was relegated to science and religion set out to secure the realm of faith because the powers of the human soul were not strong enough to combine the two. And so, in the opinion of de Maistre, the concept of crime alone, no longer that of sin in its original meaning, conveyed any meaning to the modern mind, for the concept of sin could only have meaning when men understood the interplay between the natural and moral worlds.

This example shows us that the concepts and ideas of men in the time immediately preceding the fifteenth century were quite different from ours. Going backwards from the fifteenth century, we come to a lengthy period generally referred to as the dark Middle Ages, during which we find no such progress in the realm of thought as is apparent from the fifteenth century onwards. The development of thought that has taken place since the days of Galileo and Copernicus, leading up to the achievements of the nineteenth century, bear witness to unbroken progress, but in the time preceding the fifteenth century we cannot speak of progress in this sense at all. We can go back century alter century, through the twelfth, eleventh, tenth, ninth, eighth, seventh and sixth centuries, and we find quite a different state of things. We see the gradual spread of Christianity, but no trace of progressive evolution in the world of thought such as begins in the fifteenth century and in the middle of the nineteenth century undergoes the radical change of which we have spoken. We come finally to a most significant point in the spiritual life of Europe, namely, the fourth century A.D. Gradually it dawns upon us that it is possible to follow stage by stage the progressive development beginning in the middle of the fifteenth century with Nicolas Cusanus, expressing itself in the thought of men like Galileo and Copernicus and ultimately leading on to the radical turning-point in the nineteenth century, but that things are not at all the same in earlier centuries. We find there a more stationary condition of the world of thought and then, suddenly, in the fourth century of our era, everything changes.

This century is a period of the greatest significance in European thought and civilisation. Its significance will be brought home to us all the more when we realise that events after the turning-point in the fifteenth century, for example, the movements known as the Renaissance and the Reformation, denote a kind of return to conditions as they were in the fourth century of the Christian era. This is the decisive time in the process of the decline of the Roman Empire. The headway made by Christianity was such that Constantine had been obliged to proclaim religious freedom for the Christians and to place Christianity on an equal footing with the old pagan forms of religion. We see, too, a final attempt being made by Julian the Apostate to reinculcate into the civilised humanity of Europe the views and conceptions of ancient Paganism. The death of Julian the Apostate, in the year 363, marks the passing of one who strove with might and main to restore to the civilised peoples of Europe impulses that had reigned supreme for centuries, had been absorbed by Christianity but in the fourth century were approaching their final phase of decline. In this century too we find the onslaught of those forces by which the Roman Empire was ultimately superseded. Europe begins to be astir with the activities of the Goths and the Vandals. In the year A.D. 378 there takes place the momentous battle of Hadrianople. The Goths make their way into the Eastern Roman Empire. The blood of the so-called barbarians is set up in opposition to the dying culture of antiquity in the South of Europe. The history of this fourth century of our era is truly remarkable. We see how the culture of Greece, with its belief in the Gods and its philosophy, is little by little lift ed away from its hinges and disappears as an influence, and how the remnants of its thought pass over to the Roman Catholic Church. Direction of the whole of the spiritual and mental life falls into the hands of the priests; spirituality in its universal, cosmic aspect vanishes, until, brought to light once again by the Renaissance, it works an so strongly that when Goethe had completed his early training and produced his first works, he yearned with all his heart and soul for ancient European-Asiatic culture.

What, then, is the state of things in the age immediately following the fourth century A.D.? Education and culture had vanished into the cities, and the peasantry, together with the landowning population in Southern Europe, fused with the peoples who were pressing downward from the North. The next stage is the gradual fading away of that spiritual life which, originating in the ancient East, had appeared in another garb in the culture of Greece and Rome. These impulses die down and vanish, and there remain the peasantry, the landowning populace and the element with which they have now fused, living in the peoples who were coming down from the North into the Graeco-Roman world. Then, in the following centuries, we find the Roman priesthood spreading Christianity among this peasant people who practically constituted the whole population. The work of the priesthood is carried on quite independently of the Greek elements which gradually fade out, having no possibilities for the future. The old communal life is superseded by a system of commerce akin to that prevailing among the barbarians of the North. Spiritual life in the real sense makes no headway. The impulses of an earlier spirituality which had been taken over and remoulded by the priesthood, are inculcated into the uneducated peasant population of Europe; and not until these impulses have been inculcated does the blood now flowing in the veins of the people of Europe work in the direction of awakening the spirit which becomes manifest for the first time in the fifteenth century.

In the fourth century A.D. we find many typical representatives of the forces and impulses working at such a momentous point of time in the evolution of humanity. The significance of this century is at once apparent when we think of the following dates.—In the year 333, religious tolerance is proclaimed by the Emperor Constantine; in the year 363, with the murder of Julian the Apostate, the last hope of a restoration of ancient thought and outlook falls to the ground; Hadrianople is conquered by the Goths in the year 378. In the year 400, Augustine writes his Confessions, bringing as it were to a kind of culmination the inner struggles in the life of soul through which it was the destiny of European civilisation to pass.

Living in the midst of the fading culture of antiquity, a man like Augustine experienced the death of the Eastern view of the world. He experienced it in Manichæism, of which, as a young man, he had been an ardent adherent; he experienced it too in Neoplatonism. And it was only after inner struggles of unspeakable bitterness, having wrestled with the teachings of Mani, of Neoplatonism and even with Greek scepticism, that he finally found his way to the thought and outlook of Roman Catholic Christianity. Augustine writes these Confessions in the year A.D. 400, as it were on tables of stone.

Augustine is a typical representative of the life of thought as it was in the fourth century A.D. He was imbued with Manichæan conceptions but in an age when the ancient Eastern wisdom had been romanised and dogmatised to such an extent that no fundamental under standing of Manichæan teaching was possible. What, then, is the essence of Manichæism? The teachings that have come down to us in the form of tradition do not, nor can they ever make it really intelligible to us.

The only hope of understanding Manichæism is to bring the light of Spiritual Science to bear upon it. Oriental thought had already fallen into decadence but in the teachings of Mani we find a note that is both familiar and full of significance. The Manichæans strove to attain a living knowledge of the interplay between the spiritual and the material worlds. The aim of those who adhered to the teachings of Mani was to perceive the Spiritual in all things material. In the light itself they sought to find both wisdom and goodness. No cleft must divide Spirit from nature. The two must be realised as one. Later on, this conception came to be known by the name of dualism. Spirit and nature—once experienced as a living unity—were separated, nor could they be reunited. This attitude of mind made a deep impression upon the young Augustine, but it led him out of his depth; the mind of his time was no longer capable of rising to ideas which had been accessible to an older, more instinctive form of cognition, but which humanity had now outgrown. An inner, tragic struggle is waged in the soul of Augustine. With might and main he struggles to find truth, to discover the immediate reality of divine forces in cloud and mountain, in plant and animal, in all existence. But he finally takes refuge in the Neoplatonic philosophy which plainly shows that it has no insight into the interpenetration of Spirit and matter and, in spite of its greatness and inspiration, does no more than reach out towards abstract, nebulous Spirit.

While Augustine is gradually resigning hope of understanding a spirit-filled world of nature, while he is even passing through the phase of despising the world of sense and idolising the abstract spirituality of Neoplatonism, he is led, by a profoundly significant occurrence, to his Catholic view of life.

We must realise the importance of this world-historic event. Ancient culture is still alive in Augustine's environment, but it is already decadent, has passed into its period of decline. He struggles bitterly, but to no purpose, with the last remnants of this culture surviving in Manichæism and Neoplatonism. His mind is steeped in what this wisdom, even in its decadence, has to offer, and, to begin with, he cannot accept Christianity. He stands there, an eminent rhetorician and Neoplatonist, but torn with gnawing doubt. And what happens? Just when he has reached the point of doubting truth itself, of losing his bearings altogether along the tortuous paths of the decadent learning of antiquity in the fourth century of our era, when innumerable questions are hurtling through his mind, he thinks he hears the voice of a child calling to him from the next garden: ‘Take and read! Take and read!’ And he turns to the New Testament, to the Epistles of St. Paul, and is led through the voice of the child to Roman Catholicism.

The mind of Augustine is laden with the oriental wisdom which had now become decadent in the West. He is a typical representative of this learning and then, suddenly, through the voice of a child, he becomes the paramount influence in subsequent centuries. No actual break occurs until the fifteenth century and it may truly be said that the ultimate outcome of this break appears as the change that took place in the life of thought in the middle of the nineteenth century.

And so, in this fourth century of our era, we find the human mind involved in the complicated network of Western culture but also in an element which constitutes the starting-point of a new impulse. It is an impulse that mingles with what has come over from the East and from the seemingly barbarian peoples by whom Roman civilisation was gradually superseded, but whose instructors, after they had mingled with the peasantry and the landowning classes, were the priests of the Roman Church. In the depths, however, there is something else at work. Out of the raw, unpolished soul of these peoples there emerges an element of lofty, archaic spirituality. There could be no more striking example of this than the bock that has remained as a memorial of the ancient Goths—Wulfila's translation of the Bible. We must try to unfold a sensitive understanding of the language used in this translation of the Bible. The Lord's Prayer, to take one example, is built up, fragment by fragment, out of the confusion of thought of which Augustine was so typical a representative. Wulfila's translation of the Bible is the offspring of an archaic form of thought, of Arian Christianity as opposed to the Athanasian Christianity of Augustine.

Perhaps more strongly than anywhere else, we can feel in Wulfila's translation of the Bible how deeply the pagan thought of antiquity is permeated with Arian Christianity. Something that is pregnant with inner life echoes down to us from these barbarian peoples and their culture, to which the civilisation of ancient Rome was giving place. The Lord's Prayer rendered by Wulfila, is as follows:

Atta unsar thu in himinam,
Veihnai namo thein;
Quimai thiudinassus theins.
Vairthai vilja theins, sve in himina, jah ana aerthai.
Hlaif unsarana thana sinteinan, gif uns himma daga.
Jah aflet uns, thatei skulans sijaima, svasve jah veis afletam thaim skulam unsaraim.
Jah ni briggais uns in fraistubnjai, ak lausei uns af thamma ubilin.
Unte theina ist thiu dangardi, jah mahts, jah vulthus in aivius. Amen.

Atta unsar thu in himinam, veihnai namo thein; Quimai thiudinassus theins. Vairthai vilja theins, sve in himina, jah ana aerthai.—The words of this wonderful prayer cannot really be translated literally into our modern language, but they may be rendered thus:

We feel Thee above in the Spirit-Heights, All Father of men.
May Thy Name be hallowed.
May Thy Kingdom come to us.
May Thy Will be supreme, on the Earth even as it is in Heaven.

We must be able to feel what these words express. Men were aware of the existence of a primordial Being, of the All-sustaining Father of humanity in the heights of spiritual existence. They pictured Him with their faculties of ancient clairvoyance as the invisible, super-sensible King who rules His Kingdom as no earthly King. Among the Goths this Being was venerated as King and their veneration was proclaimed in the words : Atta unsar thu in himinam.

This primordial Being was venerated in His three aspects: May Thy Name be hallowed. ‘Name’—as a study of Sanscrit will show—implied the outer manifestation or revelation of the Being, as a man reveals himself in his body. ‘Kingdom’ was the supreme Power: Veihnai namo thein; Quimai thiudinassus theins, Vairthai vilja theins, sve in himina, jah ana aerthai.

‘Will’ indicated the Spirit shining through the Power and the Name.—Thus as they gazed upwards, men beheld the Spirit of the super-sensible worlds in His three-fold aspect. To this Spirit they paid veneration in the words:

Jah ana aerthai.
Hlaif unsarana thana sinteinan, gif uns himma daga.

So may it be on Earth. Even as Thy Name, the form in which Thou art outwardly manifest, shall be holy, so may that which in us becomes outwardly manifest and must daily be renewed, be radiant with spiritual light. We must try to understand the meaning of the Gothic word Hlaif, from which Leib (Leib=body) is derived. In saying the words, ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ we have no feeling for what the word Hlaif denoted here:—Even as Thy ‘Name’ denotes thy body, so too may our body be spiritualised, subsisting as it does through the food which it receives and transmutes.

The prayer speaks then of the ‘Kingdom’ that is to reign supreme from the super-sensible worlds, and so leads on to the social order among men. In this super-sensible ‘Kingdom’ men are not debtors one of another. The word debt among the Goths means debt in the moral as well as in the physical, social life.

And so the prayer passes from the ‘Name’ to the ‘Kingdom’, from the bodily manifestation in the Spirit, to the ‘Kingdom’. And then from the outer, physical nature of the body to the element of soul in the social life and thence to the Spiritual.—

Jah aflet uns, thatei skulans sijaima, svasve jah
veis afletam thaim skulam unsaraim.

—May we not succumb to those forces which, proceeding from the body, lead the Spirit into darkness; deliver us from the evils by which the Spirit is cast into darkness. Jah ni briggais uns in fraistubnjai, ak lausei uns af thamma ubilin.—Deliver us from the evils arising when the Spirit sinks too deeply into the bodily nature.

Thus the second part of the prayer declares that the order reigning in the spiritual heights must be implicit in the social life upon Earth. And this is confirmed in the words : We will recognise this spiritual Order upon Earth.

Unte theina ist thiu dangardi, jah mahts, jah vulthus in aivius. Amen.

—All-Father, whose Name betokens the out er manifestation of the Spirit, whose Kingdom we will recognise, whose Will shall reign: May earthly nature too be full of Thee, and our body daily renewed through earthly nourishment. In our social life may we not be debtors one of another, but live as equals. May we stand firm in spirit and in body, and may the trinity in the social life of Earth be linked with the super-earthly Trinity. For the Supersensible shall reign, shall be Emperor and King. The Supersensible—not the material, not the personal—shall reign.

Unte theina ist thiu dangardi, jah mahts, jah vulthus in avius. Amen.

—For on Earth there is no thing, no being over which the rulership is not Thine.—Thine is the Power and the Light and the Glory, and the all-supreme Love between men in the social life.

The Trinity in the super-sensible world is thus to penetrate into and find expression in the social order of the Material world. And again, at the end, there is the confirmation: Yea, verily, we desire that this threefold order shall reign in the social life as it reigns with Thee in the heights: For Thine is the Kingdom, the Power and the revealed Glory.—Theina ist thiu dangardi, jah mahts, jah vulthus in aivius. Amen.

Such was the impulse living among the Goths. It mingled with those peasant peoples whose mental life is regarded by history as being almost negligible. But this impulse unfolded with increasing rapidity as we reach the time of the nineteenth century. It finally came to a climax and led on then to the fundamental change in thought and outlook of which we have heard in this lecture.

Such are the connections.—I have given only one example of how, without in any way distorting the facts, but rather drawing the real threads that bind them together, we can realise in history the existence of law higher than natural law can ever be. I wanted, in the first place, to describe the facts from the exoteric point of view. Later on we will consider their esoteric connections, for this will show us how events have shaped themselves in this period which stretches from the fourth century A.D. to our own age, and how the impulses of this epoch live within us still. We shall realise then that an understanding of these connections is essential to the attainment of true insight for our work and thought at the present time.

[ 1 ] An attempt to derive a general view of world and life from the basis of strict science was undertaken in the course of the nineteenth century by Auguste Comte (1798–1857). This enterprise, which was presented as a comprehensive world picture in his Cours de Philosophic Positive (6 vols., 1830–42), was sharply antagonistic to the idealistic views of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel of the first half of the nineteenth century. It also opposed, although not to the same degree, all those thought structures that were derived from the ideas of evolution along the lines of Lamarck and Darwin. What occupied the central position of all world conception in Hegel, the contemplation and comprehension of man's own spirit, was completely rejected by Comte. He argues: If the human spirit wanted to contemplate itself, it would actually have to divide into two personalities; it would have to slip outside itself and place itself opposite its own being. Even a psychology that does not confine itself to the mere physiological view but intends to preserve the processes of the mind by themselves is not recognized by Comte. Anything that is to become an object of knowledge must belong to the objective interconnections of facts, must be presented objectively as the laws of the mathematical sciences. From this position there follows Comte's objection to the attempts of Spencer and other thinkers whose world pictures followed the approach of scientific thinking adapted by Lamarck and Darwin. So far as Comte is concerned, the human species is given as a fixed and unchangeable fact; he refuses to pay any attention to Lamarck's theory. Simple, transparent natural laws as physics uses them for its phenomena are ideals of knowledge for him. As long as science does not work with such simple laws, it is unsatisfactory as knowledge for Comte. He has a mathematical bent of mind. If it cannot be treated clearly and simply like a mathematical problem, he considers it to be not ready for science. Comte has no feeling for the fact that one needs ideas that become increasingly more life-saturated as one rises from the purely mechanical and physical processes to the higher formations of nature and to man. His world conception owed a certain lifeless and rigid quality to this fact. The whole world appears to him like the mechanics of a machine. What escapes Comte everywhere is the element of life; he expels life and spirit from things and explains merely what is mechanical and machinelike. The concrete historical life of man appears in his presentation like the conceptual picture that the astronomer draws of the motions of the heavenly bodies. Comte constructed a scale of the sciences. Mathematics represents the lowest stage; it is followed by physics and chemistry and these again by the science of organisms; the last and concluding science in this sequence is sociology, the knowledge of human society. Comte strives to make all these sciences as simple as mathematics. The phenomena with which the individual sciences deal are supposed to be different in every case but the laws are considered to be fundamentally always the same.

The reverberations of the thought of Holbach, Condillac and others are still distinctly perceptible in the lectures on the relation between soul and body (Les Rapports du Physique et du Moral de L'homme) that Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1757–1808) gave in 1797 and 1798 in the medical school founded by the National Convention in Paris. Nevertheless, these lectures can be called the beginning of the development of the world conception of the nineteenth century in France. They express a distinct awareness of the fact that Condillac's mode of conception for the phenomena of the soul life had been too closely modeled after the conception of the mechanical processes of inorganic nature and their operation. Cabanis investigates the influence of age, sex, way of life and temperament on man's intellectual and emotional disposition. He develops the conception that the physical and the spiritual are not two separated entities that have nothing in common but that they constitute an inseparable whole. What distinguishes him from his predecessors is not his fundamental view but the way in which he elaborates it. His predecessors simply carry into the spiritual the views they have derived from the inorganic world. Cabanis is convinced that if we start by observing the world of the spiritual as open-mindedly as we observe the inorganic, it will reveal its relation to the rest of the natural phenomena.

Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) proceeded in a similar way. He also wanted first to observe the processes of the spirit without bias as they appear when we approach them without philosophical or scientific prejudice. According to this thinker, one is in error if one conceives the soul as a mechanism as Condillac and his followers had done. This mechanistic character cannot be upheld any longer if one honestly observes oneself. We do not find in us an automaton, a being that is directed from without. We always find within us spontaneous activity and an inner self. We should actually not know anything of the effects of the external world if we did not experience a disturbance in our inner life caused by a collision with the external world. We experience our own being. We develop our activity out of ourselves, but as we do this we meet with opposition. We realize not only our own existence but also an external world that resists us.

[ 2 ] Although they started from de Tracy, two thinkers—Maine de Biran (1766–1824) and André-Marie Ampè re (1775–1826) were led by the self-observation of the soul in entirely different directions. Biran is a subtle observer of the human spirit. What in Rousseau seems to emerge as a chaotic mode of thought motivated by an arbitrary mood, we find in Biran in the form of clear and concrete thinking. Two factors of man's inner life are made the objects of observation by Biran who is a profoundly thoughtful psychologist: What man is through the nature of his being, his temperament, and what he makes out of himself through active work, his character. He follows the ramifications and changes of the inner life, and he finds the source of knowledge in man's inner life. The forces of which we learn through introspection are intimately known in our life, and we learn of an external world only insofar as it presents itself as more or less similar and akin to our inner world. What should we know of forces outside in nature if we did not experience within our self-active soul a similar force and consequently could compare this with what corresponds to it in the external world? For this reason, Biran is untiring in his search for the processes in man's soul. He pays special attention to the involuntary and the unconscious element in the inner life processes that exist long before the light of consciousness emerges in the soul. Biran's search for wisdom within the soul led him to a peculiar form of mysticism in later years. In the process of deriving the profoundest wisdom from the soul, we come closest to the foundation of existence when we dig down into our own being. The experience of the deepest soul processes then is an immersion in the wellspring of existence, into the God within us.

[ 3 ] The attraction of Biran's wisdom lies in the intimate way in which he presents it. He could have found no more appropriate form of presentation than that of a journal intime, a form of diary. The writings of Biran that allow the deepest insight into his thought world were published after his death by E. Naville (compare Naville's book, Maine de Biran. Sa vie et ses pensées, 1857, and his edition, Oeuvres inédités de Maine de Biran). As old men, Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy belonged to a small circle of philosophers; Biran was a younger member among them. Ampè re was among those who were acquainted with Biran's views. As a natural scientist, he became prominent through the extension of Oersted's observation concerning the relation of electricity to magnetism (compare above in Part II Chapter I). Biran's mode of conception is more intimate, that of Ampè re more scientific-methodical. Ampè re follows with interest the interrelationship of sensations and conceptions in the soul, and also the process through which the spirit arrives at a science of the world phenomena with the aid of thinking.

[ 4 ] What is significant in this current of world conception, which chronologically represents the continuation of the teachings of Condillac, is the circumstance that the life of the soul itself is decidedly emphasized, that the self-activity of the inner personality of the human being is brought into the foreground of the investigation, and that all these thinkers are striving nevertheless for knowledge in the strict sense of natural science. Initially, they investigate the spirit with the methods of natural science, but they do not want to treat its phenomena as homogeneous with the other processes of nature. From these more materialistic beginnings there emerges finally a tendency toward a world conception that leans distinctly toward the spirit.

[ 5 ] Victor Cousin (1792–1867) traveled through Germany several times and thus became personally acquainted with the leading spirits of the idealistic period. The deepest impression was made on him by Hegel and Goethe. He brought their idealism to France. As a professor at the école normale (1814), and later at the Sorbonne, he was able to do a great deal for this idealism through his powerful and fascinating eloquence that always produced a deep impression. Cousin received from the idealistic life of the spirit the conviction that it is not through the observation of the external world but through that of the human spirit that a satisfactory viewpoint for a world conception can be obtained. He based what he wanted to say on the self observation of the soul. He adopted the view of Hegel that spirit, idea and thought do not merely rule in man's inner life but also outside in nature and in the progress of the historical life, and that reason is contained in reality. Cousin taught that the character of a people of an age was not merely influenced by random happenings, arbitrary decisions of human individuals, but that a real idea is manifested in them and that a great man appears in the world merely as a messenger of a great idea, in order to realize it in the course of history. This produced a profound impression on Cousin's French audience, which in its most recent history had had to comprehend world historical upheavals without precedent, when they heard such a splendid speaker expound the role that reason played in the historical evolution in accordance with some great and fundamental ideas.

[ 6 ] Comte, with energy and resolution, found his place in the development of French philosophy with his principle: only in the method of science, which proceeds from strict mathematical and directly observed truths as in physics and chemistry can the point of departure for a world conception be found. The only approach he considered mature was the one that fought its way through to this view. To arrive at this stage, humanity had to go through two phases of immaturity—one in which it believed in gods, and subsequently, one in which it surrendered to abstract ideas. Comte sees the evolution of mankind in the progression from theological thinking to idealistic thinking, and from there to the scientific world conception. In the first stage, man's thinking projected anthropomorphic gods into the processes of nature, which produce these processes in the same arbitrary manner in which man proceeds in his actions. Later, he replaces the gods with abstract ideas as, for instance, life force, general world reason, world purpose, and so forth. But this phase of development must give way to a higher one in which it must be understood that an explanation of the phenomena of the world can be found only in the method of observation and a strictly mathematical and logical treatment of the facts. For the purpose of a world conception, thinking must merely combine what physics, chemistry and the science of living organisms obtain through their investigation. Thinking must not add anything to the results of the individual sciences as theology had done with its divine beings and the idealistic philosophy with its abstract thoughts. Also, the conceptions concerning the course of the evolution of mankind, the social life of men in the state, in society, etc., will become clear only when the attempt is made to find in them laws like those found in the exact natural sciences. The causes that bring families, associations, legal views and state institutions into existence must be investigated in the same way as the causes that make bodies fall to the ground and that allow the digestive organs to operate. The science of human social life, of human development, sociology, is therefore what Comte is especially concerned with, and he tries to give it the exactness that the other sciences have gradually acquired.

In this respect he has a predecessor in Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825). Saint-Simon had presented the view that man would only learn to guide his own fate completely when he conceived of his own life in the state, in society and in the course of history in a strictly scientific sense, and when he arranged it like a process following a natural law. For awhile, Comte was on intimate terms with Saint-Simon. He parted ways with him when it seemed to him that Saint-Simon's views turned into all sorts of groundless dreams and utopias. Comte continued to work with a rare zeal in his original direction. His Cours de Philosophic Positive is an attempt to elaborate, in a style of spirit-alienation, the scientific accomplishments of his time into a world conception by presenting them merely in a systematized survey, and by developing sociology in the same way without the aid of theological and idealistic thoughts. Comte saw no other task for the philosopher than that of such a mere systematized survey. The philosopher would add nothing of his own to the picture that the sciences have presented as the connection of facts. Comte expressed thereby, in the most pointed manner, his view that the sciences alone, with their methods of observing reality, have a voice in the formulation of a world conception.

[ 7 ] Within German spirit-life Eugen Dühring (1833–1921) appeared as a forceful champion of Comte's thought. This was expressed in 1865 in his Natural Dialectic. As a further exposition, he expounded his views in his book, Course of Philosophy as a Strictly Scientific World Conception and Art of Life (1875), and in numerous other writings in the fields of mathematics, natural science, philosophy, history of science and social economy. All of Dühring's work proceeds, in the strictest sense of the word, from a mathematical and mechanistic mode of thought. Dühring is outstanding in his endeavor to analyze his observations of nature in accordance with mathematical law, but where this kind of thinking is insufficient, he loses all possibility of finding his way through life. It is from this characteristic of his spirit that the arbitrariness and bias is to be explained with which Dühring judges so many things. Where it is necessary to judge the conflicts of life in accordance with higher ideas, he has, therefore, no other criterion than his sympathies and antipathies that have been aroused in him through accidental personal circumstances. This man, with his mathematically objective mind, becomes completely arbitrary when he undertakes to evaluate human accomplishments of the historical past or of the present. His rather unimaginative mathematical mode of conception led him to denounce a personality like Goethe as the most unscientific mind of modern times, whose entire significance consisted, in Dühring's opinion, in a few poetical achievements. It is impossible to surpass Dühring in his under-valuation of everything that lies beyond a drab reality as he does in his book, The Highlights of Modern Literature. In spite of this one-sidedness, Dühring is one of the most stimulating figures in the development of modern world conception. No one who has penetrated his thought-saturated books can help but confess that he has been profoundly affected by them.

[ 8 ] Dühring uses rude language for all world conceptions that do not proceed from strictly scientific basic views. All such unscientific modes of thought “found themselves in the state of childish immaturity or feverish fits, or in the decadence of senility, no matter whether they infest entire epochs and parts of humanity under these circumstances or just occasionally individual elements or degenerated layers of society, but they always belong to the category of the immature, the pathological or that of over-ripeness that is already decomposed by putrefaction,” (Course of Philosophy). What Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel achieved, Dühring condemns as the outflow of a professorial wisdom of mountebanks; idealism as a world conception is for him a theory of insanity. He means to create a philosophy of reality that is alone adequate to nature because it “does away with all artificial and unnatural fictions, and for the first time makes the concept of reality the measure of all ideal conceptions”; reality is conceived in this philosophy “in a manner that excludes all tendencies toward a dreamlike and subjectivistically limited world conception.” (Course of Philosophy)

[ 9 ] One should think like a real expert in mechanics, a real physicist who confines himself to the results of sense perception, of the logical combinations of the intellect and the operations of calculations. Anything that goes beyond this is idle playing with empty concepts. This is Dühring's verdict. Dühring means to raise this form of thinking, however, to its justified position. Whoever depends exclusively on that form of thinking can be sure that it supplies him with insight concerning reality. All brooding over the question of whether or not we actually can penetrate into the mysteries of the world process, all investigations, which, like Kant's, want to limit the faculty of knowledge, are caused by logical distortion. One should not yield to the temptation of a self-sacrificing self-denial of the mind that does not dare to make a positive statement about the world. What we can know is a real and untarnished presentation of the real.

“The totality of things has a systematic order and an inner logically consistent structure. Nature and history have a constitution and a development that correspond to a large extent to the general logical relations of all concepts. The general qualities and relations of the concepts of thought with which logic deals must also be valid for the special case, that its object is the totality of being, together with its chief forms. Since the most general thinking decides to a large extent what can be and how it can be, the highest principles and the main forms of logic must set the standard for all reality and its forms.” (Course of Philosophy)

Reality has produced for itself an organ in human thinking in which it can reproduce itself mentally in the form of thought in an ideal picture. Nature is everywhere ruled by an all-penetrating law that carries its own justification within itself and cannot be criticized. How could there be any meaning in an attempt to criticize the relevance of thinking, the organ of nature? It is mere foolishness to suppose that nature would create an organ through which it would reflect itself only imperfectly or incompletely. Therefore, order and law in this world must correspond to the logical order and law in human thinking. “The ideal system of our thought is the picture of the real system of objective reality; the completed knowledge has, in the form of thoughts, the same structure that the things possess in the form of real existence.”

In spite of this general agreement between thinking and reality, there exists for the former the possibility to go beyond the latter. In the element of the idea, thinking continues the operations that reality has suggested to it. In reality all bodies are divisible, but only up to a certain limit. Thinking does not stop at this limit but continues to divide in the realm of the idea. Thought sweeps beyond reality; for thought, the body is divisible into infinity. Accordingly, to thought it consists of infinitely small parts. In reality, this body consists only of a definite, finite number of small, but not infinitely small parts. In this way all concepts of infinity that transcend reality come into existence. From every event we proceed to another event that is its cause; from this cause we go again to the cause of that cause and so forth. As soon as our thinking abandons the firm ground of reality, it sweeps on into a vague infinity. It imagines that for every cause a cause has to be sought in turn so that the world is without a beginning in time. In allotting matter to space, thinking proceeds in a similar way. In transversing the sky it always finds beyond the most distant stars still other stars; it goes beyond this real fact and imagines space as infinite and filled with an infinite number of heavenly bodies. According to Dühring, one ought to realize that all such conceptions of infinity have nothing to do with reality. They only occur through the fact that thinking, with the methods that are perfectly appropriate within the realm of reality, rises above this realm and thereby gets lost in the indefinite.

[ 10 ] If in our thinking, however, we remain aware of this separation from reality, we need no longer refrain from applying our concepts borrowed from human action, to nature. Dühring, as he proceeds from such presuppositions, does not even hesitate to attribute to nature in its production an imagination any more than he does to man in his creation. “Imagination extends . . . into nature itself; it has its roots, as does all thinking in general, in the processes that precede the developed consciousness but do not produce any elements of subjective feelings” (Course of Philosophy). The thought upheld by Comte, that all world conception should be confined to a mere rearrangement of the purely factual, dominates Dühring so completely that he projects the faculty of imagination into the external world because he believes that he would simply have to reject it if it occurred merely in the human mind. Proceeding from these conceptions he arrives at other projections of such concepts as are derived from human activities. He thinks, for instance, that not only man could, in his actions, undertake fruitless attempts, which he then gives up because they do not lead to the intended aim, but that such attempts could also be observed in nature.

The character of the tentative in the formations of nature is not at all alien to reality itself, and one cannot see why one should allow only one half of the parallelism between nature outside man and nature in man, just for the sake of pleasing a shallow philosophy. If subjective error of thinking and imagining springs from the relative separation and independence of this sphere, why should not a practical error or blunder of the objective and non-thinking nature be possibly the result of a relative separation and mutual alienation of its various parts and driving forces? A true philosophy that is not intimidated by common prejudices will finally recognize the perfect parallelism and the all-pervading unity of the constitution in both directions. (Course of Philosophy)

[ 11 ] Dühring is not in the least shy when it is a question of applying the concepts to reality that thinking produces in itself. But since he has, because of his disposition, only a sense for mathematical conceptions, the picture he sketches of the world has a mathematical-schematic character. He rejects the mode of thought that was developed by Darwin and Haeckel and does not understand what motivates them to search for a reason to explain why one being develops from another. The mathematician places the forms of a triangle, square, circle and ellipse side by side; why should one not be satisfied with a similar schematic coordination in nature as well? Dühring does not aim at the genesis of nature but at the fixed formations that nature produces through the combinations of its energies, just as the mathematician studies the definite, strictly delineated forms of space. He finds nothing inappropriate in attributing to nature a purposeful striving toward such definite formations. Dühring does not interpret this purposeful tendency of nature as the conscious activity that develops in man, but he supposes it to be just as distinctly manifested in the operation of nature as every other natural manifestation. In this respect, Dühring's view is, therefore, the opposite pole of the one upheld by Friedrich Albert Lange. Lange declares the higher concepts, especially all those in which imagination has a share, to be justifiable poetic fiction; Dühring rejects all poetic imagination in concepts, but he attributes actual reality to certain higher ideas that are indispensable to him. Thus, it seems quite consistent for Lange to separate the foundation of the moral life entirely from all ideas that are rooted in reality (compare above, to Part II Chapter III). It is also consistent if Dühring wants to extend the ideas that he sees as valid in the realm of morality to nature as well. He is completely convinced that what happens in man and through man belongs to the natural events as much as do the inanimate processes. What in human life is right cannot be wrong in nature.

Such considerations contributed to making Dühring an energetic opponent to Darwin's doctrine of the struggle for existence. f the fight of all against all were the condition of perfection in nature, it would have to be the same with man's life:

Such a conception that claims to be scientific is the most immoral thing thinkable. The character of nature is in this way conceived in an anti-moral sense. It is not merely indifferent to the better morality of man but it is actually in agreement and in alliance with the bad moral principles that are followed by scoundrels. (Course of Philosophy)

According to Dühring's life-conception, what man feels as moral impulses must have its origin in nature. It is possible to observe in nature a tendency toward morality. As nature produces various forces that purposefully combine into stable formations, so it also plants into man instincts of sympathy. By them he allows himself to be determined in his social life with his fellow men. In man, the activity of nature is continued on an elevated level. Dühring attributes the faculty to produce sensations automatically out of themselves to the inanimate mechanical forces.

The mechanical causality of the forces of nature becomes, so to peak, subjectified in the fundamental sensation. The fact of this elementary process of subjectification is evidently incapable of any further explanation, for somewhere and under some conditions the unconscious mechanism of the world must develop a feeling of itself. (Course of Philosophy)

But when the world arrives at this stage, it is not that a new law begins, a realm of the spirit, but merely a continuation occurs of what had already been there in the unconscious mechanism. This mechanism, to be sure, is unconscious, but it is nevertheless wise, for “the earth with all it produces, as well as all causes of life's maintenance that lie outside, especially in the sun and all influences that come from the whole surrounding world in general—this entire organization and arrangement must be thought of as essentially produced for man, which is to say, in agreement with his well-being.” (Course of Philosophy)

[ 12 ] Dühring ascribes thought and even aims and moral tendencies to nature without admitting that he thereby idealizes nature. But, for an explanation of nature, higher ideas are necessary that transcend the real. According to Dühring, however, there must be nothing like that; he therefore changes their meaning by interpreting them as facts. Something similar happened in the world conception of Julius Hermann von Kirchmann (1802–84), who published his Philosophy of Knowledge in 1864 at about the same time Dühring's Natural Dialectic appeared. Kirchmann proceeds from the supposition that only what is perceived is real. Man is connected with reality through his perception. Everything that he does not derive from perception he must eliminate from his knowledge of reality. He succeeds in doing this if he rejects everything that is contradictory. "Contradiction is not,” is Kirchmann's second principle, which follows his first principle, “The perceived is.”

[ 13 ] Kirchmann admits only feelings and desires as the states of the soul of man that have an existence by themselves.

Knowing forms a contrast to the other two states, to feeling and desire. . . . It is possible that there is in knowing something underlying, perhaps something similar to, pressure and tension, but if it is conceived in this way it cannot be grasped in its essence. As knowing, and it is only as such that it is to be investigated here, it merely makes itself into a mirror of another being. There is no better parable for this than the mirror. Just as the mirror is the more perfect the less it shows of itself and the more it reflects another being, so it is also with knowing. Its essence is the pure reflection of a being other than itself, without mixing in its own state of being. (Philosophy of Knowledge, 1864)

One cannot imagine a greater contrast to Hegel's mode of conception than this view of knowledge. While with Hegel the essence of a thing appears in thinking, in the element that the soul adds in spontaneous activity to the percept, Kirchmann's ideal of knowledge consists of a mirror picture of percepts from which all additions by the soul itself have been eliminated.

[ 14 ] To judge Kirchmann's position in the intellectual life correctly, one must consider the great difficulty with which somebody who had the will to erect an independent structure of world conception was met in his time. The results of natural science, which were to produce a profound influence on the development of world conceptions, were still young. They were just sufficient to shake the belief in the classical idealistic world conception that had had to erect its proud structure without the aid of modern natural science. In the face of the wealth of detailed knowledge, it became difficult to reconstruct fundamental philosophical thoughts. The thread that led from the scientific knowledge of facts to a satisfactory total conception of the world was gradually lost in the general consciousness. A certain perplexity took hold of many. An understanding for the lofty flight of thought that had inspired the world conception of Hegel was scarcely to be found anywhere.

Quite a number of lectures have now been given by me on the changes that must necessarily take place in our whole civilization. First and foremost, what was said in this connection was expressed in such a way as to appeal to the will of men. We now live in a cycle of humanity's evolution in which people have to discover inner activity in order to contribute their share towards the necessary change. For human soul substance will have to stream into external life, into the objectivity of external life, and human beings themselves will have to bring about what should appear. In the present cycle of human development it is no longer possible to wait passively for divine powers, far removed from man, to step in and to do something for human evolution, without the participation of man himself.

The essential thing is to be in a position to understand such things by observing the individual phenomena of social life and the life of nature, but today, certain phenomena of social life shall be our topic. I would like to start with a quite definite fact. Let us suppose that someone announces himself; he may, for example, send his business card with the name “Edmund Miller” printed on it. Yet, on seeing this card with the name “Edmund Miller,” it would be foolish to assume that a miller was coming, a man who grinds corn. For the person announcing himself by this name may be a contractor, or a professor, or a court advisor, and so on. It would not be justified in such a case to deduce anything from the name “Miller.” Initially, it would perhaps be better to form no thoughts whatever, but just to wait and see what kind of a person conceals himself behind the name. Or, through certain other circumstances, we may already know something about the actual person, the real living entity concealed behind this name, “Miller.”

It is clear to us in this case that it would be quite wrong to infer from his name anything about the character of the approaching individual. If a person named “Smith” announces himself we would not think that he is a smith. This shows that in regard to those words we consider proper names, we feel the need to discover, by means of something that is not inferred from the name, what or whom we are dealing with.

Well, in this respect, even proper names have undergone a certain history. A person bearing the name Smith today no longer has anything to do with a real smith; a person called Miller has nothing to do with a miller. Yet these names originally arose at a time when name-giving such as is customary today did not exist, when people in a village would remark, “The smith said,—the miller said this or did that,”—or, “I saw the miller,”—and referred to the actual smith or miller. One who has lived in villages knows that people frequently do not refer to each other by proper names but say instead that they saw the smith, or the mason, or somebody else. Therefore, the name itself originally caused people to infer from the words what lay behind them.

All words, the whole language, will undergo the same development in the-course of evolution from the fifth to the sixth post-Atlantean epoch that proper names have undergone, a development which in their case we can clearly survey. Nevertheless, human beings today are still almost completely caught up in the whole of language; we basically acquire all our knowledge out of language. In actual fact, the general attitude towards nearly the whole compass of language is to infer the things from their words. Now, it is convenient to do so, but human evolution follows a different course, and in regard to such things we must have the same attitude that we adopt in regard to natural phenomena. They contain objective necessity. Objective necessity also exists where the causality of nature holds sway in the sphere of life, something that is experienced by many people with abstract superficiality. It happens frequently—I have often pointed this out—that people will say, “I never intended to do or say this; I meant it quite differently; I had this or that intention with regard to this matter.” But regardless of how pronounced the child's intention is not to get burned, when it reaches into fire, it will burn itself. Concerning the things of life, intentions that do not delve into life are not decisive; at most, only those intentions that do delve into life, or, certainly, facts, and the relationships of these facts that follow natural laws, are decisive.

People must become used to this way of thinking; based an spiritual science, this is, above all, necessary in the most eminent sense. And one must also get used to the thought: “As pleasant as it might be if one could just take words as they are, it is nevertheless a fact that the objective course and laws of human evolution point in a different direction.” They indicate that man's whole conception, his whole soul life, is becoming emancipated from words. Words are gradually becoming mere gestures that simply indicate the being or thing in question, no longer designating and explaining anything fully. If spiritual-scientific descriptions are to be taken seriously, for example, then something must come about for which people are often annoyed with me, namely, that one can no longer use words in the manner that words and sentences are customarily used at present. For if one sets forth spiritual-scientific facts, one is above all presenting facts of the future; something is represented that in future time will have to become the possession of mankind. In a certain sense, one has to anticipate something that is supposed to occur in the future. What is to happen in the future must be received into one's will. Therefore, one is obliged to give spiritual-scientific descriptions in such a way that even the words point like gestures to the essential reality lying behind them. Since our ideal today concerning the reconstruction of the social order will have to be born out of spiritual science, as I explained yesterday, it is necessary that, particularly in matters of social reconstruction, we speak from the above-mentioned viewpoint. This is precisely what people did not at all wish to comprehend, for instance, in my book, Towards Social Renewal. They absolutely wanted matters presented to them in the old style, matters that cannot be described in the old style since they are part of the future. And basically, what one is being faced with here can best be made evident by the fact that almost all the questions that, up to now, have been connected by one side or another to the expositions in Towards Social Renewal always proceed totally out of the old manner of thinking. No attempt is made to find one's way into the transformed new way of thinking.

Thus we may say that, particularly in the descriptions of social relationships of the future, it must become evident that we have to develop an emancipated soul life that no longer clings merely to words. One who follows my descriptions in the various fields of spiritual science, including the recent ones into the field of social life, will find that I am always at pains to describe a matter from many different sides. As a rule, I use two sentences instead of one, because the first sentence indicates the matter from one side, the other one from the other side. This is then supposed to call forth a desire in the listener or reader to approach the matter by transcending the words and sentences, as it were. This is what must be mentioned in reference to human soul life as far as the transformation of the meaning of human language is concerned. This is an important matter. It is important for the reason that the greatest part of what occurs today in regard to confusion of one's manner of thinking and conceptions comes about for no other reason than the fact that the objective laws and impulses of human evolution already demand that we free ourselves from language. Because of their easy-going habits of thinking, however, human beings do not wish to give up clinging to language. When such a phenomenon is clearly understood, it leads to a deeper insight into the whole course of human development. Indeed, from this transformation of our language or languages, we can actually build a bridge to profound spiritual facts. Naturally, this is more the case in one language than in another. But this is then a matter of the specific treatment of a language, of the meaning of words in a language in the individualized differentiated regions of human civilization, as I have pointed out.

We now live in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of human civilization and are approaching the sixth condition of development. These evolutionary conditions are not of such a nature that a clear line could be drawn between one and the other epochs; instead, one epoch, bearing its own peculiarities, passes over into the next; and long before it arises, the future one casts its shadows—one could also say its lights—into the present. One must take hold of these lights if one wishes to participate in the evolution of humanity with one's soul.

Let us try and connect what might be termed the “suprahistorical” fact, namely, that we are supposed to work our way towards the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, with another fact known to all of us. It is this: With his spirit-soul entity, the human being descends out of a spiritual world to earthly incarnation through birth or conception. On earth, he then experiences the life between birth and death; then, he passes through the gate of death, and in so doing bears his soul-spiritual being once again into that environment of life which is definitely of a spiritual and soul nature.

Now we must clearly understand—and the significance of this for the art of education, for example, has also been outlined here recently—that we bring down from the spiritual world, at least in the form of effects, what we have experienced in this spiritual world. When we move in ordinary life from one locality to another, we take with us not only our clothes but also our soul-spiritual belongings. In like manner, one brings along into this world through conception and birth the consequences and effects of what has been undergone in the spiritual world. In the period that mankind has presently lived through, concerning which we know that it began around the middle of the fifteenth century A.D., man, through his spirit-soul entity, brought along forces of the soul life devoid of images, forces containing no pictures. It is for this reason that, above all, the intellectual life has arisen and has flourished. During this period, prior to descending through conception and birth into physical existence, the human being was endowed in a sense with something lacking in capacities, lacking in images. This explains the slight inclination mankind had for developing original creations of fantasy since the middle of the fifteenth century. Human fantasy is, in truth, only a terrestrial reflection of super-earthly imagination. The Renaissance does not contradict this, for lust the fact that one had to resort to a “renaissance,” not a “naissance,” clearly shows that original forces of imagination were not present, only a fantasy that required fructification from earlier periods. In short, the fact is that the human soul was permeated in a certain sense with forces that are devoid of images.

Now begins the age—and in many respects, this is the real reason for the stormy character of our times—in which the souls who descend through conception and birth into earthly life bring along for themselves images from the spiritual world. When pictures are brought along out of spiritual existence into physical life, and if salvation is to arise for the human being and his social life, they must under all circumstances be united with the astral body, whereas the element lacking images only unites with the ego. It is predominantly the unfolding of the ego which has blossomed in humanity since the fifteenth century.

Now, however, the time is beginning when man has to feel: Within me there live pictures from my prenatal existence; during my earthly life, I have to make them come alive. I cannot accomplish this merely with my ego; I must work deeper into myself, and this must reach as far as my astral body.

Now, it is generally true that humanity resists the images indwelling in the astral body, images experienced prior to conception. In a way, human beings repel what is supposed to find its way out of the depths of their being into the astral body. The dry, prosaic attitude of the present time is one of its fundamental characteristics, and there are many broadly based movements that oppose an education whose concern it would be that the forces arising from the soul and trying to make themselves felt in the astral body will actually assert themselves. There are insipid, dry people who would really like to exclude any education by means of fairy tales, legends and anything illuminated by imagination. In our Waldorf School system, we have made it our priority that the lessons and instruction of the children entering primary education will proceed from pictorial descriptions, from the life-filled presentation of images, from elements taken from legends and fairy tales. Even what the children are initially supposed to learn about the nature and processes of the animal kingdom, the plant and the mineral kingdoms, is not supposed to be expressed in a dry, matter-of-fact manner; it is supposed to be clothed in imaginative, legendary, fairy tale-like elements. For what is seated deep within the child's soul are the imaginations that have been received in the spiritual world. They seek to come to the surface. The teacher or the educator adopts the right attitude towards the child if he confronts the child with pictures. By placing images before the child's soul, there flash up from its soul those images, or, strictly speaking, those forces of pictorialized representation which have been received before birth or, let us say, prior to conception.

If these forces are suppressed, if the dry, prosaic person guides the education of the child today, he confronts the child from earliest childhood with something that is actually not at all related to the child, namely, the letters of the alphabet. For our present letters have nothing to do anymore with the letters of earlier pictorial scripts. They are really something that is alien to the child; a letter should first be drawn out of a picture, as we try to do it in the Waldorf School. The child is confronted today with something devoid of a pictorial element; the young person, on the other hand, possesses forces in his body—naturally, I am referring to the soul when I am now speaking of “body,” for after all, we also speak of the “astral body”—forces seated in his body that will burst out elsewhere if they are not brought to the surface in pictorial representation. What will be the result of modern mistaken education? These forces do not become lost; they spread out, gain existential ground, and invade the thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will after all. And what kind of people will come into being from that? They will be rebels, revolutionaries, dissatisfied people; people who do not know what they want, because they want something that one cannot know. This is because they want something that is incompatible with any possible social order; something that they only picture to themselves, that should have entered their fantasy but did not; instead, it entered into their agitated social activities.

Therefore, we can say that people who, in an occult sense, do not have honest intentions in regard to their fellowmen, do not have the courage to admit to themselves: “If the world is in a state of revolt today, it is really heaven that is revolting.” It means the heaven that is held back in the souls of men, which then comes to the fore, not in its own form, but in its opposite—in strife and bloodshed instead of imaginations. No wonder that the individuals who destroy the social fabric actually have the feeling that they are doing good. For what do they sense in themselves? They feel heaven within themselves; only it assumes the form of a caricature in their soul.

This is how serious the truths are that we must comprehend today! To acknowledge the truths that matter today should be no child's play; such acknowledgment should be pervaded by the greatest earnestness. In general, it is no light task today to describe such things, for, in the first place, people do not care for them; secondly, they cling to words. Indeed, one who states that heaven is revolting in human souls is naturally taken literally by his words; people do not notice how he is trying to show that additional facts must be known, whereby the word “heaven” is related to something more than they are in the habit of connecting with the term. This is the same as not thinking of a miller who grinds corn when a “Mr. Miller” announces himself. The emancipation from language is definitely required in individual concrete cases if, in the sense that the laws of human evolution demand it, we wish truly to make progress.

Here, we see how something that comes from the life before birth pushes into the social life. One who is familiar with these relationships knows that he has to recognize something that is actually heavenly in what appears on earth in a caricature. This is in regard to the social questions, but there is something else in addition.

During the age of intellectualism, which has developed predominantly since the middle of the fifteenth century, human beings have obtained very little from their life of sleep in the form of imaginations for their waking life. Even those who have somewhat more lively dreams tend to interpret them quite rationally and intellectually. In this direction, theosophists, for example, are rational and intellectual. I could not begin to describe in a small volume, only in a big one, how many people have come to me in the course of time and wished to have rational explanations for their dreams! What is important here is that even those imaginations that express themselves in dreams point to a deeper spiritual life. I have often said that the outward appearance of the dream does not matter at all; that has already emancipated itself from the actual content. The content which we receive and then interpret in words of a language, from which, in turn, we actually have to emancipate ourselves as well, is not the true course of the dream; it really has very little to do with the true course of the dream. The dream's content is represented in its dramatic sequence, in the way one image follows another, the way complications arise and are resolved; one can experience the same spiritual content in a number of different ways as a dream. One person comes and describes how he climbed a mountain; he ascended quite easily up to a certain point, then, he suddenly stood before an abyss and could not proceed. Another person relates that he was walking along a path; everything around him filled him with joy. Suddenly, when he reached a certain point in the road, a man with a #8224 came up 'to him and killed him. Here we have two completely different dream images. Yet the process concealed behind them may be exactly the same. It can express itself in one instance in the climb up the mountain and the feeling of confronting an abyss; in another instance, it can be expressed in a cheerful walk down a path until one confronts a person who intends to kill one. The content of the images is not important; it is the dramatic sequence of experiencing something that offers resistance. It is the dynamics behind the images that matters. The course taken by the forces can envelop itself in any number of images, indeed in hundreds of pictures!

We can only understand the spiritual world when we know that what appears in the physical world in the form of dreams, or what clothes itself in images from the spiritual world in such a manner that it resembles the physical world, is only an image. As long as one has the inclination, however, to interpret the images in a rationalistic, purely intellectual way, so long does one also occupy an intellectual standpoint in regard to the dream life of sleep. What matters here is that we understand this dream life of sleep as the expression of a deeper spiritual life. Then only do we comprehend it imaginatively; then we grasp the pictures as something that stands in place of the content.

Then we shall not turn against something that is beginning for the human being today, namely, making inner soul demands out of sleep in a manner similar to the demands made by the imaginations prior to birth or conception. For today we are beginning to sleep differently from the way sleep was experienced in the regular life of the intellectual age since the middle of the fifteenth century. Man brought along into the waking state little inclination for faculties that wish to experience, rather than interpret, the images.

We have now reached the point in human evolution where, out of sleep as well, we draw imaginations that seek to indwell not only our ego, where rationality reigns supreme, but also our astral body. If we work against this, we once more reject something that is trying to rise into consciousness out of the depths of the human soul; we also work against the whole course of mankind's evolution, and what matters here is that we do not oppose humanity's development but work in harmony with it. We do this in the first place by permeating our culture once again with as many elements as possible connected in some way with the spiritual world. Naturally, in regard to external life, it is important for us to imbue ourselves with what is grasped from the spiritual world; hence, that we also imbue ourselves with a true spiritual insight, to fill ourselves with something that in this physical world cannot be comprehended in terms of the physical world. The whole past epoch of human life was actually opposed to this. Consider a case that I have already mentioned a number of times.

It is true that Christianity confronts human beings in such a way that they can only grasp its essence, especially the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha, if they come round to a comprehension of something super-sensible. For one must envisage that Christ, a being Who formerly had not been connected with earth evolution, united with the human being, Jesus of Nazareth, and that super-sensible events took place. One must conceive of the fact that in regard to the event of Golgotha, even birth and conception differed from the way they take place in ordinary human circumstances. In short, the demand is made by Christology to understand the Mystery of Golgotha in a super-sensible sense.

There is an interesting passage in a book written by a modern naturalist⁹⁴ where fulminations are uttered against the Immaculate Conception, where it is said that it is an impertinent insult to human reason to claim that an immaculate conception can occur.

Well, a modern rationalist, a purely intellectual person, can't help feeling this way. In a certain sense, what is intended out of the spiritual life is indeed an impertinent mockery of human reason. But the point is that we now live in an age where we must gradually begin to bring into waking life what has been spiritually experienced between falling asleep and waking in such a manner that our astral body can be impregnated and permeated with a pictorial element—not merely our ego, which is the seat of rationality, of intellectualism.

It is interesting that even the theology of the nineteenth century developed in such a way that it opposed Christology with rationalism, with pure intellectualism. Increasingly, modern theology felt called upon altogether to deny Christ as such, and to describe the humble man from Nazareth, the mere Jesus, as a human personality somewhat more outstanding than other human beings. One did not wish to make the effort to comprehend something super-sensible. What is to confront the human being supersensibly, what is to awaken him to the super-sensible realm, this one tried to grasp with concepts gained here in the sensory world.

A Protestant theologian,⁹⁵ with whom I once discussed this matter, told me after we had talked about it for some time, “Yes, we modern theologians should really not call ourselves Christians any longer, for we no longer have Christ. If the name ‘Jesuit’ had not been appropriated already, we should really claim it for ourselves.” This is not something that I am saying; it is something that a Protestant theologian of the modern school said to me as a confession of his own soul.

One who has insight into the whole character of our time, however, will understand that we must advance to a comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. Just because it is the central manifestation of our human evolution, it will tear us away from the earthly manner of thinking, and will draw us with might and mean to understand something that is incomprehensible based an the earthly sense domain. Whoever wishes in everything to remain caught in the earthly sensory sphere would say, “The Immaculate Conception is an impertinent insult against human reason.”

One who understands the task of present-day man will say: I must accustom myself to such ideas. In that case, I must emancipate myself from the customary use of words today. When somebody by the name of Smith or Miller announces himself, I must not assume that he is coming with a hammer in hand or overalls powdered with flour. I must expect something quite different from what I might deduce from the words. Thus, I have to become used to emancipating myself from what was ingrained into the words by the merely physical life of the senses.

Today, the Mystery of Golgotha is in fact the first test for us to see whether we are willing to go along with the comprehension of something that extends beyond the physical-sensory sphere. We, therefore, can no longer content ourselves with a merely traditional, historical description of Christianity, we need instead a creative understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Out of spiritual science, we need inner strength of soul which, in a new way, approaches the Mystery of Golgotha and is in a position to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha as a supersensory fact. Then, having positioned the Mystery of Golgotha into the central point of human thinking and feeling, we must make a new beginning especially in regard to education, and prepare the child in such a way that it does not suppress, does not have to suppress, the imaginations that seek to arise from the depths of the soul. We must meet the imaginations halfway by making pictures of our conceptions.

This is the deeper reason why, in the last issue of Soziale Zukunft (Social Future),⁹⁶ which is a magazine dealing with education, I described education and instruction as an art in the most eminent sense. In the field of pedagogy, teachers and educators must actually proceed in the way an artist does—indeed, they must proceed in a style surpassing that of an artist. It does not do to impose abstract principles in an abstract pedagogical sense. What matters is that one penetrates the being of man, and, through this comprehension of man's nature, arrives at the point of reading from the inner human being what one has to do in each case. An artist who is creating something cannot go by abstract rules. The purpose of aesthetics is not that of establishing rules for the artists. An artist cannot even go by what he has created yesterday when he creates something today. At every moment he must endeavor to be creative and original. This is how the teacher must be, in a still higher sense. One must not say based an a certain attitude of mind: "Well, if we are looking for teachers like that, we have to wait another three to four hundred years." The only reason that we do not have such teachers as yet is because we say things like this. We can have them the very moment that we have the strong power of faith in it; but it is the strong, not the passive, power of faith that is needed here. Therefore, what is important here is that when we return from sleep, upon awakening, we truly experience in the astral body and imprint into the etheric body what the astral body experiences from the moment of falling asleep until waking up. It can only take place through pictorializing the whole cultural life.

This pictorialization of the whole life of culture, this pictorialization that is demanded by the laws of humanity's evolution, will come into being when the whole spiritual life is left to the decision of those who participate in the spiritual life; when no instructions, no school regulations are laid down by a government which by its very nature stands outside the spiritual life. It is important here that the state does not hand down pedagogical regulations, school curriculums, and such like in an abstract manner. What matters is that one has human beings in an emancipated spiritual life who act out of their own free personality, and that one accomplishes with them what one can or wishes to accomplish with them.

The fact that the human being is presently beginning to bring along through conception and birth something that differs from what he brought with him since the middle of the fifteenth century, and the fact that he also brings something different with him out of sleep, both these facts demand that careful attention be given such matters, and that one really permeates oneself with the knowledge of such decisive facts. But from where can this knowledge be gained, if not from spiritual science? The external culture, today's science, certainly does not deal in any way with these matters. It ignores them; indeed, its present methods compel it to do so. I feel obliged to say that the present situation becomes most poignant when one observes the frequent and strange discrepancy between the inner requirements of humanity's evolution and the way in which people meet them. In recent times, the need has arisen to reckon with what flows into the human being from the spiritual world. Those who were intellectual, who did not reckon with what flows out of the spiritual world, made hypotheses about atoms, molecules, and the like. It was thought that bodies possessing volume point back to an atomistic formation, and so on. Out of the root causes of mankind's evolution, the need arose to grasp spiritual facts. And this instinct to grasp the spiritual expressed itself also in something, for example, like the Theosophical Society. One of its heroes is a certain Mr. Leadbeater who wrote an occult chemistry. What did he do in this book? He did something quite horrible, for he pictures the spiritual world in an atomistic sense; meaning, the materialistic manner of thinking is carried into the spiritual world.

I have recently mentioned this whole grotesque thing. Something very clever came about in the Theosophical Society. Someone wished to prove that here is one life; there is the next one (see drawing below). Now, it is so, isn't it, that something has to pass from the preceding life to the later one. One sees the body fall into decay. A proper materialist says that the body disintegrates and it is all over with man. A theosophist, however, wants another earth life to come; so, something must pass from one life to the other! The proper materialist says that all atoms unite with the earth. The theosophist also does not think in any other way than materialistically, but at the same time he tries to think “theosophically.” He wants something to pass from the first to the next life. So he says: “Of course, the atoms become one with the earth; one atom, however, remains and it passes through the whole period of existence between death and a new birth. There it appears again. This is the permanent atom.” One atom! Oh, the theosophists were especially proud then, when they discovered this “permanent” atom! They had no inkling that in this way they were carrying materialism into the spiritual world conception! Materialism induced them to believe that something—they never said what it was—of the many atoms that sink down into the ground is saved; and this fortunate, saved, permanent atom then reappears in the next incarnation. Much has been written about this permanent atom. It is nothing more than an example of the fact that something was borne into spiritual science that people could not rise above, namely, materialism. It permeates, by the way, the whole description of man, in the way it is frequently presented in the literature of the Theosophical Society. As I have often pointed out, they present the physical body as dense, the etheric body as thinner, the astral body as still thinner. Then come degrees of thinness, where even thinking and conceptions become quite thin. Yet, one is still dealing with something substantial, like mist; hence, although Buddhi and Atma are mists, they are still tangible as mists. One does not have the will power truly to discard materialism even in one's conceptual life; to pass from concepts of matter to concepts of the spirit.

All these things prove how closely human beings are tied to the old ways of thinking. Out of such considerations, anybody who honestly wishes to acknowledge spiritual science should take up the inner challenge to test himself as to how far he has freed himself from the old materialistic concepts; or, when he turns to something spiritual, to what extent he imagines this spiritual manner in materialistic pictures, not being aware of the fact that they are just pictures.

It is always a matter of being conscious of this. For if, say, I were to draw a picture of one of you on the blackboard, the picture could mean a lot to me, if the person in question were no longer present. But if I were then to imagine that the person in the picture would shake my hand, or would speak to me, in other words, that he would be the actual person, then I would be suffering from illusions! Therefore, one may naturally sensualize the spiritual in pictures, but one must always be aware of the fact that they are nothing but pictures.

In the case of words, too, people must realize more and more clearly that language is on the way to turning the word into a gesture, and that we should go no further than to allow the word to indicate something to us that no longer is contained in the word. All words will have to take the same direction that proper names have taken.

For philosophers, I have something even better to say. Philosophers of recent times have set up any number of theories. When I say, “The child is small,” they have a concept of “small;” they have a concept of “child.” The “is,” however, the copula of the two—what does it mean? Oh, much has been written about this copula even in the philosophical sense, not just from the grammatical or philological standpoint. Everything that has been written about it suffers from the fact that this verb, “is,” no longer has the meaning of which people speak. It has already emancipated itself from its meaning and the soul content has become a different one. Thus, people in fact philosophize about something that no longer lives in the soul in an alive sense.

This is just an incidental philosophical remark which perhaps doesn't have much significance, but it is supposed to draw your attention to the fact that something that is not noticed by the outer world is by no means noticed immediately by the philosophers. Nevertheless, it is often true that the philosophers are the last to notice the things that really occur in the world, and many of our philosophical systems lag considerably behind what exists outside of themselves!

By proceeding principally from the example of language, however, I have tried to show you quite concretely how present-day human development presents itself. What actually takes place in regard to human development can really only be seen by looking at super-sensible facts. Anthropology can no longer discover what actually takes place, only anthroposophy. This is the reason why anthroposophical cultural thinking must lie at the foundation of everything that constitutes work for the progress of mankind.

• 94 . Ernest Haeckel: Anthropogenie oder Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen, Leipzig, 1891, p. 871.
• 95 . Max Christlieb: 1862–1916.
• 96 . In “Soziale Zukunft,” #5–7, Dornach, 1920.

It is only of recent times that the truths of occultism have been the subject of public lectures. Formerly, these truths were only revealed in secret societies, to those who had passed through certain degrees of initiation and had sworn to obey the laws of the Order through the whole of their life. Today, man is entering upon a very critical period. Occult truths are beginning to be disclosed to the public. In a matter of twenty years or so, a certain number of them will already be common knowledge. Why is this? The reason is that humanity is entering upon a new phase which it is the object of this lecture to explain.

In the Middle Ages, occult truths were known in the Rosicrucian Movement. But whenever they leaked out, they were either misunderstood or distorted. In the eighteenth century they entered upon a phase of much dilletantism and charlatanry and at the beginning of the nineteenth century they were put entirely in the background by the physical sciences. It is only in our day that they are beginning to re-emerge and in the coming centuries they will play an important part in the development of mankind. In order to understand this, we must glance at the centuries preceding the advent of Christianity and follow the progress that has been made.

It does not require any very profound knowledge to realise the difference between a man of pre-Christian times and a man of today. Although his scientific knowledge was far less, man of olden times had deeper feelings and intuitions. He lived more in the world beyond—which he also perceived—than in the world of sense. There were some who entered into direct and actual communication with the astral and spiritual world. In the Middle Ages, when earthly existence was by no means comfortable, man still lived with his head in the heavens. True, the mediaeval cities were somewhat primitive, but they were a far truer representation of man's inner world than the cities of today. Not only the cathedrals but the houses and porches with their symbols reminded men of their faith, their inner feelings, their aspirations, and the home of their soul. Today, we have knowledge of many, many things and the relations among human beings have multiplied ad infinitum. But we live in cities that are like deafening factories in awful Babels, with nothing to remind us of our inner world. Our communion with this inner world is not through contemplation but through books. We have passed from intuition into intellectualism.

To find the origin of the stream of intellectualism we must go back further than the Middle Ages. The epoch of the birth of human intellect, the period when this transformation took place, lies about a thousand years before the Christian era. It is the epoch of Thales, Pythagoras, Buddha. Then for the first time arose philosophy and science, that is to say truth presented to the reason in the form of logic. Before this age, truth presented itself in the form of religion, of revelation received by the teachers and accepted by the masses. In our times, truth passes into the individual intelligence and would fain be proved by argument, would like to have its own wings clipped.

What has happened in the inner nature of man to justify this transition of his consciousness from one plane to another, from the plane of intuition to that of logic? Here we touch upon one of the fundamental laws of history—a law no longer recognised by contemporary thought. It is this: Humanity evolves in a way which enables the different elements and principles of man's being to unfold and develop in successive stages. What are these principles?

To begin with, man has a physical body in common with the mineral kingdom. The whole mineral world is found again in the chemistry of the body. He has an etheric body, which is, properly speaking, the vital principle within him. He has this etheric body in common with the plants. This principle engenders the process of nutrition and the forces of growth and re-production. Man has also an astral body in which feelings and sentiments, the power of enjoyment and of suffering are enkindled. He has the astral body in common with the animals.

Finally, there is a principle in man which cannot be spoken of as a body. It is his innermost essence, distinguishing him from all other entities, mineral, plant and animal. It is the self, the soul, the divine spark. The Hindus spoke of it as Manas; The Rosicrucians as the ‘Inexpressible.’ A body, in effect, is only part and parcel of another body, but the self, the ‘I’ of man exists in and by itself alone—“I am I.” This principle is addressed by others as ‘thou,’ or ‘you;’ it cannot be confused with anything else in the universe. By virtue of this inexpressible, incommunicable self, man rises above all created things of the Earth, above the animals, indeed above all creation. And only through this principle can he commune with the Infinite Self, with God. That is why, at certain definite times, the officiating hierophant in the ancient Hebrew sanctuaries said to the High Priest: Shem-Ham-Phores, which means: What is his name (the name of God)? He-Vo-He, or—in one word—Jev or Joph, meaning God, Nature, Man; or again, the inexpressible ‘I’ of man which is both human and divine.

These principles of man's being were laid down in remote ages of his vast evolutionary cycle—but they only unfold slowly, one by one.

The special mission of the period which began about a thousand years before the Christian era has been to develop the human Ego in the intellectual sense. But above the intellectual plane there is the plane of Spirit. It is the world of Spirit to which man will attain in the centuries to come, and to which he will be wending his way from now onwards. The germs of this future development have been cast into the world by the Christ and by true Christianity.

Before speaking of this world of Spirit, we must understand one of the forces by means of which humanity en masse passed from the astral to the intellectual plane. It was by virtue of a new kind of marriage. In olden times, marriages were made in the bosom of the same tribe or of the same clan—which was only an extension of the family. Sometimes, indeed, brothers and sisters married. Later on, men sought their wives outside the clan, the tribe, the civic community. The beloved became the stranger, the unknown. Love—which in days of yore had been merely a natural and social function—became personal desire, and marriage a matter of free choice. This is indicated in certain Greek myths like that of the rape of Helen and again in the Scandinavian and Germanic myths of Sigurd and Gudrun. Love becomes an adventure, woman a conquest from afar.

This change from patriarchial marriage to free marriage corresponds to the new development of man's intellectual faculties, of the Ego. There is a temporary eclipse of the astral faculties of vision and the power of reading directly in the astral and spiritual world—faculties which are included in ordinary speech under the name of inspiration.

Let us now turn to Christianity. The brotherhood of man and the cult of the One God are certainly features of it but they only represent the external, social aspect, not the inner, spiritual reality. The new, mysterious and transcendental element in Christianity is that it creates divine Love, the power which transforms man from within, the leaven by which the whole world is raised. Christ came to say: ”If you leave not mother, wife and your own body, you cannot be my disciple”

That does not imply the cessation of natural links. Love extends beyond the bounds of family to all human beings and is changed into vivifying, creative, transmuting power.

This Love was the fundamental principle of Rosicrucian thought but it was never understood by the outer world. It is destined to change the very essence of all religion, of all cults, of all science.

The progress of humanity is from unconscious spirituality (pre-Christian), through intellectualism (the present age), to conscious spirituality, where the astral and intellectual faculties unite once more and become dynamic through the power of the Spirit of Love, divine and human. In this sense, Theology will tend to become Theosophy.

What, in effect, is Theology? A knowledge of God imposed from without under the form of dogma, as a kind of supernatural logic. And what is Theosophy? A knowledge of God which blossoms like a flower in the depths of the individual soul. God, having vanished from the world, is reborn in the depths of the human heart.

In the Rosicrucian sense, Christianity is at once the highest development of individual freedom and universal religion. There is a community of free souls. The tyranny of dogma is replaced by the radiance of divine Wisdom, embracing intelligence, love and action.

The science which arises from this cannot be measured by its power of abstract reasoning but by its power to bring souls to flower and fruition. That is the difference between ‘Logia’ and ‘Sophia,’ between science and divine Wisdom, between Theology and Theosophy.

In this sense, Christ is the centre of the esoteric evolution of the West. Certain modern Theologians—above all in Germany—have tried to represent Christ as a simple, naive human being. This is a terrible error. The most sublime consciousness, the most profound Wisdom live in Him, as well as the most divine Love. Without such consciousness, how could He be a supreme manifestation in the life of our whole planetary evolution? What gave Him this power to rise so high above His own time? Whence came transcendental qualities?

Unfortunately, yesterday's lecture had to end on a note that did not sound very good, but from time to time we have to point out such things in our ranks. But what I had to say against my will at the end yesterday actually fits into the series of our reflections, because these reflections all basically aim to show how necessary a spiritual-scientific influence is for our culture. The day before yesterday I tried to show you what the background is for something like Oswald Spengler's reflection on the decline of Western culture. Yesterday I tried to show you how the shadows of older cultures reach into our time, how these shadows of older cultures turn against everything that must come from the spiritual science meant here, out of an understandable striving. Today I would like to add some principles to our considerations, so that in the next lectures we can follow the cultural development of the present more closely and in greater depth.

I have often emphasized how the actual effect of deepening one's spiritual knowledge should not be limited to certain truths established by spiritual science being absorbed by our soul, being preserved by our soul as content, as content about all kinds of life contexts that interest us as human beings. But that is not all that is intended for the human being as an effect of spiritual science in our time, as it is meant here. What should come from this spiritual science to the contemporary human being above all is that his whole way of conceiving, the configuration of thinking, feeling and willing, should undergo that transformation through this spiritual-scientific deepening that is demanded by the needs of the present, so that we not only enter into the decline of Western civilization, but so that we can carry out of this decline the seeds of an ascent. I have often mentioned that the limitation of thinking and feeling to the physical human organism, as materialism imagines it, is by no means a chimera. I have often emphasized that materialism is not just a false world view, but that materialism in the proper sense of the word is a view of time, or perhaps it is better said that it is a phenomenon of the time. It is not the case that one can simply say that it is untrue that human thinking, human feeling, and indeed the will of the soul, is bound to the physical organism, and that one must replace this view with another. This does not exhaust the full truth in this area; rather, the fact is that, as a result of what has been brought up in the civilization of the West over the last three to four centuries, the soul-spiritual life of the human being human being, thinking, feeling and willing, have in fact come into a close dependency on the physical organism, and that in a certain respect, today, a person is stating a correct view when they say: this dependency exists. For the task today is not to overcome a theoretical view, the task today is to overcome the fact that the human soul has become dependent on the body. The task today is not to refute materialism, but to do that work, that spiritual-soul work, which in turn frees the soul of man from the bonds of the material.

In order to see clearly in this field, to see that what I have just said does not appear as mere contradictions or paradoxical assertions, one can only gain a sufficient insight from spiritual science itself. Today I will have to pick out a special chapter from the life of more recent times, the present, to show you how that which is not just an opinion but a fact - the dependence of the spiritual and soul on the physical - how that affects social life. From this you will be able to see that there is more to overcome in our time than a mere theoretical view.

Perhaps I can make myself a little more understandable about what I have just said if I recall something that I have already mentioned here, but which can in a certain sense illustrate what I am saying today. I told you how I was thrown out as a teacher of the Workers' Educational School in Berlin because of the intrigues of the leaders of the Social Democracy, because what I had to teach in those days in the most diverse fields was not genuine Marxism and, above all, in the field of history, was not a materialist view of history. I had not advocated the view that the materialistic conception of history was absolutely false, but precisely the way in which I had to take a stand on the materialistic conception of history, on the view that all ethical, all scientific, all religious , all legal life was only a superstructure, a kind of smoke compared to what was the only reality in the material economic process, precisely the way I had to relate to this conception of history, that could not be understood. Of course, it could not be understood by those who had not even approached an inner penetration of the matter. The workers who listened to my lectures gradually understood the matter; but it was precisely through this understanding that the leaders found out about it at the time. What I taught was this: I said that it begins approximately in the middle of the 15th century, slowly at first, then more and more rapidly from the 16th century, that process in the history of the development of humanity, through which the intellectual, legal, and ethical productions of humanity are in full dependence on the production processes, on the way in which economic life proceeds. Little by little, everything intellectual and legal becomes dependent on economic life. Therefore, I said, the materialistic conception of history is relatively justified for the interpretation of the last three to four centuries of human history; but one arrives at an impossible conception of history if one goes back beyond the 15th century and wants to understand older times in the sense of the materialistic conception of history. And one is completely wrong if one regards this materialistic conception of history as something absolute and says: In the future, all ethical, all legal, all scientific life will be only a kind of smoke rising from economic life. — On the contrary, it is the task of the present to overcome what has developed as the dependence of spiritual life on the economic in the last three to four centuries. It is this that must be overcome as a fact, for which the materialistic conception of history is correct.

You see, if you really take a spiritual scientific approach, you are dealing with a different way of thinking, with the way of thinking that actually breaks more in the thought forms, in the whole structure of the world view with the traditional. And truly, for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, it is much more important to educate in the development of humanity this transformation, this metamorphosis in the structure of feeling, thinking and willing, than to pass on to people just any kind of content about different human bodies and the like. Of course, these contents do come to light; these results present themselves to our spiritual vision precisely through such a metamorphosis of the structure of thinking. But the essential thing is the different attitude towards the world; the essential thing is that we are able to change the whole constitution of our soul to a certain extent. Only when we realize this do we actually notice how, in the present thinking of the broadest circles of Western civilization, the remnants of traditional thinking, feeling and will are still very much active, and how these remnants have simply been carried over into the present from the most ancient times. There have only been a few individuals who, I might say, have developed a feeling or an inkling in the most diverse fields, out of the broad masses, for how rotten the very forms and structures of thought of the old are. They were mostly unable to penetrate to spiritual science, and so they got stuck in the negative.

An extremely interesting phenomenon in relation to this stuckness is Overbeck, the friend of Friedrich Nietzsche, who taught at the University of Basel during Nietzsche's time and who, in particular, wrote an interesting book about the current justification of Christianity. It is one of the most interesting phenomena in the field of modern literature that a Christian theology raises the question: Are we still Christians? This question has been raised not only by the materialistic theologian David Friedrich Strauss, but also by the theologian Overbeck, who taught at the theological faculty in Basel and was a friend of Nietzsche. And Overbeck actually comes to the conclusion that there is still a Christian theology, but no longer a Christianity.

But in particular, I must say that it was a strange coincidence for me that, after I had to give you these various examples of theological thinking yesterday, in which I had to show you that one has to complain about theology just as much when it becomes a friend as when it becomes an enemy. It was very significant to me that just these days in the supplement to the Basler Nachrichten, a posthumous production of Overbeck is discussed, and that a sentence is pointed out that this Christian theologian wrote down. A Christian theologian wrote down the sentence: The theologians are the simpletons in modern society; that is a public secret in this modern society.

So said the theologian Overbeck in Basel! It is not necessary to go out of the sphere if one wants to collect such a judgment. However, Overbeck was a thinker in addition to being a theologian, and being a theologian was more his destiny than his will. Perhaps it was also his weakness to remain a theologian. But that is not for me to investigate today. But it is remarkable that such a saying was not coined by a monist, but by a theologian: theologians are the simpletons in modern society, and it is a public secret in modern society that this is the case.

Now, the things that are only shadows of old worldviews, ways of life and so on are still present today. To be a Christian today, one needs a new grasp of the mystery of Golgotha, as I already explained to you yesterday. But to understand today's social demands, one needs a completely different structure of thinking and feeling than the one that extends from ancient times into the broad masses of contemporary humanity. And today I would like to give you an example of this. You can take two such different social thinkers as, say, Marx, who is the idol of social democracy, and Rodbertus, who is more, I would say, a support for those who seek a solution to the social question on a national level. In a certain respect, both Rodbertus and Marx are socialists; but they are actually antipodes. But in one important point they agree. They agree on a certain conception of the fundamental question, which is actually raised today by all those who are fundamentally more deeply concerned with the social question. The question is: What actually produces economic goods? What produces economic goods that circulate in economic life, goods that are useful for the economic consumption of man? Marx and Rodbertus both answered this question by saying that only physical labor produces economic goods. Thus everything productive in economic life can be traced back to physical labor. In other words, if we want to speak of the labor that produces any coherent series of economic goods, then, for example, in the case of a railroad, we have to start with the groundbreaking, but not with the work of the engineers, nor with the work of those who, based on some life circumstances, produce the idea that a railroad should be built in this or that area. Karl Marx, for example, says that only labor, physical labor, produces economic goods. If, he says, you hire an accountant in a community in India, that accountant's work is not something that produces real economic goods. Although the work of this accountant is necessary, it does not produce economic goods. Economic goods are produced solely by the physical labor of those who are directly involved in the physical production of goods. Everything else is excluded from being counted as a productive element in the production of economic goods. What, says Karl Marx, is the Indian accountant paid with? With a deduction that is made. You first have to deduct something from what everyone else who works physically should actually earn, and give it to him because he is necessary. You can't produce without him, but he doesn't produce any goods. So you have to take from those who produce goods what you have to give him. – And by pursuing this line of thought, Karl Marx finally comes to the conclusion that all intellectual work, all intellectual production, is not taken out of economic goods in such a way that it would participate in the production of these economic goods, but that it is subtracted from those who really produce economically.

And Karl Marx's antipode, Rodbertus, comes to exactly the same conclusion. Such views arise out of the thinking that has emerged in the course of the last three to four centuries as a shadow of older ways of thinking. For one can see how such views arise when one observes the way in which such theorists view labor and the relationship of labor to the production of economic goods, and the view of these theorists has now been adopted by the entire proletariat. What exists in the entire proletariat as a view of life is a direct result of such ideas, of which I will now give you some examples. People like Karl Marx ask: Why does the worker receive a wage? They answer this question by saying that the worker receives a wage for the work he has done, that the work he has done should be paid for, and they say: It must be paid for, because by producing goods, the worker gives up his own labor. I have often characterized this view as the one that represents the present proletariat: the worker gives up his labor power, his labor power is expended; it must be replaced. He is therefore given wages, that is, economic goods, because only the wage as a representative is used for this; he is given wages so that the physical labor power that has been used up in the production of economic goods can be replaced. This idea recurs again and again, and we find it in the most diverse variants.

What is the underlying view here? The underlying view is best seen by looking at a word that Karl Marx and his followers used again and again. They used the word: labor runs into the product. — To a certain extent — when the product is produced, labor has run into the product. Thus, the labor force or its result would also have been incorporated into the economic good, into the product. One says: intellectual power cannot be incorporated into the product, only physical power can be incorporated into the product. - So one has the idea that the labor force somehow passes from the person into the product, then it is out there, incorporated into the product; then one eats and then it is replaced.

Such a notion is deeply rooted in people from certain materialistic backgrounds of recent times, and if you fight against such a view, you even appear to be a person who tends towards the paradoxical, because these things have gradually become something that seems quite natural to today's people. And in Russia socialism is now being practiced only under the influence of such views that have grown out of the underground of materialism.

Now it is really so – it is extremely difficult to admit, but it really is so – that sometimes views become popular, are advocated everywhere as if they were self-evident, and they actually have no basis at all. This view, as if labor were simply transferred into the product, has no foundation whatsoever, for it cannot be said that what is expended during the work is replaced by the food. One need only seriously ask whether someone who does not work at all does not also have to eat if he wants to live. Surely the replacement of a “lost power”, which is what is at issue here, cannot depend on whether this power has gone into the work, because if it does not go into the work, it must also be replaced. There must be a major flaw in the reasoning, a major flaw in the reasoning that has simply become popular. You cannot believe how deeply we are stuck in wrong thinking habits today. We must awaken our soul to these wrong thinking habits. It is unacceptable that our soul continues to sleep to these wrong thinking habits.

I have already expressed this thought to you in a different form. Those for whom it is not a need, or who, let us say, have not been placed in such a situation through their life circumstances that they chop wood or do similar physical work, will sometimes live out their strength, let us say in sport. There they also apply their strength. And you will easily admit that under certain circumstances one can use the same amount of strength for chopping wood as for sports. You can get just as tired from sports as from chopping wood. You can get just as good a night's sleep after sports as after chopping wood. The same amount of work can be done in a purely formal way in one case and in the other. So it cannot be a matter of how much work one does and how much energy one expends in this working and performing, but it is obvious that it is something completely different, the way in which work is integrated into the whole social process. It is a matter of learning to see beyond the way in which human life force is expressed in work, in the production of goods. At most, it may be that the industrious person needs a little more to eat than the lazy one, although this also does not quite correspond to the eating habits of some people. But in any case, this strange way of thinking, as if in economic thinking one had to look at how the expended human labor power had to be replaced by what one receives in wages, this way of thinking is in any case completely unfounded. It simply cannot be thought of this way if you want to achieve any goal.

I wanted to draw attention to this from a different angle, to show how our whole life is dominated by wrong ideas, by habits of thought that may have been justified in earlier times, but that no longer have such justification today.

Another train of thought, which also often recurs in those who observe economic life and are more or less dependent on Karl Marx, is this: they say that when physical labor is performed and an economic good is created in the course of performing that physical labor, then that labor is consumed. If the good is to be there again, it must be produced by the same labor. When someone thinks up an idea, that idea is there. It remains there, it is not consumed. And perhaps countless work processes can be carried out on the basis of this idea. — So: physical labor applied to the production of goods is consumed in its product, intellectual labor is not consumed in its product, but the products remain — this seems terribly plausible when you express such an idea. But then the question arises: is there anything to be gained in a fruitful way in economic thinking from such an idea? It is always the case that those who pursue such an idea are unable to follow the whole process through which such an idea goes in becoming reality. Is there, one might ask, a single case in which an inventor produces an idea and, without any further intellectual work being done, this idea can be realized countless times? That is not the case. Rather, the following must be said: What is the actual connection between what is produced by the spiritual man and what are external, for example, economic goods? Just take a look at the production of economic goods. Can you imagine that economic goods are produced without spiritual guidance being at the root of it? You can actually prove that spiritual guidance comes to the fore in material work, in the production of material goods, right down to the very core. You just have to go back far enough. I have often given you the example: we look at the Gotthard tunnel or the Suez Canal or something like that; such things cannot be done today without differential or integral calculus. All physical labor is in vain if these things are not taken as a basis. These things, however, differential and integral calculus, were once developed in the lonely study of Leibniz or – we do not need to get involved in a national priority dispute today – in the lonely study of Newton, but in any case these ideas originated with thinkers, in intellectual production. In all that is basically there in the Gotthard Tunnel, in the Suez Canal and in similar works, which in turn underlie the production of economic goods, in all this only the results of what was once a spiritual germ are present. And none of the physical labor could have been there if the spiritual germ had not been present. Look at anything that is produced, you will have to say to yourself everywhere: physical labor cannot even begin if spiritual labor has not gone before it; and if it does begin and the spiritual labor stops, it will not get very far either. Yes, one could prove just as rigorously as Karl Marx and Rodbertus thought they proved that economic goods arise from physical labor alone, that only mental labor produces economic goods, that physical labor is altogether entirely the result of mental labor. These things are entirely relative to each other. And the same rigor of reasoning that the Marxists can apply to the idea that only physical labor produces economic goods, the same rigor of reasoning could be found in the idea that only intellectual power produces economic goods.

What follows from this? I say explicitly: the same rigor of reasoning can apply in the one case as in the other; that is, the following can occur in one case or in the other. Karl Marx advocated the one. Someone might come along who proves just as rigorously that only intellectual labor produces economic goods. It is only due to the materialistic conditions of modern times that no such Marx has emerged for spiritual conditions as Marx emerged for material conditions. But both, if they had emerged, could have won followers. Karl Marx won enough followers; the other could have won followers too. The arguments of both could point to the same strict line of reasoning that you find today when people, of course always in good faith, discuss these or those reform issues in modern gatherings. There, everything is usually proved very strictly, because people are very clever today. Or when the people at the lecterns prove this or that, everything is strictly proved. But one can prove the opposite just as strictly. One just does not want to believe that logical proof is not something that can sustain life, but that a sense of reality and a connection with reality must be added to the logical proof or to that which is only gained from the logical proof. Only out of life can life be sustained, not out of intellectualistically oriented proofs. It is only due to the fact that the instincts of people in the last three to four centuries have been materialistically oriented that the presentation of evidence on the materialistic side has become so strict as in Marxism. As a rule, one does not get along with refutations, because the point of proof is not that one proves something, but that the other accepts the proof. But the acceptance of the proof does not rest on the logic of the proof, but — as people are when they do not penetrate into spiritual science — it rests on certain instincts, on habits, especially on habits of thinking. And so it must be said that life today is confused for us by the fact that souls do not want to awaken from their sleep to the impulses of reality, that souls, above all, do not want to penetrate to the point of saying to themselves: It is important to find the right point of view, not to look at the world from any point of view.

Today it is a matter of gaining a point of view that no longer gives rise to prejudice in the sense that one considers a one-sided line of argument to be correct, but rather one that allows one to see life so universally that one can truly weigh the weight of the one side's reasons as well as the weight of the reasons on the other side. Today we must recognize how much weight the arguments on one side, the materialistic side, carry, and how much weight the arguments on the spiritual side carry. This means that it has never been as necessary as it is today for people not to be fanatical. But fanaticism, which is virtually a modern phenomenon, can only be overcome if man opens within himself the source that leads him to a real insight into the spiritual connections of the world. That is why the fertilization of our Western civilization with the results of spiritual science is so eminently necessary. It can therefore be said, in a rigorous argument, if one wants — it always depends on whether one wants — that spiritual labor can be seen in the product. One can also say that physical labor can be seen in the product. But what are we really dealing with? In reality, we are dealing with the fact that certain processes in the external world are performed by human beings in a certain way. Let us suppose that I pick an apple from the tree. This is something that also has something to do as an addend in the sum of economic interrelations. We have to see what elements make up reality. When I pick an apple from the tree, I bring about a change in the external world, a metamorphosis: first the apple is up in the tree, then it may be lying in my basket. I have brought about this change. Certainly, a process has taken place in me, in the course of which physical strength has also been expended, which has been replaced again. But if I had taken a few steps on my walk at the same time as I would have picked the apple, I would have expended the same amount of strength. It is not a question of what happens inside me, and in an economic context it cannot be about anything that relates to the human organism. It cannot be a matter of raising the question: What does a person get in return for the physical strength expended? Rather, it can only be a matter of What is the inner significance of the metamorphosis that basically takes place entirely outside of the human being, which he only directs, which he only guides, that metamorphosis, that the apple is first at the top of the tree and then in his basket? Imagine you were to draw the whole process, or paint it. You paint the tree, then the human being next to it. You now paint how the person reaches out his hand, sets up a ladder and reaches out his hand, picks the apple, and then paint how he puts it in the basket. Now, just for the fun of it, let's say you erase everything that your painting was of the human being, and just look at what is happening objectively outside of the human being: the apple is up, moving down, is in the basket; you have completely eliminated the human being. But you have strictly focused on the process that is considered economically in life. That is what is at stake when the economic aspect is considered. And every time the purely economic consideration is based on false premises, when the consumption of vitality or physical strength and the like is included in the economic consideration, as Lassalle, as Marx, as almost all other academic economists do.

What matters, then, is that we can eliminate the human being where economic interrelationships are concerned. We must then be able to consider this eliminated human being in his or her own right. This is where we come to other contexts, to contexts that are based on a different foundation. When we say, “Yes, but people have to work, otherwise the apples won't fall from the trees into the baskets!” — when we say this, we realize: Now we cannot erase the human being! But above all, we cannot erase his soul if he is to remain human. If man is to remain human, then the impulse to work must come from within himself. He cannot remain human if a machine is devised by which he is driven through some technical process to the ladder, where his arm is raised, his fingers bent, and so on, or if the state were to introduce compulsory labor; both basically come down to the same thing. The point is that the impulse must lie within the human being. It will not lie within the human being unless it is ignited by the relationship, by the interaction between human beings.

As you can see, when we move on to the impulse to work, our considerations also enter a completely different realm from the economic realm. When it comes to the impulse for work, you cannot look away from the human being, but you also cannot look away from the innermost part of the human being. If you follow this matter in a realistic way, you will find that the one thing I mentioned, the economic process, is so radically different from what actually leads to work, what the impulse for work is, that this difference must be rooted in social reality itself.

Now there are many ways of thinking in order to arrive at the threefold social organism. But one should follow many paths of thought, because people today need a strong impulse; they are so sleepy when it comes to thinking! Above all, you will find that this tangle of ideas, which seeks to weld together everything that is economic, legal, and state-related with everything that is spiritual, has sprung entirely from materialism, which, however, at the same time, by arising as a world view, also binds the soul to bodily processes, but in doing so, also makes this soul passive, deadens this soul in its activity. We have not merely become materialistic, theoretically materialistic; we have become material. Therefore man cannot extricate himself from the catastrophe in which he finds himself today by a mere change of his way of thinking, but he can extricate himself only by a stimulation of his will. For the will is that which is the first soul-life to be independent of the body, and not entirely so, if it is ever harnessed to an end, can be harnessed to the body. For every time I perform an external act, I am given direct, vivid proof that the will is independent of the material body. For the will is active in taking the apple down from the tree and putting it into the basket. I can exclude from the purely economic process what a person eats; but I cannot exclude the will of human beings.

Today, I just wanted to give you another example of a train of thought by which you can find the deep justification of these ideas of threefolding. First, I showed you how completely different the impulse of work is from everything else that is included in economic life. You know, of course, that in the threefold organism it should be in the field of the state and the law. But if you follow the lines of thought stimulated today in other directions, for example, the way in which ideas become confused with regard to the share of physical and mental labor in the production of the product — if you think as people have learned to think during the last three to four centuries, then you will also see how this tangle of thoughts, which has arisen, also has a confusing effect when one wants to separate the spiritual life purely from the legal and economic life. For there is no necessity for work if one has the view that man simply uses physical strength in his work, which must be replaced by wages. We have seen that there is no such necessity for work. How does one come to entertain such a train of thought? How does one come to formulate this idea at all? One comes from materialistic backgrounds. One cannot free one's thinking from matter. One cannot find anything that originates in man and is independent of his body. Thus one is chained to the body with one's ideas. Political economy is chained to the body in a materialistic way. Because it cannot see the purely spiritual connections in the external world in economic life, it is diverted to the purely material process of consuming physical energy and replacing it: giving off energy, absorbing energy, giving off energy, absorbing energy, and so on! People want to operate entirely in the material world and therefore cannot arrive at anything other than, so to speak, the incorporation of the human being as a machine into the economic organism.

It is already the case today that we are not stuck in disaster because of the institutions, but that we are stuck in disaster because of the deepest thinking and feeling and the will impulses of people, and that it is eminently necessary to get away from the prejudice that a social upturn can somehow happen through mere institutions. It is urgently necessary to recognize that a social upturn can only come about through a transformation in the direction of people's thinking and feeling, through the eradication of old habits of thought that threaten to drag us deeper and deeper into decline. We must get used to following with a certain deepest interest what is alive in the thoughts of contemporary humanity. It will be found that it is of no use to continue these thoughts in any particular direction, but that it is essential to leave these lines of thought in the most important areas today and to take up new lines of thought. But these can only emerge from the deepest foundations of human nature itself. And they can only enter into human culture if impulses that are original and elementary are really taken into account and accepted by people. But today such impulses can only be found in the spiritual realm of anthroposophical science. We need a new understanding of humanity, because the old understanding of humanity has led to error even in such a field as that which I have characterized for you today. The old view has already gone so far as to regard the human being as a machine and to fail to recognize the absurdity of the idea that consuming human physical strength and replacing it with wages as an equivalent is an economic category. All this is based on the fact that within today's way of thinking, one cannot know human beings at all and that one needs to gain knowledge of human nature in the deepest sense of the word. However, this will only be possible if our whole way of thinking is oriented towards anthroposophy.

Do not think that I wish to take the floor this evening for the purpose of speaking of an understanding between the various classes of the present population, in the same way that the ruling classes, the hitherto ruling classes in particular, so often speak of reconciliation and understanding. I would like to speak to you this evening about a quite different kind of understanding, about the understanding that is being challenged by the social facts that are speaking loudly today and by the great historical forces that are currently entering the course of human development. I would like to speak of what seems to me to be demanded of the proletarian movement in particular, of these historical forces that are today, one might say, revolutionizing the world.

To speak of a different understanding is forbidden by almost the whole of modern life, the life that certain people call modern civilization. What voices have we heard within this modern civilization over the last few decades! Let us remember how the hitherto ruling classes have perceived this modern civilization, one might say, right up to the terrible catastrophe of war which has come as a horror to mankind in recent years. How often has it been said how far we humans have come in creating, in producing! How we have brought it about that thought can be sent far across the earth in a short time, how connections have been created between the most distant countries, how spiritual life in all its forms has gained a tremendous expansion. Well, I could go on singing the praises of modern civilization for a long time, not the way I want to sing them, but the way they have been sung by this ruling class. But let us now look at things from the other side. How was this modern civilization, to which so many songs of praise have been sung, actually possible? It was only possible because it was, so to speak, undermined by those who, from the innermost essence of their humanity, could not agree with what the bearers of this modern civilization were doing. And so, alongside all this, which one could also call a kind of luxury culture, one could hear the voices coming from the other side, which essentially always ended with the words: It can't go on like this! As wonderful as your civilization may be for you, it is impossible for it to go on any other way than for the vast majority of the earth's population to have no direct share in it. They have to feel excluded from this civilization, they have to watch from the outside, so to speak, but on the other hand they have to work hard for this civilization!

Has anyone on the other side shown any understanding in recent decades for the reasons and background from which such a call has emerged? You can't say that. In general, certain people today speak a very strange language. Over the last few days, I have witnessed some of what has taken place here in Bern at the League of Nations Conference. You could hear all kinds of beautiful speeches, that is, speeches that the gentlemen thought were very beautiful. But anyone who is able to look a little deeper into what is being expressed in the world-changing deeds that are going through Europe today could hear, above all, in what was said there, that the most important question of the present, the question that is of ever-increasing concern to a large part of humanity, was being talked and thought past. The actual nerve of the social question was talked and thought past! This conference showed extraordinarily little understanding for this question, and one was reminded of something else, namely the weeks of the spring and early summer of 1914, when one could hear many a strange speech from the hitherto ruling circles and their leaders. One could cite many similar speeches, such as the one made by a leading statesman in a Central European country to a parliament in 1914, in which he said: “Thanks to the energetic efforts of the European cabinets, we can hope that peace among the great powers of Europe will be secured for the foreseeable future. - This was still being said, with all possible modifications, in May and June 1914.

And then? Then came what killed millions of people, what crippled millions of people. So well foreseen was that which also asserted itself alongside that to which one sang such hymns of praise as modern civilization!

I myself, if I may make this personal remark, had to speak differently from these statesmen at the time. Before a meeting in Vienna in the spring of 1914, I had to say: Anyone who looks at the life of contemporary European humanity sees in it something like a creeping cancer that must break out. - Well, we can leave it to the judgment of mankind today as to who was a better prophet: the one who spoke of a cancerous disease that broke out so terribly in the so-called world war, or those who thought that, thanks to the efforts of the cabinets, a longer peace was in prospect. Just as in those days these gentlemen talked past what was gathering as a black cloud in the political sky of Europe, so today certain people talk past what is most important: the social powers and forces entering the life of the nations of the earth. Since things are like this, there is really very little prospect of bringing about an understanding through reason, so to speak. But an understanding on the other side, as I have already said, can be sought. And this understanding seems to me to arise if we take the following starting point.

Until our time, the proletarian population was basically in a completely different situation than it will be from now on. Anyone who has not only thought about the proletarian movement from a certain theoretical point of view, but who has experienced this proletarian movement in such a way that he has lived with it, knows that what the modern proletariat experienced was the great, penetrating criticism of what the institutions and maxims of the hitherto leading circles have done for centuries, for three to four centuries. What the modern proletarian experienced was the living, world-historical critique of everything they believed they had to impose on humanity. And basically, what was going on within the proletariat was a great, powerful critique. While the hitherto leading circles lingered within their bourgeois culture, to which they sang such hymns of praise, while they could hear in their lecture halls that which served their state, while they heard in their theaters the illusory world of their affairs, while they did many other things, what they perceived as such a salutary modern civilization, the proletarian masses came together in the hours they could spare from the heavy, arduous work of the day to reflect on the serious questions of human development, the serious questions of world history. After all, modern technical development and the capitalist development connected with it had taken the modern proletarian away from all other human contexts, which, for example, the old craft had provided, had placed him next to the machine, harnessed into the capitalist world order and thus excluded from the immediate feeling of what the leading, leading circles were doing. Then the proletarian's spiritual gaze turned to the general and, from a certain point of view, the highest interest of humanity. And in the proletarian assemblies that was driven which then always had to sound out again in the cry: It can't go on like this!

But what developed there was also a powerful, magnificent criticism of the previous policy, the previous economic management of the leading circles. This has now entered a new stage. And to really follow this entry into a new stage with attention seems to me to be one of the most necessary social tasks today.

How has the modern proletarian felt about the social order that has developed over the last three to four centuries, since the time when modern capitalism and modern technology entered the development of mankind? How did the modern proletarian feel about all this, which he had to look at as if he were standing on his feet, which he, as far as he could use it, wanted to absorb with his intimate share, so that he would also have something for his soul? The old leading circles spoke to him of various powers and forces at work in the historical development of mankind; they spoke to him of all kinds of moral world orders and the like. But he, the modern proletarian, who looked up to what these ruling classes were doing, felt little of the power, of the inner originality of such moral world orders; He felt that the actions, the thoughts, the feelings of the leading, governing circles are essentially shaped by the way they can live by virtue of their economic forms, their economic order, through which they are able to establish their civilization as a kind of superstructure on the misery, on the oppression of larger masses of humanity who had to work for them.

And so there arose in the modern proletariat what was the truth in relation to the reality of these newer thoughts about the development of mankind. The modern proletarian felt a truth about what the others fantasized about in a certain lying way; they spoke of a moral, of a divine world order, through which people are brought into mutual social relations on earth. The proletarian felt this to be a profound lie. And he felt that the truth in all this is that people live as they can by exploiting economic life for their own convenience, for their own benefit. And so the materialistic conception of history arose - and one must now say, as the proper inheritance of what was bourgeois science - the conception which did not admit that the actually effective forces in the historical development of mankind were anything other than economic forces. And that became the belief that everything that is human religion, human science, human spirituality, rises above the economic forces like a kind of “superstructure”, and that below it the economic forces reign as the only reality on which at most the superstructure acts back. The modern proletariat was right in the face of what the bourgeois world order has made of social life - a mere economy.

The second thing that emanated from Karl Marx's power of thought and spread into the proletarian assemblies, into the proletarian souls, is not the intellectual question, as I have just characterized it in the materialist view of history, but the legal question. This culminates in the one word that you all know, but which had an electrifying effect within the modern proletarian movements, which evoked understanding in the innermost feelings of the modern proletarian souls when it was presented to these proletarian souls by Marx and his successors: it is the word of surplus value. And behind much of what has been said around this word of surplus value, what the modern proletarian actually feels to be his most important human question, lies the question which is more or less consciously or unconsciously, more or less merely felt or posed with the intellect, but which is deeply felt. What sense does my work actually have within the modern social order? And it must be said that Karl Marx's various answers are brilliant. - But today we live in a time in which we must go further than even Marx went, especially if we understand Marx in the right way, not in the direction of the opportunist politicians, but in a completely different direction, as we shall see in a moment.

When the modern proletarian raised the question of the meaning of his labor and this became for him the question of his position within modern society, of his human dignity, he was repeatedly confronted with the problem that his labor was, as it were, absorbed by the capitalist economic process. He experienced that his labor had become something that it could only appear to be, namely: a commodity. The modern proletarian, who can only acquire his labor power anew as his only “possession”, experienced that he must also carry his labor power to the market, must have his labor power treated according to the rules of supply and demand, as otherwise objective commodities separated from man are treated on the commodity market.

Now the peculiarity of human life is that things can occur in this human life which are real, but which are not truths, which are lies of life. And one such lie is that human labor can ever become a commodity. For human labor power can never enter into any comparisons, any price comparisons with commodities. It is something fundamentally different from commodities. It is therefore a lie if that which can never become a commodity is nevertheless made into a commodity. Even if this is not expressed in such a clear manner, it is nevertheless something that is perceived as, I would say, the center of the proletarian question of modern times. Because human labor power has become a commodity, the legal relationship that should exist between the entrepreneur and the worker over work has become a purchasing relationship. And modern bourgeois national economists do indeed talk as if it were possible within economic life to exchange commodity for commodity on the one hand, and commodity for labor on the other.

The fact that a so-called labor contract exists in the modern sense of the word does not change the matter; for a legal contract can only be concluded about the relationship between entrepreneur and worker in the sense that we shall see later. Human labor could only be liberated from its commodity character - and it must be liberated - if the only contract possible between the employee and the employer were not the contract for the work performed, but the contract for the distribution of the jointly produced goods or services in a way that serves the healthy organism in the right sense. This is the demand that lies behind the Marxist theory of surplus value. At the same time, this is the way in which one must go beyond the merely Marxist conception. And the question must be asked: How does the wage relationship end? How does a commodity distribution contract take the place of the labor contract?

But with this we have indicated the second thing that repeatedly ran through the soul of the modern proletarian and which was hurled at the leading circles as a powerful criticism.

And the third, that was the conviction that everything that takes place in modern life and which has led to these conditions into which we have now got, does not consist in a harmony, not in a work of modern men arising from a common purpose, but in a struggle between groups of men in which one of them has the advantage at first; that is the class struggle of the modern proletariat with the leading classes.

Truly, these three points: the materialist conception of history, the theory of surplus-value and labor-power, and the theory of class struggle have been studied with more contemporary force than anything that has been written within bourgeois society in recent times. For it was recognized that what human development has come to in the last centuries is merely a result of economic forms. All other interpretations are basically a great lie of humanity.

And so the whole intellectual life, as it had become a kind of cultural luxury for the ruling class, became an “ideology” for the modern proletariat, a word that was heard again and again. It became a mere fabric of thoughts and feelings and sentiments, which were expressed as smoke emanating from the true reality of economic life.

But one does not understand the matter if one only understands it in this way. One only understands the matter correctly if one knows that in the face of this desolating ideology, this soul-killing ideology, which is essentially a legacy of the thinking of the hitherto ruling class, in the modern proletarian soul, which had time to think about human dignity and about truly becoming a human being on the machine and in the enclosure of the capitalist economic process, a real longing for a true spiritual life, not for a spiritual luxury, not for abundance, awoke. One can still often hear in bourgeois circles today how the modern proletarian question, viewed from this or that side, is actually a bread-and-butter question. Certainly, it is a bread-and-butter question; but there is really no need to talk about the fact that it is a bread-and-butter question in an assembly where proletarian understanding prevails. For it is not a question of thinking in the same way as a bourgeois sociologist and pedagogue, for instance, who now travels about a great deal in many regions, and who, among other things, recently coined the words: You only have to really know modern poverty once, then you will already come to the longing for a humanization of human society. - Behind such words there is usually nothing more than the question: How can one continue in the delusion of the old life of the ruling circles and how can one in the best way let chunks fall off for those who should not participate in this life of the ruling class? How can labor be dealt with while maintaining the existing social order? - It is not a question of bread. If it is a question of bread, then it is above all a question of how bread is fought for, out of which soul motives.

This has to do with much deeper historical forces than those who often talk about history from this perspective even suspect. And today the three questions which I have just characterized have reached a new stage in that there is much in them which one is not yet able to express clearly, but which can be heard by those who have an ear for the workings of historical forces, for the sounds which herald the great world-historical upheavals. Today the proletarian movement is no longer a mere criticism, today it is that which is called upon by the world-historical powers themselves to take action, to raise the great question: What must be done? - And here it seems to me that what I characterized earlier must be transformed somewhat, transformed in such a way that, in contrast to the purely material life as it has developed up to now, another life should develop that allows the oppressed part of humanity to have an existence that is truly humane in soul as well. That is the first question, the question of spiritual life: How can we transform the luxury ideology, the affluent spiritual life, into that which, from the innermost nature of man, man must really experience for an existence worthy of man?

The other thing that has developed, apart from this spiritual life, is precisely that which has turned the proletarian's human labor power into a commodity in the field of legal life. This could only develop because in the social order that emerged under capitalism and modern technology, law became a prerogative in many respects. How can the prerogative be replaced by law, within whose order the human labor power of the proletarian is stripped of the character of a mere commodity?

And the third question is: how can what has developed as class struggle continue to develop in other forms? The proletarian has felt very well that what must happen in life can only develop in this mutual struggle. But he perceives the struggles that have taken place in the course of modern history as those that must be overcome. And so the question of the necessity of class struggles will now, at the present stage of development, be transformed into the question: How do we overcome class struggles? - The question of surplus value, which has moved into the realm of privileges within the social order as it has developed over the last few centuries, this question of surplus value gives rise to the other question: How to find in human society, in the true sense of the word, a state of law satisfactory to all men?

With regard to the first question, the spiritual side of the social question, one only has to see how deep the abyss is between the hitherto ruling classes and those on the other side who are striving for a new world and social order. And here it must be said that what fills the modern proletarian with spiritual life has basically been inherited from the bourgeois class, which has been able to cultivate science, art and so on. - But this spiritual life had a different effect within the proletariat, for the proletarian was in a different position in relation to what he had inherited in the way of science and the like than in relation to what arose as modern spiritual life among those who were bourgeois, the leading circles. One could be a very convinced follower of modern intellectual life, one could consider oneself very enlightened, but one stood as a member of the ruling class within such a social order, which was not at all organized according to this modern intellectual life. One could be a natural scientist like Vogt, a scientific popularizer like Büchner, one could believe oneself to be completely enlightened - that was perhaps good for the head, for the intellectual conviction; but it was not suitable for understanding the position of man in real life. For the way these people stood in life could only be justified by the fact that the social order derived from quite different powers, from religious, from outdated moral world views, or at any rate from other powers than those which had presented themselves as scientifically certified powers to these ruling, leading classes. Therefore, that which is the modern scientific spirit and to which the proletarian simply brought himself from the culture of modern times had a completely different effect on the proletarian soul.

I may recall a small scene that illustrates this particularly well, this different effect of modern spiritual life on the proletarian, who was compelled to grasp this modern spiritual life not just for the head, but for the whole person, for his entire position within humanity.

Many years ago, I once stood on the same podium in Spandau with Rosa Luxemburg, who has now come to such a tragic end. At that time she spoke about science and the workers, and as a teacher at the workers' education school I had a few things to add to her words on the same subject. This topic, “Science and the workers”, gave her the opportunity to express precisely that which is so characteristic of the intellectual life of the modern proletariat. She said: “The sentiments - despite the conviction of the head - the sentiments of the modern leading class of humanity are still rooted in views as if man came from angelic beings who were originally good; and from this origin, in terms of feeling and sentiment, these ruling classes justify the differences in rank and class that have emerged in the course of development. But the modern proletarian is driven in a quite different way to take bourgeois science seriously. He must take seriously when he is taught how man was not originally an angelic being, but climbed about on trees like an animal and behaved most indecently. Looking back to this origin of man in the sense of the modern world view does not justify differences in life, class and status in the same way that others believe it to be justified, it justifies a completely different idea of the equality of all people.

You see, that's the difference! The proletarian was compelled to take what the others took as a head conviction, which did not go very deep, no matter how enlightened they were, he was compelled to take it up with his whole person, to take the matter with the bitterest seriousness of life. As a result, however, it wove itself into his soul in a completely different way. One must simply become attentive to such things, then one will already recognize in what sense the modern social question is above all a question of spiritual life and strives for the development of a spiritual life that satisfies all people.

Then, if you look into the causes of everything that I have only been able to describe today, I would like to say, in a stammering manner, because if you really wanted to describe it in detail, it would require too much elaboration, if you research the causes and then ask yourself: what development must be striven for? - then we can say the following: today it is really not a question of whether materialistic culture is the real foundation of spiritual life, but of how we can arrive at a spiritual life that can truly satisfy the human soul, the soul of all human beings. Today it can no longer be about a critical interpretation of what surplus value is, what human labor power represents itself as within the capitalist world order, but today the question arises: How can human labor power be freed from the character of a commodity and how can we ensure that “surplus value” does not remain a prerogative but becomes a right? And if there must be struggles within the human social order, can they be class struggles, can they be the struggles that have gradually emerged over the course of recent centuries?

Today we are at a stage of development where criticism alone is no longer decisive, but where the question is decisive: What is to be done? - For those who look at the foundations of life, the answer is, I would say, very radical. It may look less radical to some than it is, but it is a radical answer. Because proletarian thinking is in many respects only the legacy of bourgeois thinking, because proletarian habits of thought are the legacy of bourgeois habits of thought, the first questions to be considered are: How can the damage caused by capitalism be eliminated? How can the oppressive nature of the commodification of human labor power be eliminated? How can the class struggle be overcome in a humane way?

These questions must be asked from a much deeper perspective today. And great demands are made today by the historical facts themselves on the habits of thought, on the thoughts of the proletarian. For it is up to him to be equal to the times, to ask himself: How can we get beyond the unhealthy foundations of today's material historical life? How can we get beyond the devastation that the cycle of surplus-value production has wreaked on life, on legal life? How do we get beyond the devastation of modern class struggles? The three most important modern social questions are transformed from the negative into the positive.

If we look at the causes of current living conditions, we find that there is actually a tendency to continue what the bourgeois world order has brought about. Many people are asking themselves today: How can we overcome capitalism? How can we overcome private ownership of the means of production? - And they then come to the ancient order of human social institutions, that of the cooperative and the like, that is, they come to regard a common ownership of the means of production as an ideal.

This is understandable, and truly, it is not out of any bourgeois prejudice that these things should be discussed here, but solely from the point of view of: Is it possible to achieve what the modern proletarian wants in the way that some socialist thinkers believe they can achieve it today? Is it possible, by resorting to the framework of the old state and inserting into this old state what is the economic order, only in a different form, to bring about a redemption from the oppression brought about by the past?

Let us look at the modern state. It came into being because at a time - in the 16th and 17th centuries - when modern technology and modern capitalism were also developing, the leading circles, who then had to call the proletariat more and more to the machine, found that their interests were best satisfied within the framework of the state. And so they began to allow economic life to run into the state in those branches where it was convenient for them. And especially when modern achievements came along, large parts of economic life, such as the postal, telegraph and railroad systems, were taken over into the economy of the state, which had been handed down from time immemorial. At that time, intellectual life was also incorporated into the modern state structure!

And more and more this fusion of economic life, the legal life of the state and intellectual life took place. This fusion not only led to all the unnatural conditions associated with the oppressive conditions of modern times, but this fusion also ultimately led to the devastating effects of the world war catastrophe.

Those who think today from the historical facts will not ask: What should the states do? - on the contrary, they may be forced to ask: What should states refrain from doing? - For what they do and thereby bring about, we have indeed experienced in the killing of ten million people and in what crippled eighteen million people.

And so perhaps the question does come to mind: What should states refrain from doing? - This is what I can only hint at here, but what can truly be asked from the deep foundations of a true social science. If you look at certain political and social conditions as they have, I would say, typically developed, but also as they have typically led to their well-deserved end, then you need only look at Austria, for example, which in the 1960s turned towards a common constitutional system in the Austrian Reichsrat.

What had emerged at that time - I spent three decades of my life in Austria, got to know the conditions thoroughly, got to know what developed as constitutional life in the Austrian state at that time - truly fitted the mishmash of different nations like a glove. And for anyone who can really follow historical facts, it is clear that it was precisely what was founded in Austrian constitutional life at that time, what became Austria's policy in the sixties and seventies, that contributed to the end to which the present years have led.

Why? Well, at that time an Austrian Imperial Council was founded. Initially, the purely economic curia, the curia of the large landowners, the curia of the markets, the cities and industrial towns, the curia of the rural communities were elected to this Austrian Imperial Council. They had to represent their economic interests in the state parliament. And they made rights, they made laws out of their economic life. Only rights that were a transformation of economic interests were created. With regard to the law, however, we are not dealing with the same thing that we are dealing with on the ground of economic life. On the ground of economic life one has to do with human needs, with the production of goods, the circulation of goods, the consumption of goods. In the field of legal life, however, one has to do with that which, apart from all other interests, concerns man, in so far as he is purely only man, in so far as he as man is equal to all other men. Judgment must be based on quite different grounds when the question is asked: What is right? - than: What must be done in order to introduce any product into the cycle of economic life? - The unnatural coupling of the economic curia with legal life is what is eating away at the so-called Austrian state as a cancer.

These things could be illustrated by many examples throughout the modern states. It is not a question of merely studying these things, but of finding the right point of view from which one can gain an insight into true reality, into that which lives and weaves, not into that which people imagine to be the right thing politically or economically.

And again, look at the German Reichstag, of blessed memory, at this democratic parliament with equal voting rights, in which there could be a representation of interests like the Farmers' Union, but in which there could also be a representation of a mere spiritual community, like the Center! There we see something welded, melted into purely political life that belongs only to intellectual life. And to what unnatural conditions has this led! Again, one could cite many examples in addition to this one. If one wants to get to know the life of modern mankind, one must be able to approach it radically from this point of view. One must really have the courage to look such things in the face, then one will come to something that modern people do not yet want to admit, I would even like to say that people of all parties do not want to admit it. But what alone can be the impulse for a recovery of our social organism is the recognition that from now on there can no longer be a welding together, a coupling together of the three areas of life - spiritual life, legal life and economic life - but that each of these areas has its own laws of life, that each of these areas must therefore also give itself its social formation from its own sources.

In economic life only the interests of commodity production, commodity consumption and commodity circulation can prevail. The fundamental laws of this economic life must be decisive for administration and legislation. In the field of legal life that must prevail which springs directly from the human consciousness of law, that in which all men are really equal as men. In the field of spiritual life, that which can flow from the natural human endowment in full free initiative must prevail.

Modern Social Democracy has made inroads - I would like to say, from a completely different point of view, but that cannot affect us here today - in a single area, in that it has the proposition in its views: Religion must be a private matter. - The proposition must be extended to all branches of spiritual life. All spiritual life must be a private matter in relation to the rule of law and to the cycle of economic life. That spiritual life alone which is directed to its own powers, that spiritual life alone which always proves its reality out of its own impulse, that will not be a spiritual luxury, that will not be a spiritual abundance, that will be a spiritual life which must be longed for by all men in the same way. In looking at medieval spiritual life, for example science in relation to religion and theology, the following sentence has often been uttered: Philosophy, the wisdom of the world, is trailing behind theology. - Well, it was also believed that this had changed in more recent times. It has changed, but how has it changed? The secular sciences have become the servants of secular powers, of states, of economic cycles. And they really haven't gotten any better as a result. And why have they not become better? When one sees that there is basically a unified current, a unified force, from the highest branches of spiritual life down to the utilization of man's individual abilities, as they are carried by capital and capitalism, then one sees to the bottom of the question that arises here. Anyone who does not separate the functions and activities of capital in the modern social order from the rest of spiritual life is not looking at the bottom of the matter. Working on the basis of capital is only possible in a society in which there is a healthy, emancipated intellectual life, from which the development of such abilities based on capital can also grow.

What has happened in more recent times need not always be as grotesque as it once was when a modern, very important researcher, a physiologist, wanted to characterize what the Berlin Academy of Sciences, that is, the learned gentlemen of this Berlin Academy of Sciences, actually were: he called them, these learned gentlemen, “the scientific protection force of the Hohenzollerns”. You see, things had changed. Science was no longer the servant of theology; but whether it had risen to a higher dignity by becoming the servant of the state is another matter.

I would have to speak a great deal if I wanted to offer you the well-founded, well-reasoned truth in all its parts that only the reversal of that movement which has occurred in recent times, namely the liberation of spiritual life in all branches from state life, can lead to the recovery of our social organism. How differently will the lowest teacher feel if, in all that he has to represent, he knows himself to be dependent only on administration and legislation, which is built on the basis of spiritual life itself, than if he has to carry out the maxims, the impulses of political life! The teaching profession was once supposed to develop. It is precisely in this area that the servant class has developed. And this servant state in this field truly corresponds to what has developed in the field of economic life. In antiquity it was called the “nourishing state”. The exploitative and exploited classes have developed in more recent times. However, the two went hand in hand. One is not possible without the other.

All that which relates to the personal relationship between man and man - and this personal relationship from man to man also relates to what employees and employers agree with each other - all this can only be administered by that part of the social organism which is organized independently on the basis of spiritual life. Everything connected with rights, and with rights above all the labor relationship, must remain the domain of the political, the constitutional state. But that which is connected with commodity production, commodity circulation and consumption must become a separate member of the social order, in which only the laws of life of this organism are active.

Thus, by entering into the foundations of these things, one arrives at the radical view, which for some will prove uncomfortable, that for the health of our social relations three independent social organizations must develop side by side, which will work together in the right way precisely because they do not have a uniform centralization, but are centralized in themselves: a parliament which administers spiritual affairs, an administration which serves only these spiritual affairs; a parliament and an administration of the constitutional state, the political state in the narrower sense; a parliament and an independent administration of the economic cycle for itself; like sovereign states side by side, so to speak. Through their coexistence, they will be able to realize what the modern proletarian soul wants, but which cannot be achieved by a mere centralist nationalization of the social order.

Just take economic life for example. Today it is attached on the one hand to the natural foundations. One can also improve these natural bases by improving the soil and the like, then the working conditions can become more favorable by improving the working bases; but there is a limit beyond which one cannot go. Such a limit must also be reached on the other side. Just as economic life is attached to nature, which is outside, so on the other side must stand the rule of law. From this constitutional state, rights and laws are determined in such a way that they are separate from economic life. Just as the judge has to judge separately from his family or human relations when he judges according to the law, just as he allows his human will to function from a different source than in everyday life, so, even if it is the same people - for it will be the same people who rule through all three areas of social organization - when they judge from the modern constitutional state, they will judge according to quite different principles. For example, to cite just one, the measure of work that a person can perform, the time in which a person can work, will result precisely from the human demands of life. All this must be independent of the price formation that prevails in economic life. And just as, on the one hand, nature imposes pricing on economic life, so, on the other hand, free, independent humanity must always first decide on labor out of a sense of justice. And from the political state, which stands outside economic life, labor must be placed within economic life. Then labor is price-forming; then the character of a commodity will not be imposed on labor, then labor participates in the formation of the price, is not dependent on the price formation of the commodity. Just as nature acts on economic life from without, so must law, which is embodied in human labor, act from without.

It may be - for this may be objected - that the prosperity of a social organism becomes in a certain way dependent upon it, when labor first asserts its right; but this dependence is a healthy dependence, and it will lead to a healthy improvement in the same way as, for example, the improvement of the soil by technical means, when it is necessary or expedient or proves possible. But labor will never be able to set prices in the same way that it must set prices in accordance with human dignity if economic life is placed within the framework of the modern state as in a large cooperative. Economic life must be removed and left to its own devices. Legal life, political life, security life must be taken out and placed on its own. People have to speak from the most democratic basis about that which affects all people. Then this will have the right effect on economic life and what must come from it. This will never be able to happen from a cooperative or state institution of any kind. We will see that, if things remain the same as the present oppressors have developed from other, historical foundations, the new oppressors will also develop in the same way if real democratic foundations are not created outside of economic life.

Just as the legal life of the state must stand outside economic life, so must the entire intellectual life from the lowest school up to the university. Then that which develops out of this spiritual life will be able to be a real spiritual administration of the other two branches of life. Then it will be possible for that which is formed as profit in economic life to be genuinely supplied to the community from which it is taken. Then it will be possible for something similar to take place for the material goods, as today only for the beautiful spiritual goods. For the spiritual goods of modern society are actually the most precious of all. It is so: with regard to this spiritual good, it is true that what is produced is given to the general public at least thirty years after death, becomes free property, can be administered by everyone. People today truly do not put up with this with regard to material goods

Possession in social life is not what these or those social economists so often dream of in a strange way; it can only be understood in this way for social life: Possession is the exclusive right of disposal over a thing; possession in the productive sense, in the sense of land, is a right. And this right can only be made into a right, instead of a privilege, which corresponds to the legal consciousness of all men, if the formation of judgement takes place on a ground where only the right is determined, if it becomes possible that that which has resulted as profit can be transferred through the rule of law into the disposal of the spiritual organization, so that the spiritual organization has to find the right individual abilities for that which is no longer used for production, that is, for human service, but becomes mere profit. In this way it will become possible to bring ever new individual abilities to mankind.

But in order that there may really be a power which leads in the right way, not into bureaucratism, but into the free administration of the individual mental faculties of men, that which must be taken as property from one side, it is necessary that the constitutional state should supervise property, that is, the right of property, and that it should not itself become the owner, but that it should be able to hand over free property to that intellectual circle from which it can best be administered. From this you can see that from such backgrounds one arrives today at radical views which will surprise even you; but for my part I am convinced that the facts of world history demand such things of men today. I am convinced that what the modern proletarian wants cannot be achieved in any other way than by extending his hand to the separation of powers. That is the only possible “foreign policy” today. And strangely enough, each individual territory can carry it out for itself. If Germany were to take up this idea for itself today, as I recently expressed in an “Appeal to the Germans and the Cultural World”, which has attracted many signatures, if the Germans were to take up this tripartite division today, then perhaps they could negotiate with the others in a different way than they can today, when they stand there as a unified state that has been completely overcome, completely overcome precisely by its former centralization, and is basically incapable of doing anything.

I do not mean to take sides, but only to say that what I am saying can become the basis not only of all domestic policy, but also of true foreign policy, for the reason that each individual country, each individual people can carry it out for itself alone. Today, if one considers the enormously telling facts, one is led to the conviction that it is no longer merely a matter of changing some of the conditions according to the old ideas, but that it is necessary to base them on new ideas, new facts. In recent years we have heard quite often that there have never been such terrible events as those of the last four and a half years as long as mankind has had a history. You can hear that more often today. But what should be the echo to this assertion is not heard so often today, namely: Never before have people had such a need to rethink, to relearn as they do today, when the social question points to what most needs to be relearned, points to what is most talked and thought past.

Today it is clear that it is the people who have to act. You don't have to come up with ready-made programs! What I have developed here is not a program, is not a social theory. What I have developed here is a realistic theory of humanity. I do not imagine that I can draw up a program for all the conditions that are to arise; the individual cannot do that on his own. For just as individuals cannot form language, which is a social phenomenon, on their own, but just as language is formed in the coexistence of people, all social life must develop in the coexistence of people.

For this, however, people must first be in the right relationship to one another. [The same person can be in the economic parliament, in the democratic parliament, in the spiritual parliament at the same time; he will only have to see how he always has to find the judgment from the objectivity of the circumstances from the different sources.

How people will administer legal, economic and spiritual life when they are properly related to each other, what people will say about the social, that is what one should fathom; not put forward an abstract, theoretical program about what is right in all cases! To bring people into such a relationship that they work together in the right way - one might think - is something the modern proletariat in particular would understand, and this for the simple reason that the modern proletariat has seen how the various interests, the legal, the economic and the spiritual interests work against each other. In this way they are brought into such mutual action that they produce, out of their own forces, a humane existence for each, a viable organism for the whole. Even if it is radical, I believe that nothing else is needed than good will and insight to translate this social program, which is not a program in the common sense - it has to be called that because there are no other words - into life. However, this will make the social question appear to be what it really is. There are certain people who believe that the social question that has arisen will be solved if we do this or that, [...] no, the social question has arisen because people have reached a certain stage of development. And now it is there and will always be there and will always have to be solved anew. And if people are not prepared to accept ever new solutions, the forces will ultimately lead to such disharmonies that they must increasingly lead to revolutionary upheavals of the social order. Revolutions must be defeated step by step on a small scale; then they will not occur on a large scale. But if one does not defeat that which enters into life day by day as legitimate revolutionary forces, then one need not be surprised if that which one does not want to be aware of discharges itself in great upheavals. Rather, in a certain sense, this must be seen as something understandable.

So I believe that it is precisely in the proletariat that an understanding could develop for a truly far-reaching overview of the social question as it arises in this tripartite organization of the social organism. And I am convinced that if some understanding develops, the proletarian will only then realize how he is the true modern man in the true sense of the word. He, who has been torn out of the old legalities, placed next to the barren machine, harnessed into the soulless economic process, has the opportunity to think about what is worthy of man, about what makes human life truly worthy of man, alongside this killing and destroying of man; he has the opportunity to think about it from the fundamental bases and to consider man as a pure human being. That is why one can also believe that if what is hidden in the modern proletarian class consciousness, what lies behind it, develops out of it: the consciousness of human dignity - “an existence worthy of man must be granted to all men” - then with the solution of the proletarian question, with the liberation of the proletariat, the solution of a great world-historical question of humanity will take place. Then the proletarian will not only redeem himself, then the proletarian will become the redeemer of all humanity in humanity. Then, with proletarian liberation, the whole of humanity, that which is worth liberating in this humanity, can be liberated at the same time.

It must be answered, not to meet a human “need to know” but to meet man's universal need to become fully human. And in just what way one can strive for an answer, in what way the ignorabimus can be overcome to fulfil the demands of human evolution—this shall be the theme of our course of lectures as it proceeds.

To those who demand of a cycle of lectures with a title such as ours that nothing be introduced that might interfere with the objective presentation of ideas, I would like, since today I shall have to mention certain personalities, to say the following. The moment one begins to represent the results of human judgment in their relationship to life, to full human existence, it becomes inevitable that one indicate the personalities with whom the judgments originated. Even in a scientific presentation, one must remain within the sphere in which the judgment arises, within the realm of human struggling and striving toward such a judgment. And especially since the question we want above all to answer is: what can be gleaned from modern scientific theories that can become a vital social thinking able to transform thought into impulses for life?—then one must realize that the series of considerations one undertakes is no longer confined to the study and the lecture halls but Stands rather within the living evolution of humanity.

Behind everything with which I commenced yesterday, the modern striving for a mathematical-mechanical world view and the dissolution of that world view, behind that which came to a climax in 1872 in the famous speech by the physiologist, du Bois-Reymond, concerning the limits of natural science, there stands something even more important. It is something that begins to impress itself upon us the moment we want to begin to speak in a living way about the limits of natural science.

A personality of extraordinary philosophical stature still looks over to us with a certain vitality out of the first half of the nineteenth century: Hegel. Only in the last few years has Hegel begun to be mentioned in the lecture halls and in the philosophical literature with somewhat more respect than in the recent past. In the last third of the nineteenth century the academic world attacked Hegel outright, yet one could demonstrate irrefutably that Eduard von Hartmann had been quite right in claiming that during the 1880s only two university lecturers in all of Germany had actually read him. The academics opposed Hegel but not on philosophical grounds, for as a philosopher they hardly knew him. Yet they knew him in a different way, in a way in which we still know him today. Few know Hegel as he is contained, or perhaps better said, as his world view is contained, in the many volumes that sit in the libraries. Those who know Hegel in this original form so peculiar to him are few indeed. Yet in certain modified forms he has become in a sense the most popular philosopher the world has ever known. Anyone who participates in a workers' meeting today or, even better, anyone who had participated in one during the last few decades and had heard what was discussed there; anyone with any sense for the source of the mode of thinking that had entered into these workers' meetings, who really knew the development of modern thought, could see that this mode of thinking had originated with Hegel and flowed through certain channels out into the broadest masses. And whoever investigated the literature and philosophy of Eastern Europe in this regard would find that the Hegelian mode of thinking had permeated to the farthest reaches of Russian cultural life. One thus could say that, anonymously, as it were, Hegel has become within the last few decades perhaps one of the most influential philosophers in human history. On the other hand, however, when one perceives what has come to be recognized by the broadest spectrum of humanity as Hegelianism, one is reminded of the portrait of a rather ugly man that a kind artist painted in such a way as to please the man's family. As one of the younger sons, who had previously paid little attention to the portrait, grew older and really observed it for the first time, he said: “But father, how you have changed!” And when one sees what has become of Hegel one might well say: “Dear philosopher, how you have changed!” To be sure, something extraordinary has happened regarding this Hegelian world view.

Hardly had Hegel himself departed when his school fell apart. And one could see how this Hegelian school appropriated precisely the form of one of our new parliaments. There was a left wing and a right wing, an extreme left and an extreme right, an ultra-radical wing and an ultra-conservative wing. There were men with radical scientific and social views, who felt themselves to be Hegel's true spiritual heirs, and on the other side there were devout, positive theologians who wanted just as much to base their extreme theological conservatism on Hegel. There was a center for Hegelian studies headed by the amiable philosopher, Karl Rosenkranz, and each of these personalities, every one of them, insisted that he was Hegel's true heir.

What is this remarkable phenomenon in the evolution of human knowledge? What happened was that a philosopher once sought to raise humanity into the highest realms of thought. Even if one is opposed to Hegel, it cannot be denied that he dared attempt to call forth the world within the soul in the purest thought-forms. Hegel raised humanity into ethereal heights of thinking, but strangely enough, humanity then fell right back down out of those heights. It drew on the one hand certain materialistic and on the other hand certain positive theological conclusions from Hegel's thought. And even if one considers the Hegelian center headed by the amiable Rosenkranz, even there one cannot find Hegel's philosophy as Hegel himself had conceived it. In Hegel's philosophy one finds a grand attempt to pursue the scientific method right up into the highest heights. Afterward, however, when his followers sought to work through Hegel's thoughts themselves, they found that one could arrive thereby at the most contrary points of view.

Now, one can argue about world views in the study, one can argue within the academies, and one can even argue in the academic literature, so long as worthless gossip and Barren cliques do not result. These offspring of Hegelian philosophy, however, cannot be carried out of the lecture halls and the study into life as social impulses. One can argue conceptually about contrary world views, but within life itself these contrary world views do not fight so peaceably. One must use just such a paradoxical expression in describing such a phenomenon. And thus there stands before us in the first half of the nineteenth century an alarming factor in the evolution of human cognition, something that has proved itself to be socially useless in the highest degree. With this in mind we must then raise the question: how can we find a mode of thinking that can be useful in social life? In two phenomena above all we notice the uselessness of Hegelianism for social life.

One of those who studied Hegel most intensively, who brought Hegel fully to life within himself, was Karl Marx. And what is it that we find in Marx? A remarkable Hegelianism indeed! Hegel up upon the highest peak of the conceptual world—Hegel upon the highest peak of Idealism—and the faithful student, Karl Marx, immediately transforming the whole into its direct opposite, using what he believed to be Hegel's method to carry Hegel's truths to their logical conclusions. And thereby arises historical materialism, which is to be for the masses the one world view that can enter into social life. We thus are confronted in the first half of the nineteenth century with the great Idealist, Hegel, who lived only in the Spirit, only in his ideas, and in the second half of the nineteenth century with his student, Karl Marx, who contemplated and recognized the reality of matter alone, who saw in everything ideal only ideology. If one but takes up into one's feeling this turnabout of conceptions of world and life in the course of the nineteenth century, one feels with all one's soul the need to achieve an understanding of nature that will serve as a basis for judgments that are socially viable.

Now, if we turn on the other hand to consider something that is not so obviously descended from Hegel but can be traced back to Hegel nonetheless, we find still within the first half of the nineteenth century, but carrying over into the second half, the “philosopher of the ego,” Max Stirner. While Karl Marx occupies one of the two poles of human experience mentioned yesterday, the pole of matter upon which he bares all his considerations, Stirner, the philosopher of the ego, proceeds from the opposite pole, that of consciousness. And just as the modern world view, gravitating toward the pole of matter, becomes unable to discover consciousness within that element (as we saw yesterday in the example of du Bois-Reymond), a person who gravitates to the opposite pole of consciousness will not be able to find the material world. And so it is with Max Stirner. For Max Stirner, no material universe with natural laws actually exists. Stirner sees the world as populated solely by human egos, by human consciousnesses that want only to indulge themselves to the full. “I have built my thing on nothing”—that is one of Max Stirner's maxims. And on these grounds Stirner opposes even the notion of Providence. He says for example: certain moralists demand that we should not perform any deed out of egoism, but rather that we should perform it because it is pleasing to God. In acting, we should look to God, to that which pleases Him, that which He commands. Why, thinks Max Stirner, should I, who have built only upon the foundation of ego-consciousness, have to admit that God is after all the greater egoist Who can demand of man and the world that all should be performed as it suits Him? I will not surrender my own egoism for the sake of a greater egoism. I will do what pleases me. What do I care for a God when I have myself?

One thus becomes entangled and confused within a consciousness out of which one can no longer find the way. Yesterday I remarked how on the one hand we can arrive at clear ideas by awakening in the experience of ideas when we descend into our consciousness. These dreamlike ideas manifest themselves like drives from which we cannot then escape. One would say that Karl Marx achieved clear ideas—if anything his ideas are too clear. That was the secret of his success. Despite their complexity, Marx's ideas are so clear that, if properly garnished, they remain comprehensible to the widest circles. Here clarity has been the means to popularity. And until it realizes that within such a clarity humanity is lost, humanity, as long as it seeks logical consequences, will not let go of these clear ideas.

If one is inclined by temperament to the other extreme, to the pole of consciousness, one passes over onto Stirner's side of the scale. Then one despises this clarity: one feels that, applied to social thinking, this clarity makes man into a cog in a social order modeled on mathematics or mechanics—but into that only, into a mere cog. And if one does not feel oneself cut out for just that, then the will that is active in the depths of human consciousness revolts. Then one comes radically to oppose all clarity. One mocks all clarity, as Stirner did. One says to oneself: what do I care about anything else? What do I care even about nature? I shall project my own ego out of myself and see what happens. We shall see that the appearance of such extremes in the nineteenth century is in the highest degree characteristic of the whole of recent human evolution, for these extremes are the distant thunder that preceded the storm of social chaos we are now experiencing. One must understand this connection if one wants at all to speak about cognition today.

Yesterday we arrived at an indication of what happens when we begin to correlate our consciousness to an external natural world of the senses. Our consciousness awakens to clear concepts but loses itself. It loses itself to the extent that one can only posit empty concepts such as “matter,” concepts that then become enigmatic. Only by thus losing ourselves, however, can we achieve the clear conceptual thinking we need to become fully human. In a certain sense we must first lose ourselves in order to find ourselves again out of ourselves. Yet now the time has come when we should learn something from these phenomena. And what can one learn from these phenomena? One can learn that, although clarity of conceptual thinking and perspicuity of mental representation can be won by man in his interaction with the world of sense, this clarity of conceptual thinking becomes useless the moment we strive scientifically for something more than a mere empiricism. It becomes useless the moment we try to proceed toward the kind of phenomenalism that Goethe the scientist cultivated, the moment we want something more than natural science, namely Goetheanism.

What does this imply? In establishing a correlation between our inner life and the external physical world of the senses we can use the concepts we form in interaction with nature in such a way that we try not to remain within the natural phenomena but to think on beyond them. We are doing this if we do more than simply say: within the spectrum there appears the color yellow next to the color green, and on the other side the blues. We are doing this if we do not simply interrelate the phenomena with the help of our concepts but seek instead, as it were, to pierce the veil of the senses and construct something more behind it with the aid of our concepts. We are doing this if we say: out of the clear concepts I have achieved I shall construct atoms, molecules—all the movements of matter that are supposed to ex-ist behind natural phenomena. Thereby something extraordinary happens. What happens is that when I as a human being confront the world of nature [see illustration], I use my concepts not only to create for myself a conceptual order within the realm of the senses but also to break through the boundary of sense and construct behind it atoms and the like I cannot bring my lucid thinking to a halt within the realm of the senses. I take my lesson from inert matter, which continues to roll on even when the propulsive force has ceased. My knowledge reaches the world of sense, and I remain inert. I have a certain inertia, and I roll with my concepts on beyond the realm of the senses to construct there a world the existence of which I can begin to doubt when I notice that my thinking has only been borne along by inertia.

It is interesting to note that a great proportion of the philosophy that does not remain within phenomena is actually nothing other than just such an inert rolling-on beyond what really exists within the world. One simply cannot come to a halt. One wants to think ever farther and farther beyond and construct atoms and molecules—under certain circumstances other things as well that philosophers have assembled there. No wonder, then, that this web one has woven in a world created by the inertia of thinking must eventually unravel itself again.

Goethe rebelled against this law of inertia. He did not want to roll onward thus with his thinking but rather to come strictly to a halt at this limit [see illustration: heavy line] and to apply concepts within the realm of the senses. He thus would say to himself: within the spectrum appear to me yellow, blue, red, indigo, violet. If, however, I permeate these appearances of color with my world of concepts while remaining within the phenomena, then the phenomena order themselves of their own accord, and the phenomenon of the spectrum teaches me that when the darker colors or anything dark is placed behind the lighter colors or anything light, there appear the colors which lie toward the blue end of the spectrum. And conversely, if I place light behind dark, there appear the colors which lie toward the red end of the spectrum.

What was it that Goethe was actually seeking to do? Goethe wanted to find simple phenomena within the complex but above all such phenomena as allowed him to remain within this limit [see illustration], by means of which he did not roll on into a realm that one reaches only through a certain mental inertia. Goethe wanted to adhere to a strict phenomenalism. If we remain within phenomena and if we strive with our thinking to come to a halt there rather than allow ourselves to be carried onward by inertia, the old question arises in a new way. What meaning does the phenomenal world have when I consider it thus? What is the meaning of the mechanics and mathematics, of the number, weight, measure, or temporal relation that I import into this world? What is the meaning of this?

You know, perhaps, that the modern world conception has sought to characterize the phenomena of tone, color, warmth, etc. as only subjective, whereas it characterizes the so-called primary qualities, the qualities of weight, space, and time, as something not subjective but objective and inherent in things. This conception can be traced back principally to the English philosopher, John Locke, and it has to a considerable extent determined the philosophical basis of modern scientific thought. But the real question is: what place within our systematic science of nature as a whole do mathematics, do mechanics—these webs we weave within ourselves, or so it seems at first—what place do these occupy? We shall have to return to this question to consider the specific form it takes in Kantianism. Yet without going into the whole history of this development one can nonetheless emphasize our instinctive conviction that measuring or counting or weighing external objects is essentially different from ascribing to them any other qualities.

It certainly cannot be denied that light, tones, colors, and sensations of taste are related to us differently from that which we could represent as subject to mathematical-mechanical laws. For it really is a remarkable fact,a fact worthy of our consideration: you know that honey tastes sweet, but to a man with jaundice it tastes bitter—so we can say that we stand in a curious relationship to the qualities within this realm—while on the other hand we could hardly maintain that any normal man would see a triangle as a triangle, but a man with jaundice would see it as a square! Certain differentiations thus do exist, and one must be cognizant of them; on the other hand, one must not draw absurd conclusions from them. And to this very day philosophical thinking has failed in the most extraordinary way to come to grips with this most fundamental epistemological question. We thus see how a contemporary philosopher, Koppelmann, overtrumps even Kant by saying, for example—you can read this on page 33 of his Philosophical Inquiries [Weltanschauungsfragen]: everything that relates to space and time we must first construct within by means of the understanding, whereas we are able to assimilate colors and tastes directly. We construct the icosahedron, the dodecahedron, etc.: we are able to construct the standard regular solids only because of the organization of our understanding. No wonder, then, claims Koppelmann, that we find in the world only those regular solids we can construct with our understanding. One thus can find Koppelmann saying almost literally that it is impossible for a geologist to come to a geometer with a crystal bounded by seven equilateral triangles precisely because—so Koppelmann claims—such a crystal would have a form that simply would not fit into our heads. That is out-Kanting Kant. And thus he would say that in the realm of the thing-in-itself crystals could exist that are bounded by seven regular triangles, but they cannot enter our head, and thus we pass them by; they do not exist for us.

Such thinkers forget but one thing: they forget—and it is just this that we want to indicate in the course of these lectures with all the forceful proofs we can muster—that the natural order governing the construction of our head also governs the construction of the regular polyhedrons, and it is for just this reason that our head constructs no other polyhedrons than those that actually confront us in the external world. For that, you see, is one of the basic differences between the so-called subjective qualities of tone, color, warmth, as well as the different qualities of touch, and that which confronts us in the mechanical-mathematical view of the world. That is the basic difference: tone and color leave us outside of ourselves; we must first take them in; we must first perceive them. As human beings we stand outside tone, color, warmth, etc. This is not entirely the case as regards warmth—I shall discuss that tomorrow—but to a certain extent this is true even of warmth. These qualities leave us initially outside ourselves, and we must perceive them. In formal, spatial, and temporal relationships and regarding weight this is not the case. We perceive objects in space but stand ourselves within the same space and the same lawfulness as the objects external to us. We stand within time just as do the external objects. Our physical existence begins and ends at a definite point in time. We stand within space and time in such a way that these things permeate us without our first perceiving them. The other things we must first perceive. Regarding weight, well, ladies and gentlemen, you will readily admit that this has little to do with perception, which is somewhat open to arbitrariness: otherwise many people who attain an undesired corpulence would be able to avoid this by perception alone, merely by having the faculty of perception. No, ladies and gentlemen, regarding weight we are bound up with the world entirely objectively, and the organization by means of which we stand within color, tone, warmth, etc. is powerless against that objectivity.

So now we must above all pose the question: how is it that we arrive at any mathematical-mechanical judgment? How do we arrive at a science of mathematics, at a science of mechanics? How is it, then, that this mathematics, this mechanics, is applicable to the external world of nature, and how is it that there is a difference between the mathematical-mechanical qualities of external objects and those that confront us as the so-called subjective qualities of sensation, tone, color, warmth, etc.?

At the one extreme, then, we are confronted with this fundamental question. Tomorrow we shall discuss another such question. Then we shall have two starting-points from which we can proceed to investigate the nature of science. Thence we shall proceed to the other extreme to investigate the formation of social judgments.