The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Flyer, February 1919

Term:

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

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

Practical implementation:

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

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

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

Branches of the economy:

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

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

The peace treaty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Proper imitation develops freedom;

Authority develops the rights life;

Brotherliness, love, develops the economic life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The concept of commodity demands imagination;

The concept of labor demands inspiration;

The concept of capital demands intuition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spiritual science must be a knowledge of action.

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

The science of initiation and the impulse for freedom.

Viewpoints for the forming of a healthy social judgment.

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

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

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

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

Rudolf Steiner says in the 10th lecture:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carlo Pietzner
Michaelmas 1985

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I would like to say about certain things would not appear to me as a whole if I did not add today's lecture, which I have given here on the social question, to the one I gave today and the one I will give next Friday, because what has been developed here on the social question, although with seemingly quite different aims and from a seemingly quite different world, ultimately stems from the same human spiritual striving that I will be speaking to you about in these two lectures.

Those of you who have followed my book on the social question in the necessities of life, present and future, will have seen immediately in the first pages how the social question is approached from a point of view that decidedly considers the spiritual and cultural concerns of humanity.

As one of the phenomena that have brought humanity into its present situation, and without whose proper understanding this humanity cannot emerge from chaos and confusion, this book focuses on the relationship between humanity, cultural humanity, and the spiritual world in the last three to four centuries. It is emphasized how humanity's, I might say, negative relationship to the spiritual world is expressed in what has come to be the most widespread designation for this spiritual world: the expression, 'This spiritual world is mere ideology'. That is to say, the spiritual world is something that arises only as a superstructure on a substructure, like a kind of smoke rising from a material or economic reality. It is certainly true that in the last three to four centuries humanity has been repeatedly drawn into this view, as if all spiritual life were only a smoke rising from material life, only a superstructure on a substructure. But it is also clear to anyone who is able to follow the cultural development of the last three to four centuries and up to the present day that the whole state of mind of modern man, which is influenced by this relationship to the spiritual world, has led to the confusion and chaos in which we currently find ourselves. On the one hand, we have the terrible events of the world war catastrophe behind us, and on the other hand, the emerging revolutionary movement. We see, when we look back, how it became clear that people were no longer able to manage the external social life through their practical ideas. The facts have escaped these ideas, they have broken free, and they went their own way. They ran away without being held back by strong human ideas. And they ran into that which led them to ad absurdum, and through which the social life of the last three to four centuries was led ad absurdum. They ran into disaster. Various causes of this catastrophe have been investigated. Clarity on this point will not be achieved until it is realized that, as a result of the view of the spirit that one believed one had rightly arrived at, one has lost control over the facts of the external world and that one can only regain this control by acquiring a different relationship to the spiritual world. That is why all those who, from the standpoint of today's revolutionary movement, believe that the spiritual world is nothing more than an ideology, and base their reforms or revolutions on this view, will not bring humanity to salvation, but on the contrary will push it deeper and deeper into the abyss. Therefore, it is not just some subjective inclination of mine to speak in connection with the social question of what I have spoken of again and again every year here in Stuttgart as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. This spiritual science movement is intended to bear witness to the fact that the spiritual in man and outside of man is not an ideology. It is to bear witness to the fact that man can only gain the necessary strength for his actions, for his life practice, if he draws it from those insights that initially seem far removed from practical paths, but that train the human soul in such a way that they bring this soul into a state in which it is then also strengthened for the management of practical life. And if many today believe that the events that lie ahead of us will only take place in economic struggles, they are mistaken. We just do not realize it yet, but we are in the midst of intense spiritual struggles and that which shakes and stirs humanity up in an elemental way, which expresses itself outwardly through material and armed struggles — it is nothing other than the wave that is thrown to the surface from the stirred human souls that are struggling for new truths, for new insights. Anyone who is able to examine their own inner being to a certain extent today will be aware that the education that all of civilization has undergone over the last three to four centuries no longer allows people to educate themselves about their highest, soul and spiritual matters in the way that was necessarily possible in the past. Over the past three to four centuries and up to the present day, man has undergone a scientific education, in general. This has led him to demand a path to the supersensible worlds, of which only religious denominations have spoken to him so far, a path that is on a par with the scientific path, that does not want to present itself merely as the path of religious feeling, but as the path of knowledge of the supersensible world, of the spiritual world, alongside the path of research into the physical world through natural science. Even if few people today admit this fact, it lives unconsciously in the majority of present-day cultural humanity, and what people often bring to consciousness today is only a veiling of the facts, which can be expressed with the words: We do strive in our inmost being for a knowledge of the spiritual world, and we carry within us numerous dissatisfactions and unfulfillments of life because this longing for knowledge of the supersensible rules in our soul, instinctively rules and is not yet satisfied by anything in the cultural endeavors of our immediate environment, of our entire spiritual life.

And so today, starting from such points of view, I will speak about the paths to supersensible knowledge and observation, and the day after tomorrow about the actual supersensible being of man, that is, the true being of man that outlasts his life between birth and death. And I would like to show how this knowledge must become a real social factor, having a say in the new construction of our human society. It is certainly undeniable today for many people that a certain insight into human striving in general, that which one could call self-knowledge in the broadest sense, is more difficult for people today than it was for people in previous centuries. If we look back at earlier centuries, we cannot but admit that man then came more easily to a certain understanding of his own nature from the elementary demands of human nature than he does today. But there is another fact that stands in meaningful juxtaposition to the one just described, and that is this: today more than in earlier times, man needs this self-knowledge, which is more difficult for him than for earlier man. This is expressed in the striving for such self-knowledge, which is there after all, even if it is hidden behind this or that mask by our difficult life circumstances. But today, in terms of his upbringing, his feelings and his living conditions, people want to ask the authorities they know as scientific authorities about the state of their soul and spiritual life. This is because they have been accustomed to making the scientific the guiding principle of their lives. And so they also want to turn to the scientific forum for self-knowledge and knowledge of human nature. But it must be said that precisely by addressing this forum, he can initially only receive unsatisfactory information. And so, little by little, something has crept into the public consciousness about the questions of the soul and the spirit, which basically can only lead to doubt and uncertainty.

From what usually emerges, so to speak, from the various scientific disciplines, from the rest of life, it is clear that today's human beings have no real idea of how much goes on within their inner selves without being aware of it in their ordinary consciousness. What does the modern man believe about himself? He believes that on the one hand he is a body; and many, if they are at all concerned about it, then say that on the other hand there is the soul. But when the big question arises about the relationship of the body to the soul, of the soul to the body, then doubts arise, then uncertainties arise. On the one hand, we believe that the body is exhausted in what we survey through the sensory observation of the human being, what we dissect and recognize through anatomy, physiology, in short, through everything that the scientific knowledge of the human being provides. This provides us today with a certain idea of what the human body is. Then the human being knows that he develops ideas, that he has emotions, that he has a will that drives him to action – in short, the human being knows that something lives in his consciousness, underlying the will, underlying the emotions or feelings, underlying the ideas. But when he then reflects, “What is the relationship between what I think, feel and will, between the content of my inner soul life and my outer life?” he gets no answer. For what science, the view of the human body through the senses, shows him, is so fundamentally different from what lives in the will, in feeling and in thinking, that a bridge cannot be built from the body to the soul. And it is not only the case for ordinary consciousness that one is faced with the impossibility of building such a bridge, but if one goes through the various scientific, scholarly views of today, they generally conclude with this: something certain about this relationship between body and soul cannot be said.

Anyone who speaks about this question from the standpoint of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as it is meant here, is compelled to look very seriously at the doubts and uncertainties that beset humanity and science in this way to a high degree. And he must say, based on his knowledge: Yes, for scientific knowledge, for the kind of knowledge that has brought us to the great triumphs in natural science, for this knowledge, it must be fundamentally the case that one is driven only into doubt and contradictions when asking the relevant questions. Scientific knowledge is unsuitable for illuminating those depths of human nature from which alone answers to the burning questions can come. Now, however, the same humanities scholar is in a very special position with regard to the thought habits of the present. Since he has to present his findings from a completely different point of view than that of these thought habits, it is only natural that he is attacked in a hostile manner and judged from all sides. For he must not only open up a different field of knowledge from the everyday and the ordinary scientific one; he must also draw attention to a completely different way of knowing. He must point out that the questions raised cannot be answered at all with the way of knowing of ordinary life and ordinary science, and that if man were to remain with this ordinary scientific knowledge, he would never arrive at an answer to these questions. The spiritual scientist must assert that through a development that he himself takes care of, man comes out of this ordinary way of knowing to a completely different knowledge, to a knowledge that initially appears to be a kind of fantasy to the ordinary. Nevertheless, anyone who speaks of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science on the basis of the assumptions being spoken of to you today knows that he stands on the same scientific rigor and the same scientific discipline as the strictest scientific method of the present day. Only what the natural scientist strives for, for example, certain proofs of these facts and these laws, forms the prerequisite for the spiritual researcher, as he is meant here, that is what he has been trained in. He has gone through this before coming to his spiritual science. And in this day and age, no spiritual science should present itself to the public that does not stand on this ground, that does not assert and that has really come to know through research in the spiritual world the very thing by which natural science has come to its 'triumphs'. The spiritual researcher must have put himself in a position to be a natural scientist in the strictest sense of the word. Only the spiritual researcher begins where the natural scientist ends. While the natural scientist searches for certain results for his life of ideas, for his thinking, the spiritual scientist strives to let that which one undergoes with natural science as a strictly methodical, as a conscientious scientific experience, be his education, and only from there to go out and ascend to those higher cognitions of which I will have to speak to you today and the day after tomorrow. Therefore, it is the case for the spiritual researcher that he cannot communicate in the usual sense: I observed this or that external fact; this or that law emerged for me from this or that external fact. Rather, the spiritual researcher must have gone through everything that the natural scientist speaks of as preparation; and he must have arrived, through this preparation, at a state of soul such that he rises to new facts, to new observations, of which he can only tell, and which alone can form the content of the truly spiritual world. Therefore, the spiritual researcher, as he is meant here, will have to speak of his paths of knowledge in a completely different way than the one who, for example, has only gone through a scientific path of knowledge, who has only gone through what is often called a path of knowledge, a path to science, within today's cultural life, today's spiritual life.

Ask those who have gone through a path to science today how they went through this path to science, I would say, with a certain inner calm. They can tell how they worked here or there in the laboratory, how they heard this or that about the processes of human, historical development, how they incorporated it into their concepts, how they compiled these or those statistical facts in order to gain these or those social insights. But we will hear from all of them how they went through it all in a certain state of inner calmness of soul and then, as it were, came into possession of the scientific concepts they had been striving for. The spiritual researcher, especially the anthroposophically oriented spiritual researcher, is not in such a situation. If he is serious about this, he will not be able to speak of such inner calm and indifference in which his path of knowledge was traversed as can be spoken of the paths of knowledge of external science today. The spiritual researcher, if he speaks the truth about his path of knowledge, will tell you about inner struggles and conquests. He will tell you of the abysses of the soul he had to go through before the true supersensible insights presented themselves to him. He will have to tell you how much his own human nature, that which is dear and valuable to man in his outer life, has often become an inner opponent of his striving for knowledge. He will have to tell you about the courage he often had to summon against the inner opposing and hostile forces that lie in human nature and are averse to the true path of knowledge. And so it will be that what the spiritual researcher has to say about soul and spirit is the result of those moods of the soul that have not taken place in inner calm, that have taken place in inner turmoil, that have taken place amid the most serious inner struggles. And this spiritual researcher will have to say that nothing other than inner suffering, inner pain and the overcoming of it, has brought about what he may justifiably call, as he believes, insight into the supersensible worlds.

The spiritual researcher will have to speak of the struggles he had to undergo in two directions. For many people today, these struggles are in an abstract world, but only for the faith of these many people. By consciously going through these struggles, the spiritual researcher learns to recognize that he is truly not alone in the world in going through these struggles. As a rule, the spiritual researcher is not so presumptuous as to say to himself that something is taking place in his soul in which other people have no part. He comes to say to himself that he is only raising to consciousness what unconsciously takes place as an inner struggle at the bottom of every human soul. And the spiritual researcher knows how these struggles, I would say, between the consciousness that lives in thinking, feeling and willing, and the body that external sensory perception and physiology and anatomical science show, how these struggles take place in between, and that they rise up into human consciousness like something that many people in the present time cannot cope with. What is expressed in their instincts and often in physical and mental illnesses, in their dissatisfaction and unfulfilled longings, what is expressed in their nervousness, without their knowing what the actual causes of this state of mind in the depths of the human being are.

The spiritual researcher has to struggle on two fronts: firstly, with the external world and, secondly, with his own inner being. For people today, natural science and its popularization in the way people think is often merely a reason to be happy about the great progress of humanity, and rightly so. For the spiritual researcher, however, the experience of natural science is a particularly intense life struggle. By delving into what today's natural science is, by not only penetrating intellectually to the usual scientific knowledge, but by wanting to experience what is contained in natural science, the spiritual researcher can only experience life with natural science as a struggle. Indeed, through sense perception, through the combinations of sense perceptions that the human intellect produces in the laws of natural science, one does learn many things about nature. But you know, and in earlier years I have often dealt with this fact in my lectures in other contexts, you know that precisely the most conscientious natural scientists and natural researchers come to the conclusion that there are limits to this knowledge of nature. The most conscientious natural researchers, they speak their “ignorabimus” precisely out of a certain deepening, that is, we will not penetrate the essence of things through nature. And now it is once in human nature, that when such a limit piles up, as it rightly piles up before the knowledge of nature, man then says to himself: Well, that is just a limit of knowledge, you have to stop there. He then speaks of insurmountable limits of human knowledge.

The one who lets himself be completely absorbed by the fact that he already feels the spiritual research profession within him, that which is in the soul as a full force, cannot simply stand still when science establishes such limits. Such limits become for him the cause to fight out a life-long struggle of knowledge with that which presents itself to science as power and matter, for example, or as something else. What science itself is unwilling to penetrate, the spiritual researcher must fight his way through with. Only then does the beginning of his path of knowledge and his observations begin; the observations that he cannot go through with as calmly as one goes through a laboratory observation, the observations that he must go through with continually calling upon new spiritual-soul powers of knowledge. And then, when man comes up against these limits and fights his fight, then he becomes acquainted with the reciprocal action between his own inner being of knowledge and the outer world. There he experiences a spiritual fact of observation that presents itself to him as a fundamental characteristic of all human life. As the spiritual researcher struggles with the outer limits of knowledge of nature, he realizes that he has to draw on something from his inner soul in this struggle that otherwise plays a very small role in the knowledge of nature. He has to draw on those powers of his soul that otherwise only come into play in the interaction between human and human or, in an attenuated sense, in the interaction with natural beings, with living beings. He must draw from his inner being the power of life, that power which we unfold when we stand face to face with another person and inner sympathy passes from our soul to the soul of the other person. And it forces itself upon him, not as something subjective, but as an objective fact, the very sober knowledge of nature, and the struggle with the limits of knowledge of nature and that which plays a great role in human nature and human life: sympathy, love, the fundamental tone of all human social intercourse. And man now learns through experience to recognize the relationship between the limits of nature, which stand in the way of his knowledge, and the power of love. Through direct observation, which he has brought about by strongly invoking his inner soul powers, he learns to recognize that at the moment he becomes more deeply involved in the struggle with the limits of nature, he must expend his power of love. It is as if his power of love were released from his soul and flowed over into those areas of nature that lie beyond the boundary. And now the spiritual researcher comes to the significant and deeply moving fact that human nature is adapted to its world environment in such a way that it is denied to penetrate into the inner being with ordinary knowledge. The inner being lies beyond the boundaries of nature. If we did not have such boundaries, we would not be able to be endowed with the power of self-sacrificing love in ordinary life.

A deep meaning comes into this human life through the realization of the connection between knowledge and love. One learns that one can only love in ordinary life by this love-power separating itself from our cognitive activity exercised through the intellect. This fact, this observation, must not only be considered intellectually, it must make the deepest impression on a person once he has grasped it, for in this way he comes to know the very special way in which he is placed in the world. And he knows what he has to do if he is a true spiritual researcher. He knows that he cannot continue to penetrate into what lies beyond the boundary if he has not first strengthened himself in the power of human love and love for all other things to a degree greater than he has in the ordinary life. One must be equipped with such a strong love for all things. This equipment must be the preparation of the innermost being of the soul if one wants to go further in the struggle with the outer world, as I have indicated to you. This path, which the soul must go through so that it does not lose the power of love, so that it is not, as it were, sucked dry of this power, but can enter unreservedly into the supersensible worlds, I have tried to describe in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. And I would here expressly note that such descriptions of the right path to knowledge essentially serve to prepare the human soul so that it can safely follow the higher path to knowledge. From the present time and into the near future, humanity will demand this higher path of knowledge precisely through scientific education. Humanity will — it is in a process of development, I will speak more about this the day after tomorrow — arrive at a point where it can no longer do without such insight into the spiritual worlds as I have indicated. Humanity will arrive at a point where it would feel mentally unhappy and lost if the path into the spiritual, the supersensible worlds were not opened to it. This path will be taken by an irresistible inner impulse.

But it will be necessary to show more and more precisely and in detail how human nature has to prepare itself so that it can walk this path safely, so that the human forces that are important for practical and social life, such as love, are not taken away from it. When a person engages in such inner thought exercises, whereby he makes his thinking, which otherwise stops at the boundaries of natural phenomena, stronger and stronger, you will find in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” such thought exercises, such meditations and thought concentration, through which thinking becomes ever stronger and stronger. When a person does such exercises, he comes to a point in his development where he sees inner experiences and observations placed before his soul that do not appear before his soul in ordinary life. Then he clarifies above all the one question, the fundamental question of the life of the soul: What is it actually that I perceive of the world through my senses, that I develop within me as a world of ideas? What is it actually? And he comes upon a most remarkable fact. When stated in the abstract, it does not seem so remarkable, but in its effect on the whole human being it is highly significant and has a shattering influence on the human soul. Man comes, precisely by intensifying his thinking in such a way that he has the feeling, “I am not only passively surrendering my thoughts to the world, but I am thinking in such a way that a will, directed not by me but by the beings of the world themselves, lives in my thinking.” man comes to realize, especially when he intensifies this thinking, when he makes this thinking stronger than it is in ordinary life — that all thinking and all sensory imagining of ordinary life is nevertheless nothing more than an image, that it has an imagistic character.

It is a great impression that one gets when one comes to this through the intensification of thinking: this ordinary thinking, which one develops by looking at the outer world, which one develops when one reflects on what one has experienced in the outer world, this ordinary thinking is basically only something that runs entirely in images. It is something that has no reality in itself, as it arises. There comes a moment when, if one has followed the spiritual development of modern civilized humanity, something is awakened in the soul that has a shattering effect. It is remarkable for someone who has really had the experiences I have just described to hear that one of the greatest minds of humanity, one of the greatest thinkers of this humanity, the first representative of the newer historical development of world-views, Cartesius, Descartes, uttered the remarkable sentence: “I think, therefore I am. Cogito ergo sum.” That Descartes uttered this sentence is proof for the true spiritual researcher that he did not really look into the spiritual world, that Descartes did not come to that intensified thinking of which I have just spoken, as being based on such exercises as I describe in my book ”How to Know Higher Worlds.” Because when you get to that, then you say the word that Descartes wanted to say differently, then you say: I think, therefore I am not. Because as long as you remain with your soul in ordinary thinking, you are not. Thinking is an image, and one only becomes aware of what is reflected in it when one intensifies this thinking so that one does not experience it as shadowy as one experiences ordinary thinking, but as if permeated by the will; one experiences it as I presented it as pure thinking as early as 1892 in my Philosophy of Freedom.

When one experiences this thinking as an active, self-active process, then one knows that ordinary thinking is a shadow image of a reality, that one is not in the movement of thinking that one accomplishes. Therefore, it also follows from real spirit communication, from the real spiritual researcher, that by repeatedly reinforcing this thinking through the calm experience of thoughts with which he himself meditatively fills his consciousness, it is as if he grows into a reality with this thinking. Whereas he used to feel free in shadowy thinking, he now feels something like a spiritual drowning. And precisely for this reason he must make his whole being strong and vigorous in soul and spirit, so that he is armed against what opposes the intensified thinking, which inwardly, in the soul, is like drowning, like an extinguishing of consciousness. One must live one's way into this intensified thinking with a strong consciousness. In this way, by intensifying one's thinking, one actually experiences the shadowiness of ordinary thinking through direct spiritual perception. And then there comes a point in life that, more than anything I have been able to mention earlier, strikes this human life with a sudden shock. That is the point at which one learns to recognize what ordinary thinking and imagining actually is in its shadowiness, in its pictorial nature. One learns to recognize that it is the shadow of what one has experienced in a purely spiritual world before birth or, let us say, before conception, the shadow of reality, which is called prenatal reality. The life of a human being in the spirit, before birth, before conception, one experiences this, one feels it in the intensified thinking. And then one learns to recognize how one actually has the power of thought, of ordinary thought. One has the power of ordinary thought because one has led a different kind of life in the spiritual world before birth or before conception. And this different kind of life fades away according to this reality, it becomes a mere shadow, and we experience the shadow in our imagination, in our thinking. Time becomes like space. One looks back into the prenatal time, into the time before conception. One looks back into the spiritual world, and one sees the reality that one has experienced there. And just as a spatial phenomenon acts on another spatial phenomenon that is distant from it, so time acts like space. In this view, which I have indicated, prenatal life is still there. And it shows: by thinking, this prenatal life has an effect on my present life. I am, by thinking, dependent on this prenatal life. That shines into my soul being and through it I can think.

In short, what is called the human spirit, independent of bodily life, becomes a perception, but a perception that one must first struggle to attain through inner soul struggles. And now, now light comes into the ordinary view of the soul. Now one knows when one believes in ordinary life: there one has thinking, feeling, willing, which has no connection with the body — this must be so because in this ordinary life of the soul, in this imagining, one has only a reflection of a reality that has become paralyzed at our birth. Now we know that the soul is actually something else than what has been living with us since our birth. And now, when we step out into the world again with this intensified thinking, we see something else besides the ordinary sense world. One can also support oneself in the sense world, but that is not usually advised, and I am not advising it here either, I am just mentioning it for the sake of explanation: At the moment when you make an effort to develop an inner power of imagination of the soul, through which you are able, for example, to imagine a green meadow purely through your inner soul power quite differently than green, namely in the color of peach blossoms – it takes a strong inner effort to do so – then this inner effort that you make to not see the green, to see the soul's counter-color, not the physical counter-color, then this effort works in such a way that it supports you in generating that powerful, that strengthened thinking of which I have just spoken. But then you can also judge other external experiences differently than through ordinary thinking.

Then you meet another person, you enter into some kind of relationship with them, and you say to yourself – not with everyone, but in certain contexts with the other person, and also in certain contexts with other beings of nature, with the world in general. You say to yourself: Oh, I have not in vain reached to strengthen my thinking, I have become capable in this strengthened thinking to leap over the boundaries of nature, to look beyond the boundaries of nature. But then I see what happens to me in life differently than when I stood at these boundaries as at the boundaries of knowledge. Then I see what enters my life as fate, as fateful events, as an effect of past lives on earth that I went through before I progressed to the life in the spiritual world between death and a new birth, which I have just said is reflected in ordinary thinking and imagining. In short, what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has to say about the life of the human soul in the spiritual world, about repeated earthly lives, is not a gray theory, is not a hypothesis, and is not spoken of as something that has been conceived, but is stated as the result of those cognitions and observations which one only penetrates to when one has prepared oneself for them in the way I have just indicated and as you will find it further explained in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”.

Today I have indicated the path to the supersensible worlds from this one side. I will speak about the whole context of the supersensible man the day after tomorrow. Today I still have to discuss the other boundary that the spiritual man comes to, the other boundary at which he has to fight a hard inner battle just as at the boundary of natural phenomena. That other boundary is the one which I would like to call the boundary towards one's own human inner being. It is the boundary that man often wants to deceive himself about by becoming a mystic in the ordinary sense. Just as the spiritual researcher has to live much more intensely with natural science than the natural scientist himself, because the natural scientist only comes to his usual results and insights, but the spiritual researcher has to have experiences, struggles with natural science, so the spiritual researcher must also really go through everything that the mystic builds on, in which the mystic often delights inwardly. But at the same time he must undergo an inner struggle with this very joy, with this edification. While the ordinary mystic believes that he can arrive at questions of eternity by a certain kind of immersion in his own inner being, the real spiritual researcher, in penetrating to this inner being of man after the manner of the ordinary mystic, is beset by the most bitter doubt and the most terrible uncertainty. Just as with natural science, the spiritual researcher has to struggle with mysticism, but now inwards. Just as the spiritual researcher must not stop at ordinary natural science and its limits, he must not stop at ordinary mysticism either. For precisely because he immerses himself conscientiously and without illusions in the human interior, doubts and uncertainties arise for him in the face of ordinary mysticism. Precisely because he develops what I have just characterized: the intensified thinking; because he clearly sees into what occurs through mysticism, in which many people feel so at home that they believe themselves to be resting in the divine substance when they inwardly mystically deepen, therefore the spiritual researcher cannot stop at this mysticism, because he has learned not to indulge in illusions when observing it. He has learned to really fight all forms of fantasy. He has trained himself in strictly disciplined, scientific thinking. And so he soon sees through what the mystic calls a life with his divine inner being, with his higher self, as nothing more than the experience of all kinds of unconscious reminiscences, which are only misinterpreted because they have incorporated themselves badly into the soul or because they are overshadowed by the memory.

You see, I would like to give you an idea of this, that the spiritual researcher does not allow himself to be blinded by any illusions; that the true essence of spiritual research, through an inner discipline, through a strict inner schooling, leads to all fantasy. Therefore, the spiritual researcher is not able to calm himself down in the way that the ordinary mystic does. He regards these as subjective reminiscences; he regards them as something to which the ordinary person, in his mystical contemplation, gives himself over to all kinds of illusions. But one thing becomes clear to the spiritual researcher: that one cannot penetrate at all in the way of this ordinary inner contemplation to anything that is really the human soul. One arrives at a true reality just as little as one arrives at a true reality through ordinary, unintensified thinking. One arrives only at the elevation of a certain refined soul egoism. One feels inwardly so well and comfortably when one can say that the soul is absorbed in the divine human being, and the like. Many of those who are revered as mystics live in this comfort, in this refined egoism. The spiritual researcher must see through the true facts here, because, precisely because of his strengthened thinking, it is clear to him what the actual facts are regarding this inner mysticism. It becomes clear to him that if one could penetrate in the ordinary way into the human interior down to the divine-soul core of the human being, one would then not have a power of the soul that is so extremely necessary for ordinary practical and social life: one would not have the power of remembrance, the power of memory. We only have the power of recollection, the power of memory, because we cannot, through inner experience in the ordinary sense, descend into the full human being. The spiritual researcher then acquires an inner insight into how one can truly descend into the inner being of a person through a kind of strengthening of the ordinary soul life.

You see, this ordinary life of the soul takes place to a very great extent quite unconsciously. For are we not, in fact, a different person every day? Anyone who engages in even the most superficial self-observation will notice that they are deeply affected by their experiences each day. Just think how the soul changes from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, by experiencing this or that. Think how we change from time to time, as we go through our lives between birth and death. But man undergoes this process very unconsciously, he does not observe himself in the process, and above all he does not develop the will to make himself different. In ordinary life he develops only a small degree of self-discipline, of self-education. By increasing this self-discipline, this self-education, by consciously taking himself in hand, man comes to recognize himself in life as truly becoming. If we do not just abandon ourselves to life as it presents itself to us, allowing ourselves to be passively trained by life, but if we actively set out to shape ourselves, to educate ourselves, so that we often say to ourselves: Today you cannot do this, you will do that do this or that, so that you can enter into this or that - in short, when you take what self-education is into your own will and become more and more aware of it and make it an exercise; when you do this systematically, then another power is added to the strengthened thinking. Details of this, of which there are many, can be found in the book mentioned. If one carries this out, then the will becomes something different than what it is. Then the will becomes so that it is permeated by thoughts, that it reveals itself as interwoven with light. While the will otherwise remains something very dark for us, which is only stimulated by the thoughts of the head, a thought shines out to us from those efforts of the will, when we have trained ourselves as I have indicated. The world in which we move at will becomes completely permeated with thoughts. The world does not become a mere symbol, but a great fabric of world thoughts, through our will having become active in this way. And then, from these world thoughts, knowledge comes to us that can be added to the others I have mentioned.

Once you have passed this other test of mysticism, once you have recognized that your will is imbued with world thought, then life expands in another direction, but in such a way that something occurs for which you must be prepared, so that no harm comes to the life of the soul. You will find more details about this in the book mentioned. Damage could be caused to the soul because in the moments when one looks into the spiritual world through this other willpower, which is illuminated by thoughts about the world, one must renounce memory, the ability to remember. One cannot remember what one has seen spiritually. If today, on the paths of training that I have just mentioned to you as the training of the will, I have done some spiritual research and want to tell you about it tomorrow, I cannot get it out of my memory. I can only tell you about it if I go through all the events that led to the experience again, so that it arises anew in my soul. One must renounce the actual memory. But instead, the human soul presents itself to the soul, that human soul that cannot be experienced through ordinary mysticism. One experiences it after one has passed the test of ordinary mysticism, after one has overcome that which adapts one to the ability to remember in life. Just as the ordinary world of thoughts and ideas is a shadow of prenatal life, so one beholds that which lives in the will, which otherwise remains so dark – that which lives below memory, that which is spiritually hidden in the human is spiritually hidden in the human body, but cannot be seen, because otherwise we would have no memory in ordinary life —, one then sees it as what remains as a germ when the human being has passed through the gate of death. Then one learns to recognize through direct observation, through perception, that which hovers before man as the immortality of the soul. Then one learns to recognize the spiritual connection between what lives in man before birth and what lives in him after death. Then one learns to recognize the eternal in human nature.

Today I have described to you the paths that lead to supersensible knowledge and observations, to that which gives man a consciousness of the immortality of his soul. I have shown you that it must become a modern path for the development of humanity to ascend to real knowledge of the supersensible world on the basis of everything that humanity has acquired in religious and scientific development. The day after tomorrow I will talk about how this human being presents himself as a supersensible being before our soul.

Today, to conclude, I would just like to summarize in a few sentences what appears to me to be the bridge between the lectures I have given here this year on a seemingly completely different subject and the lectures I am now giving.

You see, I have often had to ask myself in the times that have emerged from the terrible social experiences even before the world war catastrophe, then from the horror experiences during the world war catastrophe and now afterwards: What about the ideas and concepts, with the impulses that people need to really shape social life of their own accord? For man is compelled to shape this social life with the future in mind. And I have conscientiously, truly conscientiously, inquired in the literature and everywhere else I could think of about what ideas about social will are held by the economists of current opinion, by people who think about economics and have to do with economics, and on what basis they form such ideas.

I have just had a strange experience in this search. I have not made it easy for myself, this search, and I have not started from the immodesty of wanting to practice a frivolous criticism everywhere. The one who becomes a spiritual researcher is far from this frivolity. He is very inclined, precisely for reasons that you can gather from today's lecture, to lovingly respond to the ideas and will impulses that people produce. But still, I could not close my mind to the fact that especially the social and ethical sciences everywhere today suffer from a certain imperfection, from a certain lack of clarity of concepts. You can see this in practice when you look at the economists of the various schools of thought and see what one says about goods, about labor, about capital, what the other says about it, and so on. But what people say lives in the terrible struggles of the present, it lives itself out, it wants to be shaped. People fight, fight out of instincts. They make demands and do not know what they are talking about. This is something that weighs on the soul. And then it became clear to me, and I will say this quite openly, where the real harm lies. It became clear to me that in those conceptions which one wants to gain from what lives in human activity, in human production, what lives in what one person does for another in the social order, that which the mere scientific habits of thought give cannot live.

This, for example, is the terrible thing about Karl Marx's political economy, that it starts from the model of the habits of thought in the natural sciences, and that as a result it does not arrive at a true understanding of the external social situation of humanity, but only at a killing criticism and at the suggestion of fruitless revolutionary movements. This is the tragedy of present thinking. And so, when one has the opportunity to have spiritual science, the paths of which I have characterized to you today, on the one hand, and to have the great social questions on the other, one comes to the conclusion that this way of thinking, which people have developed over the last three to four centuries under the influence of ideological thinking and the unreality of spiritual life, is not sufficient to grasp social life. In order to grasp this social life, a training of the spirit is needed that can only be acquired through the spiritual world itself. What is contained in the circulation of goods on the market, what is given to them by human labor, cannot be understood unless it is related to the spiritual worlds to which the human soul belongs. And what lies in the work of one person for another in social life cannot be grasped if one cannot train one's thinking through thoughts that reach into the spiritual world. And one will not grasp what capital is in the right sense if one cannot measure its mode of operation in its purely material nature against what man is as a spiritual being.

In short, we cannot arrive at a knowledge of the social organism without first having spiritual science. This is a fact that has become clear to me, and it is from this fact that I have tried to build a bridge between spiritual science and the impulses for the threefold social organism. How this bridge looks in terms of the development of humanity into the future is something I will also have to talk about the day after tomorrow. I will have to speak about what arises from the basis of such a soul life, which is capable of understanding from common sense that what I have said today is based on truth, about necessities for the social development of the present and the near future.

For decades we have been hearing again and again from the present consciousness with a certain justification the call: the enslaved part of humanity must redeem itself, must free itself. For, whatever may happen in the struggle for this redemption, this liberation, this enslaved part of humanity has nothing to lose but its chains. Now, as true as that is on the one hand, it is nevertheless one-sided for the one who is able to see the whole world, the world that is before man, to see in the light of the spirit. For as hard as it is to bear chains in the material world, as those meant in the saying quoted, so justified it is to strive to shake off these chains, which one can only lose through a struggle – there is still something that must be said to be more terrible to lose than all material chains of humanity: that is the fulfillment of the soul with the realization of the true spiritual man. If we continue to develop under the relationship to the spirit that has emerged over the last three to four centuries, and which can be rightly regarded as an ideology, we could lose something that must not be lost: the awareness of the spiritual nature of man, of the eternal significance of this man. And it will be the task of modern spiritual science to ensure that this awareness is not lost, that man once again fights for a spiritual life in which he appears to himself in his true form. If it undertakes this task, it will make the most important contribution to the social reorganization of human life. But then, when one realizes this, one will also say: it is not only economic struggles that we must boldly sail into, but in the future there will also be spiritual struggles. May humanity prove strong and courageous in standing these spiritual battles, then it will not lose what it must not lose if it is not to sink into the abyss: the consciousness of spirituality, of the eternity of man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This lecture appeared in The Golden Blade, 1954.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speech to workers of the Daimler factory

The sense in which my topic is to be treated today can be seen from the appeal that each of you has received. The subject today is to treat that which is called socialization today, which sounds like a world-historical call on the one hand and like a general human call on the other, from a broader and wider perspective than it is usually treated. And not because it corresponds to some kind of preference, but because the great and powerful demand of our time can only be grasped in the right way if one approaches the subject as broadly and generously as possible.

If I had spoken to a labor assembly five or six years ago in the same way that I want to speak to you today, the conditions for the speaker to communicate with his audience would have been very different than they are today. That is the case, it is just not well understood in the broadest circles yet. You see, five or six years ago a meeting like this would have listened to me, would have formed an opinion, according to the social views it held, as to whether one or other of the things the speaker said might differ in one way or another from its own social views, and it would have rejected him if he had put forward anything that was not in line with its own views. Today, it must depend on something quite different, because these five to six years have passed as significant, incisive events containing humanity, and today it is already necessary that trust in someone who wants to say something in terms of socialization, not only when he wants exactly the same thing as you, but when he shows that, with regard to the justified demands of the time, which are expressed in the ever-growing proletarian movement, he has an honest and sincere feeling and desire for these justified demands of the time. Today, we are facing very different facts – time has developed rapidly – than those we faced five or six years ago. Today, we have to look at very different things than we did five or six years ago. The following is offered by way of introduction.

You see, respected, very clever socialist thinkers, shortly before the autumn revolution of 1918 in Germany approached, they said something like the following: When this war is over, the German government will have to treat the socialist parties quite differently than it has treated them in the past. Then it will have to hear them. Then it will have to draw them into its council. — Well, I do not want to continue the matter, as I said, so spoke respected socialist leaders. What does that show? That shows that shortly before November 1918, these respected socialist leaders thought that after the war they would have to deal with some kind of government that would be there in the old sense, and which would only take these socialist personalities into account. How quickly things have changed, how quickly something has come about that even these socialist leaders could not have imagined! The kind of government that they believed would still be there has disappeared into the abyss. But that makes a huge, enormous difference, and today you are all faced with completely different facts. Today you are no longer in a position to seek 'consideration', but today you are in a position to participate in the new development of the social order that must take place. A positive demand is made of you, the demand to know, to think about what has to happen, how we can reasonably move forward in terms of the recovery of the social organism. A completely different language must now be spoken than before. Above all, it is important to look back and remember what led us into the terrible situation of the present; what should change for the better, what must change. Let me just mention a few introductory remarks.

I do not want to trouble you much with personal remarks. But if you are not a theorist, not an abstract scientist, but, like me, have acquired your views on the necessary social development through more than thirty years of life experience, then what you have to say in general and what you feel personally merge into one. As I said, I do not want to bore you with any particularly long personal statements, but perhaps it may be noted in the introduction that I was forced, personally forced, in the spring of 1914 in a small meeting in Vienna – a larger probably would have laughed at me at the time for the reasons I will speak of in a moment — to summarize what, figuratively speaking, had emerged in my bloody life experience regarding the social question and social movement. At that time, as a conclusion of decades of experience and decades of observation of the social life of today's so-called civilized world, I had to say the following: the prevailing tendencies of life will become ever stronger until they finally destroy themselves. The one who spiritually understands social life sees everywhere how terribly the tendencies towards social ulcerous growths are sprouting. This is the great cultural concern that arises for the one who sees through existence. That is the terrible thing, which has such a depressing effect and which, even if one could suppress all enthusiasm for recognizing the processes of life by the means of a spirit-cognizing science, would lead one to speak of the remedies that can be used against it – one would like to scream words about it to the world, as it were. If the social organism continues to develop as it has done so far, cultural damage will occur that is to this organism what cancerous growths are to the natural human organism.

Now, if someone had said this in the spring of 1914, the so-called clever people would naturally have thought him a fantasist. For what did the very clever people, those to whom, as the leading class, the fate of humanity was entrusted, what did they actually say about what was in store for the world? Today, one has to investigate a little critically what the minds of these leading people were made of, otherwise people will always object that it is not necessary to speak as seriously as we want to today. What did these so-called leading personalities say at that time? Let us listen, for example, to the Foreign Minister who was jointly responsible for foreign policy at that time. In a decisive session of the German Reichstag, in front of several hundred enlightened gentlemen, he had the following to say about what was about to happen. He said: The general relaxation in Europe is making gratifying progress. We are doing better every day with the Petersburg government. This government does not listen to the comments of the press pack, and we will continue to cultivate our friendly relations with St. Petersburg as we have done in the past. We are in negotiations with England, which have not yet been concluded, but which have progressed so far that we can hope to establish the very best relations with England in the near future.

This general relaxation has made such great progress, these relations with St. Petersburg have been so well initiated by the government, these negotiations with England have borne such fruit, that soon after, the time began in which, to put it mildly, ten to twelve million people within Europe were killed and three times as many were maimed. Now I may ask you: How were the gentleman and those to whom he belonged as a class informed about what was going on in the world? How strong was their intellect to grasp what was needed for the immediate future? Were they not truly stricken with blindness? And was there not added to this that terrible, that hideous arrogance that labeled anyone as a fantasist who pointed out that there is a social cancer that will break out in a terrible way in the near future? These questions must be asked today. They must be asked because numerous personalities today, despite the loudly speaking facts, are as blind as those with regard to what is only at the beginning of its development today: the form which this social movement, which has been going on for more than half a century, has taken in its newer form since the fall of 1918. That is what one would like to achieve today, that there would be people - such people must be among the proletarian population today - who have in their heads a consciousness of what must actually happen.

Those who, over the past few decades, have learned not only to think like so many who talk about socialism today, but to think and feel like the proletariat, have been led by their fate to do so. Today, they must think about the social question in a much more serious and broader way than many do. He must look at what this movement has become today as a result of its development over the last five, six, seven decades since Karl Marx's great reputation spread throughout the world; he must realize how the social movement, how the social programs today have to step out of the stage of criticism and to enter the realm of creation, the realm where one can know what needs to be done to rebuild the human social order, the necessity of which must be felt today by everyone who lives with an alert soul.

In three fundamental areas of life, the working class has sensed what is actually good for it, what must change for it in its entire position in the world, in human society, and so on. But the conditions of the last few centuries, especially of the nineteenth century and particularly of the beginning of the twentieth century, have had the effect that, while more or less unconsciously, instinctively the worker felt with his heart very well that the paths to his future ideal are three, yet, so to speak, the attention was directed only to a single goal. The modern bourgeois social order has, so to speak, relegated everything to the economic sphere. The modern worker was not allowed, not able, to gain a completely free, fully conscious view of what is actually necessary from his employment relationship. He could, because modern technology, namely modern capitalism, had harnessed him to the mere economic order, he could actually only believe, because the bourgeoisie had shifted everything to the economic level, that the downfall of the old, the collapse of the old, and the construction to be longed for and achieved, would have to develop in the economic sphere, in the sphere where he saw that capital, human labor and goods were at work. And today, when the justifiable call for socialization is heard, even when other areas of life are taken into account, only the economic order is actually considered. As if hypnotized, I would say, the gaze is directed purely at economic life, purely at what is understood by the names capital, labor and goods, living conditions, material achievements. But deep down in the proletarian's heart, even if he is not quite sure in his head, there sits what tells him that the social question is a threefold one, that this newer social question, which he suffers from, for which he wants to stand up, for which he wants to fight, is a spiritual question, a legal or state question and an economic question. Therefore, today, allow me to treat this social question, this social movement, as a spiritual question, as a legal question, and as an economic question.

You only have to look at economic life to see that there is much more at stake than just economic life. If we are right to call for socialization today, we must also ask: yes, what should be socialized and how should it be socialized? Because from these two points of view,

What should be socialized?

How should it be socialized?

we must, above all, consider economic life as it has developed in recent times, and how it actually is in our day, if we have no illusions about it, at least for our region, it is more or less in collapse. We must realize today that we can no longer learn anything from all the things that people in the sense of capitalism, in the sense of private enterprise, have regarded as practical and appropriate for people. Anyone who today believes that one can get ahead with institutions that are only conceived in the same way as one has previously conceived is truly indulging in the greatest illusions. But we must learn from these institutions. You see, the most characteristic thing that has emerged in social life over a long period of time, but especially to this day, is that on the one hand we have the previously leading classes, accustomed in their thinking to what has been comfortable for them for a long time; those have repeatedly praised and even adulated in their spokesmen and themselves all that modern culture and modern civilization have produced that is so glorious and great. How often have we not heard: Man today rushes across miles in a way that was previously unimaginable; thought travels at lightning speed by telegraph or telephone. External artistic and scientific culture is spreading in an unimagined way. — I could continue this song of praise, which I do not want to sing and which countless people who have been able to participate in this culture have sung over and over again, for a long time. But today, indeed, the times demand that we ask: how was this new culture possible from an economic point of view alone? It was only possible because it arose as a superstructure over the physical and mental misery, over the physical and mental distress of the broad masses, who were not allowed to participate in the much-praised culture. If it had not been for this broad mass, if it had not worked, this culture could not have existed. That is the crux of the matter; that is the historical question of today, which must not be ignored.

From this, however, the hallmark of all modern economic life emerges. This characteristic consists in the fact that today any follower, any member of the propertied class, can easily provide a popular “proof”; recently, this proof has been provided more abundantly. For a while, people kept quiet about it because, foolish as it is, stupid as it is, one can no longer dare to tell the working class, the truly socially minded people, about this folly. But today it is being heard more and more often, today when so much folly is going through the air, through the so-called intellectual air. It is easy for those who still want to represent today's declining economic order to say: Yes, if you now really divide up all the capital income and ownership of the means of production, the division does not particularly improve what the individual proletarian has. It is a foolish and stupid objection, because it is not at all a matter of this objection, because it is not at all about this objection, but about something much more fundamental, greater and more powerful. What it is about is this: that this whole economic culture, as it has developed under the influence of the ruling classes, has become such that a surplus, an added value, can only give a few the fruits of this culture. Our entire economic culture is such that only a few can enjoy the fruits. Nor is more added value given than what only a few can enjoy. If the little that is given were to be distributed among those who also have a right to a dignified existence, it would not even begin to suffice. Where does this come from?

This question must be posed differently than it is by so many today. I would like to give you just a few examples; I could multiply these examples not a hundredfold, but a thousandfold; perhaps some examples in the form of questions. I would like to ask: Within the German economic culture of the last decades, did all machines really need exactly as much coal as was absolutely necessary for these machines? Ask the question objectively and you will get the answer that our economic system was in such a state of chaos that many machines required much more coal in the last decades than would have been necessary according to the technical advances. But what does that mean? It means nothing other than that much more human labor was expended for the production and extraction of these coals than should have been expended and could have been expended if truly socio-economic thinking had been present. This human labor was used uselessly, it was wasted. I ask you: Are people aware that in the years before the war, we used twice as much coal in the German economy as we should have been allowed to use? We wasted so much coal that today we have to say that we could have gotten by with half the coal production if the people who had to supply the technology and the economy had been up to the task. I am giving this example for the reason that you see that there is an opposite pole to the luxury culture of the few on the one hand. This luxury culture has not been able to produce capable minds that would have been up to the newer economic life. As a result, an infinite amount of labor has been wasted. As a result, productivity has been undermined. These are the secret causes, quite objective causes, by which we have been brought into the situation in which we now find ourselves. Therefore, the social and socialization question must also be solved in a technical and objective way. The culture of the past has not produced the minds that would have been able to somehow create an industrial science. There was no industrial science; everything is based on chaos, on chance. Much was left to cunning, to cheating, to senseless personal competition. But that had to be. Because if one had gone into the matter on the basis of industrial science, then what would have resulted would no longer be what only a luxury culture has produced for a few from the surplus value of the working, producing population. Today, the question of socialization must be approached in a completely different way than many people approach it.

You see, someone can come to me today and say: Yes, you are of the opinion that there should no longer be any idle rentiers in the future? Yes, I do hold that view. But if he fights for the current economic order as one of its supporters, he will tell me: But just consider how little it is when you add up all the pension assets and distribute them, and how small it is in relation to what all the millions of working people have together. I will tell him: I know just as well as you do that the pension assets are few, but look, a counter-question: it is a very small ulcer that someone has on some part of their body. This ulcer is very small in relation to the whole body. But does it depend on the size of the ulcer or on the fact that when it occurs it shows that the whole body is unhealthy? It is not a matter of calculating the size of the rentier's fortune, nor of necessarily morally condemning the rentiers – it is not their fault, they have inherited this wisdom of being rentiers or something like that – but it is that, just as in the natural human organism a disease, an unhealthy thing, shows itself in its entirety when an ulcer breaks out, so the unhealthiness of the social organism shows itself when idleness or rent is possible in it at all. The rentiers are simply proof that the social organism is unhealthy; they are proof that all idlers, like all those who cannot work themselves, use the labor of others for their sustenance.

Thoughts must simply be brought into a completely different channel. It must be possible to convince oneself that our economic life has become unhealthy. And now the question must be asked: How is it that within the economic cycle, capital, human labor, and goods develop in such an unhealthy way – namely for the question of the broad masses of humanity as to whether one can lead a dignified existence as a worker? This must be asked. But then one can no longer stop at mere economic life; then, when one sees this question in all its depth, one is necessarily led to grasp the social question in three aspects: as a spiritual question, as a state or legal question, and as an economic question. Therefore, you must give me a quarter of an hour if I first speak about the social question as a spiritual question. Because anyone who has studied this aspect a little knows why we do not have an industrial science, why we do not have what has long since resulted from the minds of people a healthy management, a healthy socialization of our economic life. If the soil is diseased, no fruit will grow on it. If the spiritual life of a people is not healthy in a particular age, then the fruit that should grow on it is not the economic overview, as a way to control the economic order so that real benefit can arise from it for the masses. All the chaos that exists in our economic life today has arisen from the soil of a sick spiritual life in recent times. Therefore, we must first look at this: what is going on in those buildings that the worker passes at most when he walks across the street on Sunday, when he is freed from his factory or place of work? What goes on in those institutions where the so-called higher intellectual life takes place, from which, in turn, orders and instructions are issued for the lower school system, for the ordinary elementary school? I ask you, hand on heart, what do you actually know about how those personal abilities that are actually guiding in spiritual life, in legal life, in economic life are fabricated in the universities, in the grammar schools, in the secondary modern schools? You know nothing about it! You know something about what is taught to your children at school, but even there you do not know what intentions and aims for this school teaching flow down from the higher educational institutions into the ordinary schools. The broad masses of the proletariat basically have no idea which paths lead people growing up in the field of intellectual life. And this is part of what creates the abyss, the deep divide: on the one side, the proletariat; on the other, the others. What has been done in recent times to improve the situation? Because there was no other way than to make certain concessions to democracy, a few scraps in all possible forms of so-called newer education were given to the people; adult education centers were established, people's courses were held, art was shown to the people, so benevolently: the people should also have some. What has been achieved with all this, what is it actually? It is nothing but a terrible cultural lie. All this has only served to make the gulf even more significant. For when could the proletarian look with an upright, honest, whole-hearted, whole-souled gaze at what is painted within the bourgeois class, at what is fabricated within the bourgeois class as science? If he shared a common social life with those who produced it, if there were no class difference! For it is impossible to have a common spiritual life with those to whom one does not belong socially. That is what has, spiritually, above all, created the great divide. That is what points, spiritually, to what has to happen.

The enlightened, the enlightened in their own opinion, the very clever people, they are proud when they can say today: In the Middle Ages, well, it was the case that philosophy – as the whole of science was called back then – trailed behind theology. Of course we do not want to wish back that time, I certainly do not want to call back the Middle Ages, but what has happened in the course of the modern development? Today, because it has become very proud, the scientist no longer carries the train of theology, but with regard to the state, what does he do then? Well, here is a blatant example: You see, there was a great modern physiologist, he is dead now, who was also the luminary of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. I hold him in high esteem as a naturalist. Just as Shakespeare once said, “Honorable people they all are,” I would like to say, “Clever people they all are, all of them.” But this man revealed something about what characterizes this modern intellectual life in particular. He said – one would not believe it, but it is true – the scholars of the Berlin Academy of Sciences saw themselves as the scientific protection force of the Hohenzollern. – Yes, you see, again an example that could easily be multiplied a hundredfold, a thousandfold.

Now I ask you: Is it any wonder that the modern proletarian, when he looked at this intellectual life, perceived this intellectual life as a luxury intellectual life? Is it any wonder that he says to himself: This intellectual life is not rooted in a special spirit, it truly does not carry the human soul, nor does it reveal that it is the outflow of a divine or moral world order. No, it is the consequence of economic life. People live spiritually in the way they acquire their capital. That is what their intellectual life makes possible for them. Therefore, even in the modern proletariat, a truly free view of a spiritual life that truly nourishes the soul could not arise. But I know from decades of experience: the modern proletarian has a deep longing for a true spiritual life, not for a spiritual life that stops at the bourgeois border, but one that seeps into the souls of all people. That is why the appeal that I am commanded to speak about today states that in the future this intellectual life must be self-contained and not only contain the last remnants of intellectual life, art and the like that still remain. In Berlin, they have also wanted to incorporate these heavily into the omnipotence of the state.

The whole of intellectual life, from the lowest level of education to the highest, must be left to its own devices, because the spirit thrives only when it has to prove its reality and strength anew every day. The spirit never thrives when it is dependent on the state, when it is the state's lackey, the servant of economic life. What has become of this field has paralyzed people's minds. Oh, when we look at the ruling classes today, when we, who want to understand the call for socialization, look at those who run the factories today, at those who run the workshops, who run the schools, the universities, who run the states – oh, it makes one's soul ache – they can't think of anything, the seriousness of the situation does not sink into their heads. Why not? Yes, how have people gradually become accustomed to economic life, to legal or state life, and to intellectual life? The state, so to speak, takes over when the human being is beyond just the first years of education – which the state has not yet taken over because the first years of a person's education are not run cleanly enough for the state – with its school, it takes over the human being. He then educates him in such a way that this person only has to accomplish - as it was until the great war catastrophe over the entire civilized world - what he is commanded, what he is ordered, what the state - from its theologians, from its physicians, as it turned out during the war, in particular from its lawyers, from its philologists - actually wants. If there is an intelligent person among them, in the examination commissions, then you can hear a clever word from them. I once sat with the gentlemen of an examination commission, and when we talked about how bad our grammar school system actually is, he said: Yes, it is also a shame when you have to examine people and then see what kind of people you have to let loose on young people.

I am telling you this as a cultural-historical fact, as a symptom, so that attention is drawn to what lives among the people who have led the world, to whom, in a certain way, the leadership of the people was entrusted, and why people have finally brought the world into this terrible catastrophe. The causes that have brought humanity to this catastrophe are made up of millions of details. And among these causes, the social phenomenon of spiritual life is predominant, and because socialization is on our minds today, it is the socialization of spiritual life that matters most. What matters is that human talents and abilities be cultivated in the right way, just as what is to grow in the field is cultivated, as is the case in agriculture. This has not been done so far. The state took over the human being, trained him for its use, and all activity, all independence, was driven out of the human being. In the end, the human being had only one ideal in relation to economic life and intellectual life from the legal life of the state: economic activity. The state had taken him over and trained him for itself. Now, when man is well trained, the state economic life begins for him. He was provided for; then he was well-behaved, even if he no longer wanted to work, provided for until his death in the form of a pension, that is, through the work of those who had no pension. And when he had died, the church took care of the matter after death. The church gave him a pension for after death. In this way, a person was provided for economically until death if he belonged to the ruling classes, and in the grave he was also retired after death. Everything was in order for him; he no longer needed to think for himself or intervene in the social order in such a way that something beneficial could arise from it; he did not need to participate actively. Therefore, it has gradually become the case that people were no longer able to reflect on what should happen, on what should come into the world as a kind of new development. Those who were excluded from all of this, to whom the state would not even have granted the small insurance pension until death if they had not forced it, and to whom the ruling classes have also not handed down any intellectual life, because the intellectual life that gave them a patent for the soul after death was not wanted by the proletarians, who demand a new order. Therefore, we have as our first demand precisely that for an emancipation of intellectual life, for a reorganization of intellectual life. That is the first question that matters.

The second question arises when we turn our attention to the field of law, to the area that is supposed to belong to the actual state. However, we only find ourselves coming together sympathetically in this area today if we look at the economic area from it. What is actually in the economic area? In the economic area, there is the production of goods, the circulation of goods, and the consumption of goods. The commodities have certain values that are expressed in the price. But through the economic development of recent times, in its connection with the development of the state, the bourgeoisie has introduced into economic life something of which the proletarian demands in the most justified way today: it must no longer be part of economic life, and that is human labor. Just as it has struck the souls of the proletarian-feeling, when Karl Marx pronounced the significant word of surplus value, so the other word struck the souls of the proletarians, that in an unjustified way, the labor of man has become a commodity in the modern economic order. Here the proletarian feels: as long as my labor power must be bought and sold on the labor market, like goods on the commodities market according to supply and demand, I cannot answer yes to the question: Do I lead a dignified existence? What does the modern proletarian know of the intellectual life? Despite all popular entertainments, despite all guidance in the galleries and so on, he only knows that which he calls surplus value. Surplus value means that which he must supply for an intellectual life that cannot become his; that is what he knows of intellectual life. That is why the word surplus value struck so sympathetically into the proletarians' minds. And when Karl Marx formulated it, the modern proletarian's feelings ran counter to this concept of surplus value. And because human labor power must never be a commodity, Marx's other concept of “labor power as a commodity” struck the hearts and minds of the proletarians like a bolt of lightning as a profound truth. |

Anyone who truly understands human life knows that what I have just said, that in the modern economic cycle the human labor of the proletarian is unlawfully treated as a commodity, that this in turn is based on an enormous lie. For human labor is something that can never be compared by any price with a commodity, with a product. This can even be proved quite thoroughly. I know that the lectures I am now giving in this way – especially to the leading classes – are repeatedly and repeatedly said to me, directly or indirectly, to be difficult to understand. Well, just recently someone told me: They are just difficult to understand for those who do not want to understand them. And when I recently gave a talk in Dornach to a gathering of proletarians that was similar to the talk I am giving you today, someone from the type of people who find these words so difficult to understand said that he had not understood them properly after all. A proletarian replied: Well, you have to be a fool not to understand it. I, for one, do not fear this difficulty of comprehension, for I was a teacher for many years at the Workers' Education School founded by Wilhelm Liebknecht, and I know that the proletarian understands much of what the bourgeois finds quite incomprehensible. I do not fear that you will not understand me when I say: All tendencies, all goals of economic life, are directed towards consuming commodities. The issue, therefore, is to consume the commodity in a healthy way. What cannot be consumed is produced in an unhealthy way. In some way, the commodity must be consumable. But if the capitalist economic system turns human labor into a commodity, then those who turn it into a commodity are only interested in consuming it. But human labor power must not be merely consumed, and so we need an economic system, and above all we need a socialization that not only determines the working hours but also, and above all, determines the hours of rest, because these must be there if a communal social life is to be there. This shows that recovery can only come about when the leading circles of society, the then rightful leading circles of society, have as much interest in the worker having his rest period as today's capitalists have in the worker having his working hours.

Therefore, I say to you: human labor power can never be compared in price to any other commodity. Therefore, buying human labor power on the labor market – you understand what that means – is a great social lie that must be eradicated. How do we go about divesting human labor power of the character of a commodity? That is a great social question.

The first question was the intellectual question. The second is a great social question: How does the modern laborer come to strip his labor power of the character of the commodity? For what does the modern proletarian feel about the way his labor power is used in today's economy? He may not always have time to sort out his feelings and what is going on in his heart, and he may not be able to express himself clearly about these matters, but he says to himself: In ancient times there were slaves; the capitalists bought and sold human beings, just as one buys and sells a cow, the whole human being. Later there was serfdom; then they no longer sold the whole person, but only a part of the person, but still enough. At present, despite all the assurances of freedom and humanity, despite the so-called employment contract, the proletarian knows very well that now his labor is still being bought and sold. He knows that. The so-called employment contract does not deceive him about that. But in the depths of his soul, in the depths of his mind, he feels: I can sell a horse or a pair of boots at the market and then go back. But I cannot take my labor power and sell it to the factory owner and then go back; I must go along as a human being with my labor power. So I am still selling my entire self when I have to be in a wage relationship, when I have to sell my labor power. Thus the modern proletarian experiences the connection of the true character of his labor power with the old slavery. That is why he experiences it, which unfortunately the leading classes have failed to grasp at the right moment: that today the world-historical moment has arrived when labor power can no longer be a commodity. Economic life can only have the cycle of commodity production, commodity consumption, and commodity circulation.

Only people who can only think in the old way, such as Walther Rathenau in his latest booklet, which is titled “After the Flood,” show a certain fear of this realization. Walther Rathenau says: If you separate labor from the economic cycle, then the value of money must fall terribly. — Well, he only looks at it from one side. For those who think like him, this decline in the value of money will indeed have great significance. We will not talk about that any further. The point is that economic life itself can only be properly understood if one sees how this economic life is connected, on the one hand, to the natural conditions of economic life. There is the soil, it produces coal, it produces wheat. In the soil, for example, are the natural forces that belong to the soil and that produce the wheat. From above, the necessary rain falls. These are natural conditions. You can get around them to some extent with technical aids, but economic life does have its limits there. How terribly foolish it would be if someone wanted to legislate based on economic cycles and write a law that said: If we want reasonable prices and reasonable economic conditions, then in 1920 we need a year with so-and-so many rainy days and so-and-so many sunny days, and the forces under the ground must work in such and such a way. You are right to laugh. It would be very foolish to want to make laws about what nature itself determines, to want to invent requirements from the economic life as to how nature should work with its forces. Just as we come up against a limit with the economic life, as the soil of a particular country can only provide a certain amount of raw materials, so on the other hand the economic life must border on that which stands outside this economic life, on the life of the constitutional state. And in the life of the state under the rule of law, only that which is the common concern of all people, and which can truly be based on democracy, may be established and regulated. Thus we arrive at a threefold structure of the healthy social organism.

Spiritual life stands on its own; spiritual life must be free. In this respect, talent and human abilities must be cultivated in the right way. One statesman, who has said many a hot-headed thing during the terrible catastrophe of the war, has also said: In the future, the path will be free for the hardworking! — In these serious times, fine phrases and empty talk that are only true in terms of the letter no longer suffice. If people say, “A free hand to the capable,” but they are predisposed by blood and social prejudices to consider their nephew or sibling the most capable, then not much will be achieved by such a grand motto. We must take the cultivation of human talent seriously in the free spiritual life, and then we will socialize the spiritual life. The state is responsible for everything in which all people are equal, for which special talents are not considered, but for which what is considered is what is innate in man, just as the ability to see blue or red is innate in a healthy eye. The state is responsible for the sense of justice. This sense of justice can lie dormant in the soul, but it is placed in the heart of every human being. The proletarian sought to live out this sense of right. What did he find? Just as he found intellectual luxury in the sphere of intellectual life, which was like a smoke that emerged from the economic life, so in the sphere of the state he found not the living out of the sense of right, but class privileges, class prerogatives and class disadvantages. There you have the root of the anti-social element in modern life. The State is the owner of everything in which all men are equal. They are not equal in respect of their mental and physical abilities and aptitudes. These belong to the sphere of the free spiritual life. The State will only be healthy when it no longer absorbs spiritual and economic life in the sense of the modern bourgeois order, or one might say, in the sense of the bourgeois order that is now heading towards its decline. Instead, it should release spiritual life on the one hand and economic life on the other for their own socialization. That is what is at stake. Then it will be possible for the worker, as an equal of all people in the territory of the state, to regulate the measure and type and character of his labor power before he has to plunge into economic life at all. In the future, it must be as impossible for economic conditions or economic necessities to determine labor law as it is simply impossible for natural conditions to make it impossible for the economic cycle or other factors to regulate the forces of nature, rain and sunshine. Independently of economic life, it must be determined by the state, on democratic soil, where one person is equal to another, in the state, which is completely separate from economic life, what labor law is, and what is opposed to this labor law, what disposition of a thing is, what is called ownership today, but what must cease to the greatest extent possible and must give way to a healthy state in the future. If economic life is not determined by the worker, but rather, conversely, economic life must be guided by what the worker determines about his work in a state democracy, then an important requirement has been met.

Now, one might object: then economic life becomes dependent on the law and right of labor. Very well, but it will be a healthy dependency, a dependency as natural as the dependency on nature. The worker will know before he goes to the factory how much and how long he has to work; he will no longer have to deal with any foreman about the extent and nature of his work. He will only have to talk about what exists as a distribution of what has been produced together with the supervisor. That will be a possible employment contract. There will be contracts only about the distribution of what has been achieved, not about labor. This is not a return to the old piecework wage; that would only be the case if this process of socialization were not thought of in the round.

I can also briefly mention another issue that stands in the way of labor law, which will liberate the worker. Conventional socialism talks a lot about private property becoming common property. But the big question of this socialization will be precisely how to do it. In our current economic system, we only have a little healthy thinking about property in one area. This is in the area that, according to modern bourgeois phraseology, modern bourgeois dishonesty, has gradually become the most insignificant property after all, namely intellectual property. In relation to this intellectual property, you see, people still think a little bit sanely. They say to themselves: however clever a person may be, he brings his abilities with him at birth, but that has no social significance. On the contrary, he is obliged to offer them to human society; these abilities would be of no use if the person were not part of human society. Man owes what he can create from his abilities to human society, to the human social order. It does not truly belong to him. Why do we manage our so-called intellectual property? Simply because we produce it; by producing it, we show that we have the abilities to do so better than others. As long as we have these abilities better than others, we will best manage this intellectual property in the service of the whole. Now, at least, people have realized that this intellectual property is not inherited endlessly; thirty years after death, intellectual property belongs to all of humanity. Anyone can print what I have produced thirty years after my death; they can use it in any way they like, and that is right. I would even agree if there were more rights in this area. There is no other justification for the administration of intellectual property than that, because one can produce it, one also has the better abilities. Ask the capitalist today whether he agrees to take responsibility for what he considers to be the right thing for the valuable material property that he possesses! Ask him! And yet this is the healthy way. It must be the basis of a healthy order that everyone can acquire capital through the intellectual organization that will be the healthy administration of human abilities – you will find this explained in more detail in my book 'The Crux of the Social Question'. But it must come about that the means and ways are found to this great, comprehensive socialization of capital, that is, of capital income and the means of production, so that everyone who has the abilities to do so can come to capital and the means of production, but that he can only have the administration and management of capital and the means of production as long as he can or wants to exercise these abilities. Then they will pass over, when he no longer wants to exercise them himself, to the community in certain ways. They will begin to circulate in the community.

This will be a healthy way to socialize capital if we can get what is today capital in inheritance law, in the creation of pensions, of idler's rights, of other superfluous rights, what accumulates in capitals, into the social organism. We need not even say: private property must become social property. The concept of property will have no meaning at all. It will be as meaningless as it would be if blood were to accumulate in individual places in my body. Blood must be in circulation. What is capital must go from the capable to the capable. Will the worker agree to such socialization? Yes, he will, because his situation in life compels him to be reasonable. He will say to himself: If the one with the right abilities is the manager, then I can trust him, then my labor power is better applied under the right manager than under the capitalist, who does not have the abilities, but who has only been put in his place by an unhealthy accumulation process of capitals. I can only hint at these things now. The future doctrine of socialization will be the concrete, true development of the circulation of capital and the means of production, which Karl Marx also presented in an abstract way as a great goal for humanity: From each according to his abilities and needs.

We have gone through a hard time of human suffering, a hard time of trial for humanity. Today we no longer need to say, as some have done, that there must be a new race of people who can socialize according to the principle: To each according to his abilities and needs! No, we can have the right belief. If we only want it, then such healthy social ideas will be able to take hold of the tripartite division into spiritual life, legal life and economic life. For this economic life will only become healthy when it is separated from the other two. Then, in the economic sphere, associations will be formed, as I have described in my book, and cooperatives will be formed, which, in a healthy way, do not aim to produce and profit, but which start from consumption and do not make production in such a way that workers are squandered, but rather that workers are called upon to improve consumption and to satisfy needs.

Allow me to tell you the beginning that we made in the society that you do not love, because I understand it so much being maligned – allow me to tell you how, in a particular area, attempts were made to economically socialize intellectual life. When I was obliged, about twenty years ago, to lead this society with my friends, it was important to me to say to myself: If you distribute the books that are produced by me on the basis of this society in the same capitalist way as is the custom in the book trade today, then you are committing a sin against healthy social thinking. For how are books produced today? Many people today consider themselves capable of producing good books. Well, if everything that is printed today were to be read, then we would have our work cut out for us. But you see, that is why there is this custom in the book trade: someone considers themselves a genius and writes a book. The book is printed in a thousand copies. Of most of these books, 950 copies are pulped because only fifty are sold. But what does that mean in economic terms? You see, so many people who have to produce the paper, so many typesetters, so many bookbinders and so on have been employed to do the work; this work is unproductive, this work is wasted. Therein lies the great harm. Oh, you would be amazed if you only tried to answer the question of how much of the work that the honored attendees sitting here have to do is wasted. That is the great social harm. So how did I try to do it? I said to myself: There is nothing to be done with the book trade. We founded a small bookstore ourselves. But then I first made sure that the needs for which the book was to be printed existed. That is, I had to make the effort to create the consumers first; not, of course, by putting up a pillar like the pillars with the advertisement: Make good soups with Maggi! but by first creating the needs – one can argue against these needs, of course – and then starting to print, when I knew that not a single copy would be left lying around, not a single action would be in vain. Attempts have also been made to produce bread, which was not possible under present conditions in the same way, but where it could be carried out, it was precisely in economic terms that it proved fruitful, if one starts not from blind production aimed only at getting rich, but from needs, from consumption. Then, when that happens, real socialization can be carried out through the cooperative economy.

So today I had to talk to you about socialization on a broader basis. Because only what arises on this broad basis is the truly practical. Otherwise, socialization will always be botched if we do not ask the very first question: What does the state have to do? First it must release spiritual life in one direction, then economic life in another direction; it must remain on the ground of the life of right. There is nothing impractical about that, but it is a socialization that can be carried out every day.

What is needed? Courage, nothing else! But why do people want to see it as impractical? I have met enough people who, over and over again in the last four and a half years, have said that this world war catastrophe is so terrible that people have not experienced such horrors in the history of mankind, that it is the greatest experience in the historical development of humanity. Well, I have not yet found people who also say: If people were condemned to be led into such misery by old thoughts, by old habits of thinking, then they must now pull themselves together to leave these old thoughts and come to new thoughts, to new habits of thinking. Above all, we need a socialization of minds. The minds that we carry on our shoulders must contain something different from what has been in people's minds so far. That is what we need. Therefore, the question must be approached in a broad way.

And now, in conclusion, I would like to say this: when the dawn of modern times broke, those people who had the greatest concern for the progress of civilized humanity were imbued with three great ideals: liberty, equality, fraternity. These three great ideals have a strange history. On the one hand, every healthy and inwardly courageous person feels that these are the three great impulses that must now finally guide modern humanity. But very clever people in the nineteenth century repeatedly demonstrated the contradictions that actually exist between these three ideas: liberty, equality, fraternity. Yes, there is a contradiction, they are right. But that does not change the fact that they are the greatest ideals, despite the contradictions. They were formulated at a time when humanity was still hypnotized by the unitary state, which has been revered like an idol up to the present day. In particular, those who have made the state their protector and themselves the protectors of the state, the so-called entrepreneurs, could speak to the employee as Faust spoke to the sixteen-year-old Gretchen about the god: “The state, my dear worker, is the all-embracing, the all-sustaining; does it not embrace and sustain you, me, itself? And subconsciously it can think: but especially me! — The gaze was directed as if hypnotized to this idol, the unified state. There, in this unified state, these three great ideals do indeed contradict each other. But those who did not allow themselves to be hypnotized by this unified state in the field of intellectual life, who thought of freedom as I myself did in my book “The Philosophy of Freedom”, which I wrote in the early 1890s and which had to be republished now, in our time of great social issues and great rethinking, they knew: Only because people believed that they had to be realized in the unified state did contradictions arise between the three greatest social ideals.

If we recognize correctly that a healthy social organism must be one that is structured in three, then we will see that in the realm of spiritual life, freedom must prevail, because abilities, talents and gifts must be cultivated in a free way. In the realm of the state, absolute equality must prevail, democratic equality, because in the state lives that which makes all human beings equal. In economic life, which is supposed to be separate from the life of the state and the life of the spirit, but which is to be supplied by the life of the state and the life of the spirit, fraternity must prevail, fraternity on a large scale. It will arise from associations, from cooperatives, which will emerge from the professional associations and from those communities that are formed from healthy consumption, together with healthy production. Equality, liberty and fraternity will reign in this threefold organism. And through this new socialization it will be possible to realize what people who think and feel healthily have longed for a long time. We must only have the courage to regard many an old party program as a mummy in the face of new facts. We must have the courage to admit: new ideas are needed for new facts and for the new phases of human development. And I have had experiences with all classes in my life observations, which truly span decades, that have arisen from a destiny that has taught me to feel and think not about, but with the proletariat, and I have gained from this the feeling that the proletariat is the healthy element, that even what has now emerged as a consequence of the impermissible fusion of economic life with state life, that this is felt by the proletarian in the right way. Those who have listened to me today will know that I am sincere in my belief that the modern proletariat's demands are justified and historic. But I also know that in the final analysis, when it comes to the question of strikes, the reasonable proletarian thinks like the reasonable man in general. I know that the reasonable worker does not strike for the sake of striking, he only strikes because the economic system has brought it about that political demands are mixed up with economic demands. Not until this separation of political life from economic life has occurred will economic life be able to be completely brought into reasonable channels. We would also understand this, especially if we had the opportunity to talk about it in more detail. We would understand the need for every strike: it could be avoided; the reasonable worker would only want to undertake it out of necessity. This is also something that belongs to healthy socialization, that we get beyond what we actually do not want to do, what is unreasonable to do. Even the modern economic order has brought it about that what is unwanted, what is considered unreasonable, is often done.

You will understand me, and you will also understand when I say, precisely from this point of view: however bad my experiences have been with the old classes, people must still find their way to threefolding, and I hope for much from the healthy senses of the modern proletariat. I have seen how behind what the modern proletariat calls its class consciousness there stands an unconscious human consciousness; how the class-conscious proletarian is really asking how to arrive at a world order that answers the question, ” Is human life worth living and worth living for me? — Today the proletarian can only answer this question arising out of the economic order, out of the legal order, and out of the intellectual life with a No; tomorrow he wants to answer it with a Yes. And between this 'No' and this 'Yes' lies true socialization, lies that by which the truly self-conscious proletariat will liberate and redeem this proletariat and thereby liberate and redeem all that is human in man, which deserves to be liberated and redeemed.

Closing words after the discussion

Well, esteemed attendees, in the final analysis the discussion has not really yielded anything of such significance with regard to what I said that I needed to detain you much longer with this closing speech. But first I would like to answer the direct question that was put to me at the end: why I used so much agitation in my talk. Well, I certainly do not want to enter into a discussion with the esteemed questioner, as you will understand, as to whether, because it is said of me that I am a philosopher, I am only entitled to speak in an incomprehensible, unagitated way, that is, in figures of speech. That is not my point. But I was somewhat surprised, very much surprised, that the word “agitational” was applied at all to what I said. Because I am truly not aware of having spoken a single word other than what emerges from my conviction of truth, from my view of the current situation. What is agitative? If, let us say, a man who is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative listens to the very moderate words of someone who is very much on the left, and the latter finds them inflammatory, are they necessarily inflammatory? Why does he speak in an inflammatory way to the dyed-in-the-wool conservative? It is not his fault. The words only become so in the mind of the ultra-conservative man. So, you see, what one person regards as demagogic does not have to be demagogic for another. What one person finds quite unpleasant, he often calls demagogic. Now your technical manager has also spoken to you. If everyone who comes from the same background as your esteemed technical manager were to speak as your esteemed technical manager does, then, ladies and gentlemen, we would soon achieve what we want to achieve. If a great many people thought like this, then it would not be necessary for a few to say that the words of those like me, who want to speak the truth and do not want to create an abyss, only serve to widen the gap. But on the other side, on the right side of the abyss, there are also people quite unlike your esteemed technical director, who addressed you, and who speaks quite differently from him. There will not be a great gulf fixed between him and us. Perhaps the gulf will only begin where he, too, stands more on the other side. I believe that what I said about the fate of many intellectual workers could be understood.

You see, you could experience different things if you are really involved in the newer development of humanity. Many, more than 27 or 28 years ago, I once attended a meeting at which Paul Singer spoke. Some people from the proletariat somehow made it clear that they did not value intellectual work the same as physical labor. They should have listened to how Paul Singer, in agreement with the vast majority, defended intellectual work! I have never seen intellectual work misunderstood by the proletariat. I was not talking about any gap between physical and intellectual labor, I was talking about the gap between the proletariat, human labor, and capitalism. We must be clear about that. And let us be clear, such speeches as we have heard from your esteemed leader, to our great joy – at least to mine and certainly to your great joy – such speeches, we do not easily hear them on the other side either. We will not easily find people whose hands can be grasped.

And finally, one more thing: Yes, certainly, I say things that may make it necessary to act quickly with regard to many things. As a scientist myself, I understand very well the words of the esteemed previous speaker when he says: Development must proceed slowly; one must have patience to wait. Thirty years ago, mathematicians discovered things that are only now being recognized. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, and I now address your technical director, whom I greatly respect: But there are things in social life today that we cannot afford to wait for, but rather we are obliged to open our minds a little and be capable of quick understanding. That is why I was more pleased about the following than about the emphasis on slowness.

I have given lectures on social issues in various cities in Switzerland. I have come to understand that someone who falls outside the usual program is initially met with mistrust. In Basel, friends initially tried to get the Socialist Party's executive committee to have me give a lecture in their circle. The board – I do not blame them, I understand it, I also spoke today of justified mistrust – perhaps because they did not want to refuse me, based themselves on principle and said that they did not know whether it was desirable to let outside influences approach party members. So they rejected my lecture. That seems to be the opinion of some leaders now. They drew the conclusion that I should not speak. Then a Social Democrat came to me and said he would try to get me to come and speak at the Railway Workers' Association. That too was rejected. I then gave a lecture in Zurich. We then made leaflets in Basel, simply handed them out on the street and took the largest hall for a social lecture in Basel, and I was able to give this lecture in front of more than 2,500 people. You see, that was very recently. Now, just before I had to leave, after I had given this lecture to the proletariat of Basel, I received an invitation from the railway workers' association, which had refused at the time, that I should now give a similar lecture to its members. So things are fourteen days apart: first the association refuses, then it knew what it was getting and now also demanded its lecture. That was a rapid development, a development in a fortnight. I believe that today we must pay more attention to such rapid thinking, which takes place in a fortnight, than to such thinking that tells us that things must happen slowly. Today I would like to be much more pleased about those who first want to assert their free will, but who want to learn and want to learn quickly. Because, my dear attendees, we are heading for a terrible time if we want to adapt to slowness. We need a healthy impulse for thoughts that go just as fast as the facts will go. That is what we want to write on our hearts today. I know that the honored speaker did not mean to walk slowly out of laziness, but other people are lazy. But anyone who is serious today knows how quickly we will have to rethink and relearn if we do not want to be left behind and end up in misery and destruction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

T. G. J.

A. O. B.