The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The decision to construct the first Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland was made in May, 1913, when Rudolf Steiner visited the future building site. Construction began within a few weeks and the exterior of the building was completed in April, 1914. Work on the interior proceeded at a slower pace and lasted through World War I (1914-1918). In 1914, Rudolf Steiner had begun a scaled-down model of the Christ sculpture that was later to be installed in the Goetheanum.. As the work on the sculpture itself began, he frequently explained its significance in his lectures.

One of Rudolf Steiner's lecture tours, May 6 through May 18, 1915, took him to Vienna, Prague and Linz. In all three cities he stressed that the Christ figure in the sculptured group would have to be portrayed as a being in equipoise between the polar forces of Lucifer and Ahriman and that this being was symbol of, and model for, man's own existence here on earth. The Linz lecture, which is here translated, presents the group in a world-historical context and relates the significance of the Lucifer-Christ-Ahriman configuration to the events surrounding World War I. Steiner sees a parallel between Christ's central, but equalizing position and Central Europe's mission in World War I. He implies that Germany's and Austria's militarism and political intransigence alone did not lead to war against the world powers in the East (Russia) and the West (France, England and, since 1917, the United States). According to Steiner, World War I was the earthly expression of a struggle between luciferic forces in the East and ahrimanic forces in the West, and it was Central Europe's destiny to mediate between these forces.

The fundamental polarization of East and West that Rudolf Steiner saw emerging more than six decades ago is now a political reality. While most historians today concede that World War II was in part caused by the circumstances surrounding World War I, few would accept Rudolf Steiner's statement from his Linz lecture that World War I was “destined by the European karma” or, to state it more concretely, that it was unavoidable. If the war could not have been avoided, then the question of who was to blame or who caused it is, as Steiner says, irrelevant. Based on this position, Steiner suggests that only one question has relevancy: “Who could have prevented the war?<” This question seems to contradict Steiner's statement that World War I was destined by the European karma. A quick glance at the historical record may help to clarify what Steiner meant.

In suggesting that the Russian government and possibly England, could have prevented the war, Steiner simply deals with possibilities outside the realm of what had to happen according to European karma. Russia's instigation of the two Peace Conferences in the Hague (1899 and 1907) was indeed self-serving and hypocritical, for it was Russia that, in 1914, mobilized its armed forces without considering British proposals for peace negotiations. Under these circumstances and considering the political immaturity of the German leadership, it was not surprising that the German Kaiser and his generals over-reacted to the Russian mobilization and interpreted it as a declaration of war. Kaiser Wilhelm II and Czar Nicholas II, who were cousins, frantically exchanged telegrams in which one beseeched the other to preserve the peace, but to no avail. The war machinery was already overheated by the forces of chauvinism and materialism so that even from this vantage point Steiner was correct in maintaining that war was unavoidable.

Regarding the possibility of preventing the war, a glance at the major Western powers involved in the controversy, and at Germany, reveals the following historical facts. France, for thirty years an ally of Russia, did nothing to prevent the war because she did not attempt to delay the hasty Russian mobilization. Her representatives said later that France regretted the Russian action, but there seems little doubt that France was more interested in presenting herself as the innocent victim of an attack. On the other hand, England's foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, could have prevented the war if he had taken earlier measures to discourage Germany's militarists from asserting themselves in their country, but in view of the English tradition and the English Constitution, this was probably not possible. Finally, the confusion in Germany itself was caused by a lack of understanding of who had legitimate authority to make decisions. Eventually, the political decisions were made by generals who managed to spread the belief that the fatherland was in peril and that Germany herself was not the attacker, but the attacked. Thus, theoretically, any one of these three powers could have prevented the war but that, as Rudolf Steiner points out in the lecture, is not the real issue.

Furthermore, the war did not emerge out of a French or Russian moral conviction that was responsive to German militarism. Rather, the goal of crushing German militarism emerged well after the war had begun. The war could be interpreted, in this sense, to be inevitable because it was not generated from a goal, but exploded and then developed its goals. In this war of attrition, materialism camouflaged itself with nationalistic sentiment and strove for absolute expression and triumph.

It is against such a background of perplexity and misguided fervor that Rudolf Steiner's message to Central Europeans must be read. In rejecting the question of who had caused the war, Steiner dismissed as equally irrelevant the question of who was to blame for materialism. Materialism was there, as was Ahriman. Steiner admonished the Central Europeans to counterbalance materialism by adopting a spiritual perception of life and by striving for an encounter with the Christ.

This profound spiritual responsibility that Steiner put on the Germans in 1915 was disregarded and the challenge passed by. After World War I it was not the Christ, but Adolf Hitler who, under the guise of “savior,” emerged as Germany's Nemesis and was thus catapulted into a central position. When Hitler was finally destroyed, Central Europe broke up into two parts, one of which disappeared behind the Iron Curtain, while the other aligned with the West.

As it stands today, Rudolf Steiner's call to instate the Christ in His central position has yet to be fully received and responded to not only by the people living in what is left of Central Europe, but also in the rest of the world.

Some day when the building in Dornach that is dedicated to the spiritual sciences is completed, it will contain, in a significant spot, a sculpture dominated by three figures. In the center of this group a figure will tower as if it were the manifestation of what I would call the most sublime human principle ever to unfold on earth. Hence, one will be able to experience this representation of the highest human principle in the evolution of the earth-the Christ, who in the course of this evolution lived three years in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. A special task in the portrayal of this Christ figure will be to make two ideas visible. Firstly, it will be important to show how the being that we are concerned with dwells in a human body. Secondly, it must also become apparent how this human body, in every facial expression and in every gesture reflects a magnificent degree of spiritual refinement, which descended with the Christ from cosmic and spiritual heights into this body in its thirtieth year. Then there will be the remaining two figures of the group, one to the left and the other to the right of the Christ figure, if that is the proper name for the figure that I have just sketched. This Christ figure is placed in such a way that it seems to be standing in front of a rock that towers noticeably at His left side, with its peak extending over His head. On top of the rock there will be another figure, winged but with his wings broken, who for this reason begins to fall into the abyss. One feature in the Christ figure that must be worked out with special artistic care is the manner in which he raises his left arm, for it is precisely this gesture that precipitates the breaking of the wings. It must not appear, however, as if the Christ Himself were breaking the wings of this being. Rather, the interaction of the two figures must be portrayed artistically to show how the Christ, by the very motion of raising his hand, is expressing his infinite compassion for this being. Yet this being cannot bear the energy flowing upward through arm and hand, an energy that is evidenced by indentations that the fingers of the extended hand seem to leave in the rock itself. When this being comes into proximity with the Christ being, he feels something that may be expressed in the words: I cannot bear the radiation of such purity upon me.

This feeling dominates so essentially as to break this upper beings wings and cause his imminent plunge into the abyss. To make this visible will be a particularly important artistic task and you will see how the meaning of this interaction could easily be misunderstood. Imagine, for example, an artistic portrayal of the Christ suggesting that merely by raising His hand He would radiate such power onto the being that his wings would be broken, forcing the plunge into the abyss. In that case it would be the Christ Himself who irradiated this being, as it were, with hatred, and thereby caused his descent. Such an impression must under no circumstances be conveyed. Rather, the being must be portrayed as having caused his own fall, for what is to be shown plunging downward, with broken wings, is Lucifer.

Now let us consider the other side of the group, toward the right of the Christ figure. There, the rock will have a ledge and, therefore, will be concave underneath. In this depression there will be another winged figure, who with his arm-like organs turns toward the ledge above. You have to visualize this as follows. To the right is the depression in the rock and in it stands this winged figure with wings entirely different from the figure on top of the rock. The wings of the figure on top of the rock resemble those of an eagle, whereas the figure in the depression has bat-like wings. This figure virtually buries himself in the cave, working in shackles, ever busy undermining the earthly realm.

The Christ figure in the middle has his right hand directed downward and the left one upward. Again, it will be an important artistic task not to show the Christ as wanting to shackle this figure; rather, he has infinite compassion for this being, which is Ahriman. Ahriman cannot bear this compassion and he writhes with pain from what the hand of the Christ exudes. This radiance from Christ's hand causes the golden veins down in the rock depression to wind around Ahriman's body like strong cords and shackle him. What is happening to Lucifer is his own doing; the same is true with Ahriman. This concept is going to take form as a sculpture that will be set up in a significant place in the new building. Above the sculptured group we will attempt to express the same motif through the medium of painting, but then the concept must be expressed differently. To summarize, the group of three figures: Christ, Lucifer and Ahriman will stand at the bottom as a sculpture, and above, the same motif will appear as a painting.

We are injecting this configuration of a relationship between Christ, Lucifer and Ahriman into our Dornach building because the science of the spirit reveals to us in a certain way that the next task regarding the comprehension of the Christ impulse will be to make man finally understand how the three forces of Christ, Lucifer and Ahriman are related in this world. To this day there has been much talk about Christianity and the Christ impulse, but man has not yet gained a clear understanding of what the Christ impulse has brought into the world as the result of the Mystery of Golgotha. Certainly, it is generally admitted that there is a Lucifer or an Ahriman, but in so doing, it is made to appear that from these two one must flee, as if one wished to say, “I want nothing to do with Lucifer and Ahriman!”—In yesterday's public lecture <¹ I described the way in which the divine-spiritual forces can be found. If these forces did not want to have anything to do with Lucifer and Ahriman, either, the world could not exist. One does not gain the proper relationship to Lucifer and Ahriman by saying, “Lucifer, I flee from you! Ahriman, I flee from you!” Rather, everything that man has to strive for as a result of the Christ impulse must be seen as similar to the equilibrious state of a pendulum. In the center, the pendulum is in perfect balance, but it must oscillate to one side or the other. The same applies to man's development here on earth. Man must oscillate to the one side according to the luciferic principle and to the other according to the principle of Ahriman, but he must maintain his equilibrium through the cultivation of Paul's declaration, “Not I, but Christ in me.”

To understand the Christ in His quintessential activity we must conceive of Him as a reality, as a working force. That is to say, we must realize that what wove itself into our evolution here on earth through the Mystery of Golgotha was present as a fact. It is not important how well or how inadequately this fact has been understood by mankind up to this time; what is important is that it has been present, influencing human development on earth. Much could be said to explain exactly what man has not understood about the Christ impulse up to this time; the science of the spirit will have to contribute its share to bring about a full comprehension of how the Christ impulse has come from spiritual heights and influenced man's development on earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. In order to realize how the Christ has become a working force, let us visualize—as has been done elsewhere—two events in the annals of man's evolution that have influenced the development of the entire Western world.

You will remember an important event from history when Constantine, son of Constantius Chlorus, defeated Maxentius and thus introduced Christianity externally into the mainstream of Western civilization. Constantine had to fight that important battle against Maxentius so that he could establish Christianity in his western empire as the official religion. Had this battle not taken place as it did, the entire map of Europe would have been different. But this battle really was not decided by military skill, that is, not by the intellectual prowess available to people in those days, but by something entirely different. Maxentius consulted the so-called Sibylline Books, the prophetic oracles of Rome, which guided him into leading his army out of the assured safety of Rome's walls into the open field, in order to confront Constantine's army. Constantine, on the other hand, had a dream before the battle in which he was told, “If you approach Maxentius under the banner of the Mystery of Golgotha you will reach a great objective!” Indeed, Constantine carried the symbol of the Mystery of Golgotha—the cross—when he led his forces into battle, even though his army was three-fourths smaller than that of Maxentius. Enthused by the power emanating from the Mystery of Golgotha, Constantine won that historical battle resulting in the external introduction of Christianity to Europe. When we realize the extent to which people in those days understood the Christ impulse purely by intellectual means, it is not surprising to find that there ensued an endless theological quarrel. People argued whether or not Christ was consubstantial with the Lord in all eternity, and so on. Let us say this, that the degree of knowledge of the Christ impulse available to human beings in those days is not important, but rather the fact that the Christ impulse was present and that through his dream it guided Constantine to bring about what had to happen. What is important is the actuality of the Christ and His real and visibly active power. Only in the science of the spirit do we begin to understand what the Christ impulse is.

Another historical event was the struggle between France and England. It changed the map of Europe in such a way that we can say that if France had not been victorious over England, all conditions and relationships would have become different. But how did this victory happen? It happened because the Christ impulse has worked itself into the subconscious of the soul up to the present time, when it is increasingly becoming a conscious force. So we can see in the evolution of the Western spirit how the Christ impulse seeks out in the souls of men those conditions by which it can become effective in some individuals. Legends have preserved for us the manner in which the Christ impulse can assert itself within the Western spiritual tradition. In part, these legends refer generally to ancient pagan ages, but they take us back to those heathen times in which an understanding of Christianity was beginning to germinate.

If the soul does not consciously seek initiation as delineated in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, but becomes saturated with the Christ impulse as if by way of natural initiation, then the most favorable period for this process is from December 25 to January 6. We can understand this clearly by realizing that for occult knowledge it is evident that the earth is not only what geologists describe. Geologists conceive the earth's components as being similar to the skeleton of man. Yet the spiritual also belongs to our earth whose aura has been permeated by Christ. During the day's twenty-four hours, this earth sleeps and is awake just as we are. We must familiarize ourselves with the fact that the state of wakefulness on earth occurs during the winter, and the state of sleep during the summer. The earth spirit is most awake in these twelve or thirteen days from Christmas to the Epiphany. In ancient ages when, as you know from the various presentations in my lecture series, human beings elevated themselves to a sort of dreamlike clairvoyance to reach a spiritual understanding of the world, in those ages the most favorable time for this process was summer. Thus, it is quite natural that whoever wants to elevate himself to spiritual heights by means of a more dreamlike clairvoyance will have an easier time of it during the summer, when the earth is asleep. Therefore, St. John's midsummer-day was in ancient ages the most propitious time to raise the soul to the spiritual level. The old way of spiritual interaction with the earth has been replaced by a more conscious elevation that can best be reached during the earth's wakefulness.

For this reason, legends inform us that unusually endowed people, who are particularly suited by their karmas, pass into an extraordinary state of consciousness that resembles sleep, but only on the surface. its inner quality is such that it can be inspired by those forces that elevate human beings to the domain we call the spirit world. A beautiful Norwegian legend² tells us that Olaf &Åsteson, in church on Christmas Eve, falls into a sleeplike state and when he awakens on January 6 is able to relate the experiences he had in this condition. This Norwegian legend does in fact describe the experiences that one perceives first as the soul world—and then as something that feels like the spirit world, but with everything being expressed as images, as imaginative forms.

This time of year has been most favorable in those epochs when human beings were not as advanced as they are in our time. Now it is no longer possible for the Christ impulse to penetrate the souls of men in this way, as if by natural initiation. Nowadays man must make a conscious effort and climb to initiation in a way similar to that achieved through the instructions given in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. We are living in an age when natural initiations are becoming increasingly rare and will eventually disappear. Yet one initiation that could still essentially be called a natural initiation took place when the Christ impulse worked itself into the soul of the simple country girl, The Maid of Orleans. It was she who caused the victory of the French over the English. Again, not the human mind nor the talents of military leaders were decisive factors in changing the map of Europe so magnificently, but rather the Christ impulse working itself into the subconscious of the Maid of Orleans and inspiring her to radiate its presence in all of history.

We would now have to examine whether something similar could have occurred in the Maid of Orleans by way of natural initiation and ask whether her soul was inspired in the nights from the 25th day of December to the 6th of January. From her biography it seems difficult to demonstrate that she was even once in a sleep-like state during the twelve or thirteen special days when the Christ impulse could have entered her soul, inspiring her to act as its human shell on the battle grounds of France. Yet, that is precisely what happened. There is a time when the karma of a particular individual can facilitate such a sleep-like state in a human being. During the last few days prior to a person's birth he lives in the mother's womb in a dreaming, sleep-like state. He has not yet perceived with his senses what is happening in the world outside. If by virtue of his karma a person were especially suited to receive the Christ impulse during these last few days in the womb, then these days could also be days of natural initiation. Strengthened by and saturated with the Christ impulse, such a person would have to be born on the sixth day of January. Joan of Arc was born on that day. It is her special mystery that she was born on the 6th day of January and had spent the time from Christmas to the day of Epiphany in a peculiar sleep-like state in the womb of her mother where she received her natural initiation. Now consider the profound connections beyond the external developments that we are accustomed to call history. As a rule, the external events that are reconstructed from historical documents are of the least significance. What is of decisive historical significance is the plain date in our calendar indicating that Joan of Arc was sent into this world on the 6th day of January. Thus, supernatural forces become active in the sentient world and we must read the occult signs that present this fact to us. They tell us that the Christ impulse had already streamed into the Maid of Orleans before her physical birth, as if by way of natural initiation.

I want to explain these facts in order to instill in your souls a feeling for the fact that the external preception must take into account unknown forces and connections beyond what we ordinarily call history. European history has been guided by the Christ impulse since the Mystery of Golgotha, whereas Asia retained a world view that is not vet fully sensitive to the Christ impulse. To be sure, Europeans have been led into considering the wisdom of India as something especially profound. Not only is it characteristic of Hindu thought, if not of all Asian religious perception, however, that its entire attention is directed to the time preceding the appearance of the Christ impulse, but also that the state of religious perception is preserved as it was in those days. If something remains behind in the evolutionary process it can be interpreted to have absorbed something luciferic, and for this reason Asian religious evolution is the carrier of a luciferic element. A glance at the religious development of Asia will inform us that it contains much of what mankind as a whole once possessed but was later forced to abandon. We must in part cleanse Western culture of the luciferic remnants and in part we must elevate them in such a way that the Christ impulse can enter.

Moving from Asia to the East of Europe, we notice how Russian orthodox Christianity has remained stationary at an earlier stage of Christian development, refusing to advance and thereby keeping something of the luciferic element. In short, we can detect a luciferic remnant in the East, which, I would say, a wise guiding force left behind for the evolution of mankind in general.

Looking to the West and especially to American culture, a different characteristic quality stands out. The characteristic feature of American culture is to explain everything from external appearance. This kind of perception can certainly lead to great and significant achievements, but still, externals are usually expected to provide answers to all questions. Suppose we in Europe, and especially in Central Europe, notice a person who earlier in his life did not yet have an opportunity to dedicate himself to Christ and to the spiritual cosmic forces. If some event in this person's life brought about his conversion, we want to know what had gone on in his soul. We are not interested in learning that there was a leap forward in his development because such a phenomenon could certainly be found everywhere. The most incorrect pronouncement made by the empirical sciences is that nature does not make any leaps.³ Yet there is a tremendous leap from a green plant leaf to the red petal of a flower, and there is another significant leap from petal to the calyx. This pronouncement is therefore patently false; the truth of all development rests precisely on the fact that leaps occur everywhere. Hence, when a person who for some time was leading an external existence is suddenly induced by something to turn to spiritual things, we are not interested in the fact that it happened. What does interest us is the inner force and power that can bring about such a conversion. We will want to look into the soul of such a person and ascertain what has caused such a reversal. The inner workings of the soul will interest us.

How would the American proceed? He would do something quite peculiar. In America, conversions of this sort have been observed frequently. Well, the American would ask the people who have experienced conversions to write letters. He would then gather all these letters into a bundle and say, “I have received these letters from some two hundred people. Fourteen percent of all these souls experienced a conversion out of sudden fear of death or hell: five percent claimed altruistic motives; seventeen percent because they aspired to ethical ideals; fifteen percent had experienced pangs of conscience; ten percent acted in obedience to what they were taught; thirteen percent because they saw that others were converted and imitated them; nineteen percent because they were forced by a good whipping at the appropriate age, and so on.” In this fashion the most extreme souls are isolated, sorted and tallied and the result is claimed to be founded on “scientific data.” The findings are then compiled in books that are sent out and billed as “soul science.” For these people all other evidence is unsound, or as they claim, rests on subjective notions. There you have an example of the externalization of the innermost phenomena, and so it goes with many, many things in America. At a time that cries out for special spiritual deepening, the most external brand of spiritism is rampant in America! Everything there has to be tangible.

That is a materialistic interpretation of spiritual life. We could mention many other instances from which it would be possible to see how the culture of the West is seized by the ahrimanic principle, and what principle causes the pendulum to swing to the other side. In the East we are confronted by the luciferic and in the West by the ahrimanic principle. In Central Europe we have been assigned the immensely important task of finding the equilibrium between East and West. Therefore, the plastic group in our building in Dornach must represent what we consider the most significant spiritual task of our age, that is, finding the equilibrant relationship between Lucifer and Ahriman. Only then will it be recognized how the Christ impulse was meant to influence evolution on earth, when the Christ is not simply brought to preeminence, but is known in the proper way as exemplary force in balance with Lucifer and Ahriman.

The following may illustrate that no clear understanding has yet been reached concerning the relationship of man and of Christ to Lucifer and Ahriman. In a period, even the greatest phenomena are not always free from a one-sided attitude that may characterize the age. It is impossible to overestimate the significance of Michelangelo's magnificent painting The Last Judgment, which can be found in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Christ is portrayed in triumph, directing the good people to the one side and the wicked to the other. Let us look at this Christ figure. It does not possess the features we would like to emphasize in the Christ of our building in Dornach. Even though Lucifer towers above, it must be shown that the Christ raises His hand in compassion. Lucifer is not supposed to be toppled by the power of Christ, but plunges down by his own power because he is unable to bear the radiance of the Christ nearby, and the Christ looks up and raises his brow toward Lucifer. Similarly, Ahriman is not conquered by any hatred from Christ, but because he feels he cannot stand the forces emanating from Him. The Christ, however, towers in the middle as the One who is carrying the Parcival principle into the new age and who, not through His power but through His very being, induces others to overcome themselves, rather than being overcome by Him. In Michelangelo's painting, we see a Christ who uses His very power to send some to heaven and others to hell. In future, such an image will no longer be seen as the genuine Christ, but rather as a Christ having luciferic qualities. Of course, this observation does not detract from the greatness of the painting, in fact, we acknowledge it. We simply must admit, however, that Michelangelo was not yet capable of painting the genuine Christ because the development of the world had not yet advanced to such a point when this could be done. There has to be a clear understanding that we cannot turn our attention just to the Christ, but must set our sight on the threefold configuration: Christ, Lucifer, Ahriman. I can only hint at this, but spiritual science will eventually bring to light the full content of the mystery, Christ in relation to Lucifer and Ahriman.

Now consider the following. Looking eastward we can make out luciferic forces even in the eastern regions nearest to us, while in the West we see ahrimanic forces. As a matter of fact, in spiritual scientific consideration we must adopt a mode of perception by which neither objects nor nations, nor the spirit of nations, are observed with sympathy or antipathy, but rather in accordance with their characteristics. What is called the national mentality of a person steeped in the heritage of his people depends to a large degree on the activity of the physical body and the ether body. From the time of our falling asleep to the moment of our awakening we live with our spiritual-intellectual being as astral body and ego, and during this period we also live outside our habitual national identity. Only during the time from our awakening to the time when we fall asleep do we partake in our nationality, because then we are immersed in our physical body. For this reason man overcomes his sense of national identity little by little during his stay in kamaloka. There he strives toward a union with humanity as a whole in order to live most of the time between death and rebirth in the sphere of humanity as such. Among the characteristics discarded in kamaloka is one that specializes us as members of a nationality.

In this connection the various nationalities differ considerably from one another. Let us, for instance, compare a Frenchman with a Russian. It is a Frenchman's particular trait that he is especially persistent in holding onto, and dwelling in, what the collective soul of his people carries into his physical body and ether body during his life between birth and death. This can be seen in his definitive idea—not as an individual but as a Frenchman—of what it is to be French. Above all, he stresses the importance of being French and what that means to him. But this notion held by Frenchmen or by anyone else from a Romance culture about their nationality affects the ether body by clearly imprinting the idea of nationality on it. A few days after the Frenchman has passed through the gate of death he loses his ether body; it is then a closed entity that has a prolonged existence in the etheric world. The ether body is unable to dissolve for a long time because it is impregnated with, and held together by, the Frenchman's idea of nationality. Thus, if we look to the West we see the field of death filled with firmly defined ether bodies.

Now, if we take a closer look to the East, at Russian man, we recognize his peculiar trait; his soul, upon passing through the gate of death, carries an ether body that dissolves in a relatively short period of time. That is the difference between the West and the East. When the ether bodies of Western Europeans are separated after death, they tend to maintain a certain rigidity. What the Frenchman calls “Gloire” is impregnated in his ether body as a national Gloire. He is condemned for a long time after his death to turn his spiritual sight onto this ether body, and to look at himself (The Russian, however, looks little at himself after his death.) Through all this, Western European man is exposed to the ahrimanic influence because his ether body has been infected by materialistic thinking.

The speedy separation and the diffusion of the ether body is accompanied by a feeling of sensual pleasure, which is also present as a most peculiar ingredient of national sentiment. How is this expressed in the East (Central Europeans do not understand this just as they do not empathize with the East.) Consider Dostoevsky and even Tolstoy or those leading writers who are constantly speaking of “Russian man”; their jargon is an expression of an undefined sensual pleasure surging from their national sentiment. Even in Solowjow's philosophy, we find a vague and stifling quality that the Central European man cannot reconcile with the clarity and purity he seeks. This search for clarity and purity is related to what is active in Europe as spiritual power.

In Central Europe there exists another condition, an intermediate state and something I can now dwell on in greater detail than was possible in yesterday's lecture. I mentioned that something exists in Central Europe that could be called the inner disposition toward striving. As a Central European, Goethe could have written his Faust no differently in the eighteen-forties: he was always striving! This striving is innermost nature. It was in Central Europe where the mystics made their appearance—those mystics who were not satisfied with the mere knowledge of the divine-spiritual principle but wanted to experience it in their own souls. To experience the Christ event internally was their very endeavor. Now take Solowjow who proceeds above all from a historical premise that the Christ died for mankind. That is correct, but Solowjow is a soul who, similar to a cloud, perceives spiritual life as something outside himself. Somehow he thinks that everything is viewed as a completed event, while Central European man demands that everyone experience the Christ event again in himself. Solowjow stresses time and again that Christ has to die so that man can be human. Meister Eckhart, in contrast, would have responded like this: “You are seeing Christ in the same way in which one looks at something external.” The point is that we should not look only at historical events, but that we should experience the Christ within ourselves. We must discover something within ourselves that passes through stages similar to those experienced by Christ, at least spiritually, so that we can rediscover the Christ event within ourselves.

Now it will certainly seem strange and fantastic when mankind nowadays is told that in Central Europe the close association of the “I” with the Christ principle had put a stamp on the entire development of the area, to the effect that even the linguistic spirit of a people took up this association and equated “I” (Ich) and “CH” (Christ): I-CH conjoined became “Ich.” In pronouncing “Ich” in Central Europe one utters the name of Jesus Christ. That is how close the “I” wants to be to the Christ, longing for the most intimate closeness with Him. This living together, as one, with the spiritual world, which we in Central Europe must strive to attain in all intellectual fields, is not known in the West or in the East. Therefore, something in the twentieth century is necessary so that the Christ principle can gradually spread over the entire European continent. I have frequently emphasized in several lecture series⁴ that in November 1879 the spiritual being we call the Archangel Michael had reached a special stage of development. Michael had become, so to speak, the leading spirit who is now preparing the event that has to take place in the twentieth century. This is alluded to in my first mystery play⁵ as the appearance of the etheric Christ on earth. It will come to pass that at first a few, and gradually more and more souls will know that the Christ is really here, is again on this earth, but as an ether body and not as a physical body.

Certain preparations are necessary. When some souls in the course of the twentieth century become clairvoyant to life in the etheric world—and that will happen—they would be disturbed by those ether bodies that are residual from Western Europe. The spiritual eye would perceive them first of all and would have a distorted vision of the Christ figure. For this reason Michael has to fight a battle in Europe. He has to contribute something to the diffusion of these rigid ether bodies from Western Europe. To accomplish this task, he must take the ether bodies from the East, which strive for diffusion, and join with them in a struggle against the West. The result of this is that since 1879 a violent struggle has been in preparation between Russian and Western European ether bodies and is now raging in the entire astral world. This furious battle between Russia and France is indeed going on in the astral world and is led by Michael; it corresponds to the war that is now being waged in Europe. We are often shaken by the knowledge that the events in the physical world take place as exact opposites to those occurring in the spiritual world, and that is precisely what is happening in this case. The alliance between France and Russia⁶ can be blamed on the seductive powers of Ahriman or, if you will, on the ahrimanic element, the twenty billion francs that France gave to Russia. This alliance is the physical expression of a struggle raging between French and Russian souls, a struggle that has an impact on Central Europe as it strives in its innermost soul for an encounter with the Christ. It is the karma of Europe that we in Central Europe must experience in an especially tragic way what the West and East must settle between themselves. The only possible interpretation of the external struggle between German and French elements is that the German element lies in the middle and serves as an anvil for both East and West. Germany, which is hammered by both sides in the conflict, is in reality the subject of their own controversy. That is the spiritual truth and quite different from what is happening in the physical world. Consider how different the spiritual truth is from what is happening in the physical world! This must strike contemporary man as grotesque, but it nevertheless is the truth, which must have a shocking effect on us.

There is yet another extraordinarily important matter worth mentioning. Surely history seems to be contradicted when we see that England, even though she has in the past always been allied with Turkey against Russia, now has to fight with Russia against Turkey. We can understand this contradiction only through occult observation. On the physical plane England and Russia are allies in the fight against the Turkish element, yet occult vision, perceiving this struggle from below through the physical plane and then onto the astral plane, sees that in the North it is Russia and in the Southeast it is Turkey that appear to be allied with England. This is due to the fact that the alliance between England and Russia is only of significance on the physical plane, but has no corresponding value in the spiritual world since it rests entirely on material interests. From below one sees that England and Russia are allied in the North only on the physical plane. In the Southeast, looking through the physical plane, one perceives on the astral plane a spiritual alliance between the English and the Turks while they are both fighting the Russians. Thus, on the physical plane, England is an ally to Russia and on the astral plane Russia is attacked by England. This is how we must see the events as they unfold in external reality inasmuch as they reveal themselves as external history. What is behind this history is something entirely different.

There will be a time when people will speak about the present events differently than they are doing now. You will have to admit, the entire war literature contains something rather unpleasant. True, some valid statements are made, but there are also many disagreeable ones. Above all, there is one thing that is disagreeable. There is much talk about how it is still too early to discuss the question of who has caused the war and so on. People delude themselves about the facts when they say that at a later date the documents in our archives will surely bring to light who is to blame for the war! In reference to the external events, however, the matter can be resolved fairly easily, provided one judges dispassionately. Chamberlain, in his War Essays⁷ is correct (even though he is in error about the details) when he says that it is possible to know the key issues of this war. All that is without a doubt accurate, but it leaves the proper question unasked. For example, there is but one question that can be answered unequivocally, if only it is properly posed, and this question is: Who could have prevented the war?—The constantly recurring question: Who is to blame for this war? and many other questions just are not appropriate. Who could have prevented the war? The answer to this question can be no other than that the Russian government could have prevented the war! Only in this fashion will it be possible to find the appropriate definition for the impulses that are at work in each situation. Of course, war had been desired by the East for decades, but had it not been for a certain relationship between England, Russia and France, it could not have broken out. Therefore, one might ascribe the greater blame to England. Yet all these conjectures do not take into consideration the underlying causes that made this World War a necessity. It is naive to believe that war could have been avoided. People these days talk as if it did not have to come about when it was, of course, destined by the European karma.

I wanted to allude to some of this by sketching the spiritual differences between East and West. It is not important that we look for external causes. All we have to know is that this war was a historic necessity. When that is understood the individual causes do not matter.

What is important is the proper attitude toward the various effects, for one effect can impress our souls in an especially significant way. It is remarkable and a characteristic phenomenon that a war like this one produces many unexpended ether bodies. Since this is the biggest war in man's conscious history, this phenomenon is present to a corresponding large degree. Ether bodies are produced that are not worn out. You see, the ether body that man carries with him can support him for a long period of time, until he reaches seventy, eighty or ninety years of age. But in a war human beings are sacrificed in the prime of their lives. You know that man, when he passes through the gate of death loses his ether body after a short period of time. A person dying in a war, however, loses his ether body when normally it could have supported his physical body for a long time, in many cases for decades. Those ether bodies entering the etheric world prematurely are preserved with all their powers. Consider now the countless number of unexpended ether bodies of those going through the gate of death at an early age. There is something distinctive about these ether bodies. I would like to illustrate this fact with an example that concerns our Movement, and after that I wish to explain how the ether bodies of the young soldiers who have gone through the gate of death will emerge in the etheric world in the near future.

This fall we witnessed in Dornach the death of little seven-year-old Theodor Faiss; his family belonged to the Anthroposophical Society and was employed not far from our building project. The father used to live in Stuttgart before moving to Dornach. He worked as a gardener in the vicinity of the building and lived there with his family. He himself had been drafted soon after the beginning of the war and at the time of the event I would like to relate, he was staying in a military hospital. Little seven-year-old Theodor was really a sunny child—a wonderful, lovely boy. Now, one day the following happened. We just had a lecture that I delivered in Dornach about the work that goes on in the building. After the lecture someone appeared and reported that little Theodor's mother had not seen him since late in the afternoon. It was ten o'clock at night and we could not help thinking that a terrible accident had happened. This afternoon a horse-driven furniture van had been in the vicinity of the so-called canteen; it was seen on a narrow street where it was forced to turn. To my knowledge, no van as huge had reached that spot in decades. Little Theodor had been in the canteen before the van had turned. He had been delayed there, otherwise he would have gone home earlier with the food that he had fetched from the canteen for supper. It so happened that he covered the short distance to his home in such a way that he reached the very spot where at that moment the van turned over and fell on him. Nobody had noticed the accident, not even the coachman because he was tending to his horses when the van turned over and did not know that the child was buried under it. When we were informed that the child was missing we tried to heave the vehicle up again. Friends fetched tools and alerted Swiss soldiers to help us with the task. Naturally the child had been dead since five-thirty in the afternoon. The van had crushed him immediately and he had died of suffocation.

This case can be used as an example of what I have often tried to explain by means of a comparison: causes are mistaken for effects, and vice versa. I have frequently used the following example. A person falls into the river and people hurry to the spot where it happened. When they find a rock, they conjecture that the victim had stumbled over it and this caused him to fall into the river and drown. Thus, they are sure that the man had died because he fell into the river. If one were to conduct an autopsy, however, it might turn out that he had suffered a heart attack and as a result, was already dead when he fell into the water, but he fell into the water because he had died. You will frequently encounter a similar confusion of cause and effect when life situations are assessed, and even more frequently in the general sciences.

The situation with little Theodor was that his karma had expired, so that it is actually possible to say, “He himself ordered the van to the place of the accident.” I have told you this externally tragic case in detail because we are here concerned with a child's ether body, which could have supported his life for decades. This ether body has passed into the spiritual world with all of its unexpended powers, but where is it? What is it doing? Since that day, anyone attuned to occult perception who is working artistically on the building in Dornach or is there simply to pursue his thoughts will know that the entire ether body of the child, with all its powers, is enlarged in the aura of the Dornach building. We must distinguish that the individuality is elsewhere; it goes its own way, but the ether body was separated after a few days and is now present in the building. I will never hesitate to assert that the powers needed for intuition are those of this ether body that was sacrificed for the building. The relationships behind ordinary life are often quite different from what we are able to suspect. This ether body has become one of the protective forces of the building. Something tremendously stupendous lies in such a relationship.

Now let us consider the vast amount of power that ascends to the spiritual world from the unexpended ether bodies of these who are now walling through the gate of death as a result of military events.

The way in which events are connected is different from what people can imagine; the karma in the world takes its course in a different way. It is the task of spiritual science to replace fantastic notions with spiritually true ideas. For example, we can hardly imagine something more fantastic and untrue, from a spiritual perspective, than what has taken place in the last few decades. Let us ask what has been accomplished by the (Hague) Peace Conference⁸ which aimed at replacing war with law, or international law, as it was called. Since the Peace Conferences were held, wars have never been more terrible. During the last few decades this Peace Movement counted among its special patrons the very monarch who has waged the bloodiest and most cruel wars ever known in history. The launching of the Peace Conferences by the Russian Czar must therefore be considered the biggest farce in world history; it is also the most abominable. This must be labeled a luciferic seduction of the East; the details can be easily traced. No matter how one may view the situation, the human soul is shocked by the fact that in the beginning, when the war impulses made their way into Central Europe, the people there made few comments about the situation, even in places where they gathered for the purpose of discussion, such as the German Parliament in Berlin. Little was said, but the events spoke for themselves. In contrast, there was much talk in the East and West. The most shocking impressions come from the debates among various political parties in the St. Petersburg Duma. Representatives of these parties uttered, with great fervor, endless variations of absolutely meaningless phrases. It was terrifying to see the luciferic seduction at work. The fires raging in this war, however, are intended to warn and admonish the human race to be on guard.

From what is now happening, a few souls must come to a realization that we cannot go on like this; human evolution must take up the spiritual! Materialism is confronting its karma in this, the most terrible of all wars. In a certain sense, this war is the karma of materialism. The more this fact is realized by human beings, the more they will abandon their arguments about who is to blame for the war, and then they will have to realize that this war has been sent into world history to admonish man to turn to a spiritual perception of human life in its entirety.

Not only does materialism cause human souls to embrace materialism, it also perverts man's logic and dulls his feelings. We in Central Europe are still lacking a full understanding of what I have stated before. We in Central Europe must be most intimately engaged in the continued development of the Christ impulse. To do this we must, among other things, try to understand the minds that have already sown the seeds. Just one example. Goethe wrote a theory of color, which physicists regard as something—well—something that deserves no more than an indulgent smile, as if they wanted to say, “What did the poet know about colors? He was nothing but a dilettante.” Since the 1880's I have tried to gain acceptance for Goethe's theory of color in spite of the findings of modern physics.⁹ Why does nobody understand that? The answer is that Central Europe has been imbued with the materialistic principle that has come to us from the British folk soul. Newton, whom Goethe had to oppose, has been victorious over everything emanating from Goethe's spirit. Goethe also established a theory of evolution that demonstrates how human beings, simply by grasping spiritual laws, can progress from the state of greatest imperfection to one of greatest perfection. People found this too difficult to understand. When Darwin published his theory of evolution in a more comprehensible fashion, it was readily accepted. Darwin, a materialistic thinker who was inspired by the British folk soul has conquered Goethe, a man whose perceptions resulted from a most intimate dialogue with the German folk soul.

Ernst Haeckel's experiences were tragic. During his entire life he nourished himself intellectually by leaning on the ideas of Huxley and Darwin; his materialism is basically an English product¹⁰ Yet when the war broke out, Haeckel was enraged about what emerged from the British Isles. He was one of the first to return British medals, diplomas and honors; instead, he should have returned his brand of Darwinism and physics, which is tinged with English thought. This is what we have to realize if we are to understand how Central Europe can strive for an intimate harmony with the laws of the world.

The greatest damage is done when what is poured into a child's soul induces the child to develop merely materialistically later in life. This trend has been on the increase for several centuries. Ahriman has even inspired one of the great British writers to compose a work that is calculated to impress the child's soul materialistically. The intent is hardly noticeable because ordinarily, one does not see all this as preparatory to a materialistic orientation. The work I am talking about is Robinson Crusoe. The description of Robinson is so shrewd that once the mind has accepted the ideas in the Robinson tale, it cannot avoid thinking materialistically thereafter. Mankind has not yet recovered from the ill effects perpetrated by the inventors of Robinson tales; they existed before and exist now. Much more could be said. These statements are not made to say something derogatory about the people of the West who have to be what they are. Rather, I wish to point out how the people in Central Europe must discover the connections to great values that are just now germinating but will grow to determine future developments. In this regard, the significance of Austria is especially noteworthy. During the past few decades several men there aspired to profound accomplishments, for example, Hamerling¹¹ in the area of literature, Carneri¹² who set out to deepen Darwinism, by extending it to the moral realm, as well as Bruckner¹³ and other artists from a variety of disciplines. What matters here is the concern of a people for these things.

Now let us consider the unexpended ether bodies that are still in existence. They were cast off by human beings who had learned, through a great event, how to sacrifice themselves for their people's spiritual commonalty, a commonalty no longer present for them, at least on the surface. If a spiritual scientist today asserts that there is a collective soul of people and that it exists as archangel and so forth, he will be ridiculed. What is called a people's collective soul by the materialists is nothing but the abstract sum of attributes that the people of a nation possess. The materialist considers the people as nothing but the sum of human beings who co-exist in the same geographic area and share a sense of commonalty with each other. We, on the other hand, speak of a people's spiritual commonalty in such a way that we know that the spirit of a people is present as a real being of the rank of an archangel. Even though somebody who sacrifices his life for his people is not fully conscious of the real spirit of his people, he nevertheless confirms by the manner in which he goes through death that he believes in a continuity of life alter this death. He believes that there is more to a people's spiritual commonalty than meets the eye, that is, it is related to, and co-exists with, the super-sensible world. All those going through death confirm in a more or less conscious way that there is a super-sensible world, and that realization is imprinted on their ether bodies. In a future time of peace, the unexpended ether bodies will be among people living on earth and will continually send the following sounds into the music of the spheres: there is more in the world than what mere physical eyes can perceive! This spiritual truth will ring forth as part of the music of the spheres through ether bodies that the dead have left behind. These are aside from what they are taking along as their individuality, which they retain during their lives between death and rebirth. We must listen to what lives and echoes from these ether bodies, because they were discarded by people who went through death and in so doing, affirmed the truth of the spiritual world. Mankind's greatest sin will be to ignore what the dead call out to us when their ether bodies speak. One's glance at the spiritual world will be infinitely enriched if one considers that those who have lost loved ones—fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters—may tell themselves that those who were sacrificed continue to live for humanity, as a reminder of what is yet to come!

If one were to rely only on what is taking place in the physical world, there would be little hope for the successful continuation of the spiritual movement through which a spiritual scientific world view is to be cultivated. Recently, a good and faithful colleague aged thirty or so died. My words to this soul that had gone through the gate of death requested that it should continue to work in our spiritual scientific field as faithfully and as courageously as it had done here on earth, utilizing all of its acquired knowledge. This colleague had worked diligently with us here on the physical plane; my message to him for his life between death and rebirth was that he should continue to work with us after death as he had done in life, for we are counting on these so-called dead as we are counting on the living. Our spiritual-scientific world view must be alive to such a degree that the gap between the so-called dead and the living can be overcome: we must feel the dead among us as if they were alive. We want not only theory, but life. Thus we wish to point out that when there is peace, there will be a living tie between those on earth and those who have gone through the gate of death. Man will be able to learn, and must learn, from the dead how they contribute to the great spiritual progress that must take hold on earth.

Sometimes life offers us an opportunity to see how human logic alone does not suffice. I would like to mention an example—not for personal reasons but because I want to characterize the way our Movement is viewed by the public. A few years ago an article was printed in a respected South German journal¹⁴ by a famous contemporary philosopher about our spiritual science. This treatment of spiritual science was intended to impress the public purely because the essay was authored by a famous philosopher. The editor took great pride in the fact that he was able to present an article about spiritual science by such a famous man. Of course, everything was skewed and the facts about spiritual science were distorted. But what did it take for the editor to realize that the account about spiritual science that he had sponsored in his monthly journal was distorted? The war broke out and the author of the article sent several letters to the editor. These letters contained some of the most disgusting remarks about Central European culture that one could imagine. The professor had railed and sneered at it. The editor then printed these letters in his journal as examples of the stupidity of this kind of thinking, commenting that anyone who writes this way belongs in an insane asylum. We are confronted by a curious fact. A good editor needed such an experience in order to see that the author, whose article on spiritual science had severely damaged the public image of the Movement, belonged in an insane asylum. If the man belongs in an insane asylum now, however, then the same was true before, when he wrote the article on spiritual science!

So it goes in the world! To be a judge of what is going on, man must garner other supports than those ordinarily available to him. The spiritual scientist who can clearly demonstrate that truth finds its own way, is on firm ground. Spiritual science, however, must be active in the evolution of mankind so that what is necessary, happens. Early in history Emperor Constantine had to accomplish his mission so that the Christ impulse could bear on the subconscious from the spiritual world. Later, the Christ impulse became active in the Maid of Orleans; what had to happen did indeed take place. Today, the Christ impulse must continue to bear on man, but more on his consciousness. In the future, there must be souls who will know that up there in the spiritual world there are those who sacrificed themselves as individuals and who admonish us to emulate their own belief in the active force of the spiritual, which they attained in death. The forces in the unexpended ether bodies beckon to the future, as well: to understand their message is to admit it into one's soul. Below, however, there must be souls who will perceive this truth and prepare for it through the proper and active understanding of our spiritual science. Our spiritual science must cultivate souls on this earth who will be capable of sensing what the ether bodies of the dead up there will say to us in the future. These souls will know that in the beyond there are forces to admonish human beings who had to be left on earth. When spirit-conscious souls down here harken to the hidden sounds of the spiritual world, then all bloodshed, all sacrifices and all suffering, past and future, will bear fruit. I do hope that quite a few souls come together through spiritual science and perceive the voices from the spiritual world that are resounding especially because of this war. Summarizing the final words of today's reflection, I wish to say a few words to you that are merely an expression of my feeling for what I want to instill in your souls.

From the warrior's valor,
From the blood of battles,
From the pain of the bereaved.
From a people's sacrifice
Will the spirit fruit arise—
Will the souls embrace the spirit
Consciously, with inner eyes.

With such feelings in our hearts we forever want to imbue ourselves with the meaning of the rose cross so that we can perceive it in the proper way as the motto for our doing, weaving and feeling. Not the black cross alone. He who tears the roses from the black cross and has nothing left but the black cross, would fall into the clutches of Ahriman. The black cross in itself represents life when it strives to embrace inanimate matter. Also, if one were to separate the cross from the roses, keeping only the latter, one would nor find the proper thing. For the roses, separate from the cross, tend to elevate us to a life of selfish striving toward the spiritual, but not to a life in which we reveal the spirit in a material world. Not the cross alone, not the roses alone, but the roses on the cross, the cross carrying the roses: That is our proper symbol.

• 1 . “Die übersinnliche Erkenntnis und ihre stärkende Seelenkraft in unserer schicksalstragenden Zeit” (“Supersensible Perception and Its Strengthening Soul-force in Our Time of Destiny”). Corresponding remarks can be found in the Berlin lectures of April 16 and 23, 1915, published as: “Aus schicksalstragenden Zeit”, (“From a Time of Destiny”) Bibl.-No. 64 in the Gesamtausgabe (Complete Works [of Rudolf Steiner]), Dornach, 1959.
• 2 . “Welten-Neujahr. Das Traumlied von Olaf &Åsteson” (“Cosmic New Year. The Legend of Olaf &Åsteson's Dream”), Hanover lecture of January 1, 1912. Published as a separate edition in Dornach, 1958; Gesamtausgabe (Complete works), Bibl.-No 158.
• 3 . In this form the pronouncement was first made by Karl von Linné in his Philosophia Botanica, Stockholm, 1751, no. 77.
• 4 . Cf. especially “Die spirituellen Hintergründe der äusseren Welt—Der Sturz der Geister der Finsternis” (“The Spiritual Background of the External World—The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness”), 14 lectures, Dornach, September 29 to October 28, 1917. Gesamtausgabe (Complete works), Bibl.-No. 177, Dornach, 1965.
• 5 . “Die Pforte der Einweihung” (“The Portal of Initiation”), first scene. Gesamtausgabe (Complete works), Bibl.-No 14, Dornach, 1962.
• 6 . The alliance was negotiated in 1897 by President Faure of France and Czar Nicolas II of Russia.
• 7 . Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Neue Kriegsaufsatze (New War Essays), Munich, 1915, p.36.
• 8 . “The reference is to the Hague Peace Conference of 1899 and 1907, which were both initiated by Czar Nicholas II.
• 9 . Rudolf Steiner was asked in 1882 to edit Goethe's scientific writings in Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur. Volume I was published in 1883; it contained writings on the formation and transformation of organisms. Rudolf Steiner's introductions and critical commentaries to the four volumes were published as a special edition, entitled: Rudolf Steiner, , Dornach, 1926. A German edition was published in Freiburg, 1949. Gesamtausgabe (Complete Works), Bibl.-No. 1. Cf. the correspondence between Karl Julius Schröer, Joseph Kürschner and Rudolf Steiner in Blätter für Anthroposophie,. 13 Jg. No. 2, February 1961.
• 10. Ernst Haeckel: “I have always readily acknowledged the magnificent contributions of the small insular British empire to the enrichment of human civilization. These were possible because of its advantageous insular position and its geographic alliances. In addition I worked on Darwinism for the past fifty years and had many personal dealings with Darwin, Huxley, Lyell, John Murray and many other famous natural scientists in England and Scotland; these were pleasant and fruitful personal relationships.” Haeckel, Ewigkeit. Weltkriegsgedanken über Leben und Tod, Religion und Entwicklungslehre (Eternity, World War Reflections on Life and Death, Religion, and the Theory of Evolution), Berlin, 1915, p.65 and 114.
• 11. Robert Hamerling, 1830-1889. Cf. Rudolf Steiner, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Literatur 1886-1902 (Collected Essays on Literature, 1886-1902), Bibl.No. 20, Gesamtausgabe (Complete Works), Dornach, 1957; Mein Lebensgang (The Course of My Life), Bibl.-No. 28, Gesamtausgabe (Complete Works), Dornach, 1962; “Robert Hamerling, ein Dichter und ein Denker und ein Mensch” (“Robert Hamerling, the Poet, the Thinker and the Man”), Dornach, 1939.
• 12. Bartholomäus Ritter von Carneri, 1821-1909. Cf. Rudolf Steiner, “Carneri, der Ethiker des Darwinismus” in Methodische Grundlagen der Anthroposophie 1884-1901 (“Carneri, the Moral Philosopher of Darwinism” in Methodological Foundations of Anthroposophy, 1884-1901), Bibl.-No. 30, Gesamtausgabe (Complete Works), Dornach, 1961: also “Vom Menschenrätsel” (“On the Riddle of Man”) and Mein Lebensgang (The Course of My Life).
• 13. Anton Bruckner, 1824-1896.
• 14. Wincenty Lutoslawski, “Rudolf Steiner's sogenannte ‘Geheimwissenschaft’” in Hochland, 8.Jg., 1.Heft Oktober 1910, S.45-58. (“Rudolf Steiner's so-called ‘Occult Science’” in Hochland, VIII, 1, October 1910, p.45-58). Professor Karl Muth, editor of the journal, writes an editorial comment in No. 7 of the same year, in which he describes Lutoslawski as an “author who is eminent as a man and as a thinker.” Later, in Krisgshefte der Suddeutschen Monatshefte, Munich, February 1915, p.623-631, Muth refers to his correspondence with Lutoslawski and writes, among other things: “in addition to making several small contributions to Hochland, Lutoslawski also published in this journal three lead articles which aroused considerable attention among the readers: one article on the theosophy of Rudolf Steiner, another one on exercises to strengthen the will, and the third one on his conversion to the Catholic faith. His published notes contain peculiar biographical clues ... Where in Germany—except in an inane asylum—would there be a human being like this lector of philosophy from the University Geneva—a man who seems to be completely disoriented as he confronts the magnitude of our contemporary world-historical situation with complete blindness and a paucity of ideas! The relief which his overwrought brain received through his epistolary outpouring did not satisfy him; he now insists that his latest letter should come to the attention of the public as well.”

Before we essay the second part of our programme, I shall permit myself to point briefly to the genesis of poetry – in man’s inner nature. For what ought to lie at the foundation of a knowledge of man is the following perception: in the first instance, the world, the universe, the cosmos is artistically active in man; but man then brings forth from himself again what the aesthetic activity of the cosmos has inlaid in him, as art.

Two elements must collaborate in a man, working through the powers of his spirit and soul, in order for poetry (in the general way of things) to be engendered and given form. It is not thought – even in the most intellectual poetry it is not thought as such – that is shaped by the artist. It is the collaboration, the wonderful interaction between breathing and blood-circulation. In breathing, the human being is entirely conjoined with the cosmos. The air which I have just breathed in was formerly an ingredient in the cosmos, and it will afterwards become an ingredient in the cosmos once more. In breathing I absorb into myself the substantiality of the cosmos, and then release to the cosmos once more what was briefly within me. Anyone who experiences this – anyone with a real feeling for this breathing-process – will find in it one of the most marvellous mysteries of the whole formation of the world. And this interchange between man and the world finds its inner formation in something closely bound up with the breathing-rhythm: the rhythm of blood-circulation. In a mature man the ratio expressed in the relation between respiration and pulse beat is an average one to four: eighteen breaths (or thereabouts) and seventy-two pulse-beats per minute. Between the two is generated that inner harmony which constitutes man’s entire inner life of plastic and musical creativity.

The following remarks are not advanced as exact knowledge, but by way of a picture. We see engendered before us a spirit of light who, on the waves of the air, plays into man through his breathing. The breath takes hold of the blood-circulation, as of the occult workings of the human organism. We see Apollo, the god of light, carried on the billows of air in the breathing-process, and in his lyre the actual functioning of the blood-circulation. Every poetic act, every forming act of poetry ultimately rests on this ratio between breathing, as inwardly experienced, and the inner experience of the circulation of the blood. Subconsciously our breath counts the pulse-beats; and subconsciously the pulse-beats count the breaths dividing and combining, combining and dividing to mark out the metre and the syllable-quantities. It is not that the manifestations of poetry in speech adapt themselves so as to conform either to respiration or to the circulation of the blood: but rather the ratio between the two. The configuration of syllables may be quite irregular, but in poetry they stand in a certain ratio to one another, essentially similar to that between breathing and circulation.

We can see this in the case where poetry first comes before us, in what is perhaps the most congenial and readily comprehensible form – the hexameter. Here we can see how the first three verse-feet and the caesura stand in a mutual ratio of four to one. The hexameter repeats this ratio of blood‑circulation to breathing a second time. Man receives the spiritual into his own inner processes and inner activities when he creates poetry out of what he is at every moment of his earthly life: a product of breathing and blood-circulation. He articulates this artistically through the syllables in quantity and metre. And we approach intensification and relaxation, tension and release, in a properly artistic way when we allow fewer or more syllables to the unit of breath. And these will then balance each other out in accordance with their inherent natural proportions. In other words, we must adjust the timing of the verse in the right way.

If we let the verse proceed according to the proportion ordained by the cosmos itself, which subsists between breathing and blood-circulation, we arrive at epic. If we ascend towards an assertion of our own inner nature; i.e., let the breathing recede, refrain from activating the life of the breath, do not allow it to count up the pulse-beats on the ‘lyre’ of the blood-circulation – when we recede with our breathing into ourselves and make the pulsation of the blood the essential thing, reckoning up the notches (so to speak) scored onto the blood-stream, we arrive at an alternative form of metrical verse. If we are concerned with the breathing, which calculates, as it were, the blood-circulation, we have recitation: recitation flows in conformity with the breathing-process. If the pulsation of the blood is our criterion, so that the blood engraves its strength, weakness, passion, emotion, tension and relaxation onto the flux of the breath – then declamation arises: declamation pays more attention to the force or lightness, strength or weakness of emphasis given to the syllables, with a high or low intonation. Recitation, in accordance with the quietly flowing breath-stream, reckons only the blood-circulation, and this is communication in poetry – whereas declamation is poetry as description. And in fact everyone who practises speech-formation must ask himself when confronted with a poem: Have I to recite here or declaim? They are two fundamentally different nuances of this art-form. We realise this when we see how the poet himself differentiates in a wonderful way between declamation and recitation.

Compare in this respect the Iphigeneia Goethe composed in Weimar, before he became acquainted in Italy with the Greek style. Observe the Iphigeneia he wrote at that time: it is entirely declamatory. Then he comes to Italy and grows absorbed in his own way in what he terms Greek art (it was not really still Greek art, but he does feel in it an after-effect of Greek art): he rewrites his Iphigeneia in the recitative mode. And while declamation, as stemming from the blood, passes over into recitation, which stems from the breathing, here that inwardly more Nordic, that Germanic disposition of feeling comes to adopt an outward artistic form that works through quantities and metre in this play which Hermann Grimm has aptly christened the “Roman Iphigeneia”. For someone with artistic sensibility there is the greatest conceivable difference between Goethe's German and his Roman Iphigeneia. We do not wish today to manifest a special sympathy or antipathy for one version or the other, but to indicate the tremendous difference, which should be apparent upon hearing a passage from the Iphigeneia either in recitation or declamation. Examples from both versions are now to be presented.

As for the hexameter, we shall encounter this in Schiller’s “Der Tanz”. A correct, regular metre – not necessarily the hexameter – we will come upon this in some poems by Mörike, a lyricist who inclines toward the ballad-form.

If we survey the aesthetic evolution of mankind, we may experience decisively how in ancient Greece everything became recitative and man lived altogether more in his natural surroundings. The life of recitation lies in the breathing-process, in quantitative metres. The declamatory emerges out of the northern sense of inwardness, the depths of feeling we find in the soul and spiritual life of Central Europe. It relies more upon weight and metre. And if, in his process of creation, the Divinity holds sway over the world through quantity, weight and proportion, then the poet is seeking through his declamatory and recitative art to hearken to the regency of the Divine – to do so in a poetic intimacy, through observing the laws of quantity and metre in recitation, and through an intimate feeling for metre and weight in the high and low tones of declamation.

In this context we will now present Schiller’s “Tanz” to exemplify the hexameter; then Mörike’s “Schön – Rohtraut” and “Geister am Mummelsee”, which are in a ballad-style; and lastly a short passage from Goethe’s German and Roman Iphigeneia. [Note 30]

DER TANZ

Siehe, wie schwebenden Schritts im Wellenschwung sich die Paare

Drehen! Den Boden berührt kaum der geflügelte Fuss.

Seh ich flüchtige Schatten, befreit von der Schwere des Leibes?

Schlingen im Mondlicht dort Elfen den luftigen Reihn?

Wie, vom Zephyr gewiegt, der leichte Rauch in die Luft fliesst,

Wie sich leise der Kahn schaukelt auf silberner Flut,

Hüpft der gelehrige Fuss auf des Takts melodischer Woge,

Säuselndes Saitengetön hebt den ätherischen Leib.

Jetzt als wollt es mit Macht durchreissen die Kette des Tanzes,

Schwingt sich ein mutiges Paar dort in den dichtesten Reihn.

Schnell vor ihm her entsteht ihm die Bahn, die hinter ihm schwindet,

Wie durch magische Hand öffnet und schliesst sich der Weg.

Sieh! jetzt schwand es dem Blick; in wildem Gewirr durcheinander

Stürzt der zierliche Bau dieser beweglichen Welt.

Nein, dort schwebt es frohlockend herauf; der Knoten entwirrt sich;

Nur mit verändertem Reiz stellet die Regel sich her.

Ewig zerstört, es erzeugt sich ewig die drehende Schöpfung,

Und ein stilles Gesetz lenkt der Verwandlungen Spiel.

Sprich, wie geschiehts, dass rastlos erneut die Bildungen schwanken,

Und die Ruhe besteht in der bewegten Gestalt?

Jeder ein Herrscher, frei, nur dem eigenen Herzen gehorchet

Und im eilenden Lauf findet die einzige Bahn?

Willst du es wissen? Es ist des Wohllauts mächtige Gottheit,

Die zum geselligen Tanz ordnet den tobenden Sprung,

Die, der Nemesis gleich, an des Rhythmus goldenem Zügel

Lenkt die brausende Lust und die verwilderte zähmt.

Und dir rauschen umsonst die Harmonien des Weltalls?

Dich ergreift nicht der Strom dieses erhabnen Gesangs?

Nicht der begeisternde Takt, den alle Wesen dir schlagen?

Nicht der wirbelnde Tanz, der durch den ewigen Raum

Leuchtende Sonnen schwingt in Kühn gewundenen Bahnen?

Das du im Spiele doch ehrst, fliehst du im Handeln, das Mass.

Friedrich Schiller.

[Though by different means, Sir John Davies also managed to devise a highly-polished, regular metre to reproduce in English the classical _.stateliness of a courtly dance. The following section treats of “The Antiquitte of Dancing,” and is taken from his “Orchestra, or A Poeme of Dauncing”:

Dauncing (bright Lady) then began to be,

When the first seedes whereof the world did spring,

The Fire, Ayre, Earth and Water did agree,

By Loves perswasion, Natures mighty King,

To leave their first disorder’d combating;

And in a daunce such measure to observe,

As all the world their motion should preserve.

Since when they still are carried in a round,

And changing come one in anothers place,

Yet doe they neyther mingle nor confound,

But every one doth keepe the bounded space

Wherein the daunce doth bid it turne or trace:

This wondrous myracle did Love devise,

For Dauncing is Loves proper exercise.

Like this, he fram’d the Gods eternall bower,

And of a shapelesse and confused masse

By his through-piercing and digesting power

The turning vault of heaven formed was:

Whose starrie wheeles he hath so made to passe,

As that their movings doe a musick frame,

And they themselves, still daunce unto the same.

Or if this (All) which round about we see

(As idle Morpheus some sicke braines hath taught)

Of undevided Motes compacted bee,

How was this goodly Architecture wrought?

Or by what meanes were they together brought?

They erre that say they did concur by chaunce,

Love made them meete in a well-ordered daunce.

As when Amphion with his charming Lire

Begot so sweet a Syren of the ayre,

That with her Rethorike made the stones conspire

The ruines of a Citty to repayre,

(A worke of wit and reasons wise affayre)

So Loves smooth tongue, the motes such measure taught

That they joyn’d hands, and so the world was wrought.

Sir John Davies (1569-1626).]

Two Ballads:

SCHÖN-ROHTRAUT

Wie heisst König Ringangs Töchterlein?

Rohtraut, Schön-Rohtraut.

Was tut sie denn den ganzen Tag,

Da sie wohl nicht spinnen und nähen mag?

Tut fischen und jagen.

O dass ich doch ihr Jäger wär’!

Fischen und Jagen freute mich sehr. –

– Schweig stille, mein Herze!

Und über eine kleine Weil’,

Rohtraut, Schön-Rohtraut,

So dient der Knab’ auf Ringangs Schloss

In Jägertracht und hat ein Ross,

Mit Rohtraut zu jagen.

O dass ich doch ein Königssohn wär’!

Rohtraut, Schön-Rohtraut lieb’ ich so sehr.

– Schweig stille, mein Herze!

Einstmals sie ruhten am Eichenbaum,

Da lacht Schön-Rohtraut:

‘Was siehst mich an so wunniglich?

Wenn du das Herz hast, küsse mich!’

Ach erschrak der Knabe!

Doch denket er: mir ist’s vergunnt,

Und küsset Schön-Rohtraut auf den Mund.

– Schweig stille, mein Herze!

Darauf sie ritten schweigend heim,

Rohtraut, Schön-Rohtraut;

Es jauchzt der Knab’ in seinem Sinn:

Und würdst du heute Kaiserin,

Mich sollt’s nicht kränken:

Ihr tausend Blätter im Walde wisst,

Ich hab’ Schön-Rohtrauts Mund geküsst!

– Schweig stille, mein Herze!

DIE GEISTER AM MUMMELSEE

Vom Berge was kommt dort um Mitternacht spät

Mit Fackeln so prächtig herunter?

Ob das wohl zum Tanze, zum Feste noch geht?

Mir klingen die Lieder so munter.

O nein!

So sage, was mag es wohl sein?

Das, was du da siehest, ist Totengeleit,

Und was du da hörest, sind Klagen.

Dem König, dem Zauberer, gilt es zuleid,

Sie bringen ihn wieder getragen.

O weh!

So sind es die Geister vom See!

Sie schweben herunter ins Mummelseetal,

Sie haben den See schon betreten,

Sie rühren und netzen den Fuss nicht einmal,

Sie schwirren in leisen Gebeten –

O schau!

Am Sarge die glänzende Frau!

Jetzt öffnet der See das grünspiegelnde Tor;

Gib acht, nun tauchen sie nieder!

Es schwankt eine lebende Treppe hervor,

Und – drunten schon summen die Lieder.

Hörst du?

Sie singen ihn unten zur Ruh.

Die Wasser, wie lieblich sie brennen und glühn!

Sie spielen in grünendem Feuer;

Es geisten die Nebel am Ufer dahin,

Zum Meere verzieht sich der Weiher. –

Nur still!

Ob dort sich nichts rühren will?

Es zuckt in der Mitten – O Himmel ach hilf!

Nun kommen sie wieder, sie kommen!

Es orgelt im Rohr und es klirret im Schilf;

Nur hurtig, die Flucht nur genommen!

Davon!

Sie wittern, sie haschen mich schon!

Eduard Mörike (1804-1875).

[For something similar in English we need look no further than the authors of the celebrated Lyrical Ballads:

LUCY GRAY;

OR, SOLITUDE

Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray:

And, when I crossed the wild,

I chanced to see at break of day

The solitary child.

No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;

She dwelt on a wide moor,

– The sweetest thing that ever grew

Beside a human door!

You yet may spy the fawn at play,

The bare upon the green;

But the sweet face of Lucy Gray

Will never more be seen.

‘To-night will be a stormy night –

You to the town must go;

And take a lantern, Child, to light

Your mother through the snow.’

‘That, Father! will I gladly do:

’Tis scarcely afternoon –

The minster-clock has just struck two,

And yonder is the moon!’

At this the Father raised his hook,

And snapped a faggot-band;

He plied his work; – and Lucy took

The lantern in her hand.

Not blither is the mountain roe:

With many a wanton stroke

Her feet disperse the powdery snow,

That rises up like smoke.

The storm came on before its time:

She wandered up and down;

And many a hill did Lucy climb:

But never reached the town.

The wretched parents all that night

Went shouting far and wide;

But there was neither sound nor sight

To serve them for a guide.

At day-break on a hill they stood

That overlooked the moor;

And thence they saw the bridge of wood,

A furlong from their door.

They wept – and, turning homeward, cried,

‘In heaven we all shall meet;’

– When in the snow the mother spied

The print of Lucy’s feet.

Then downwards from the steep hill’s edge

They tracked the footmarks small;

And through the broken hawthorn hedge,

And by the long stone-wall;

And then an open field they crossed:

The marks were still the same;

They tracked them on, nor ever lost;

And to the bridge they came.

They followed from the snowy bank

Those footmarks, one by one,

Into the middle of the plank;

And further there were none!

– Yet some maintain that to this day

She is a living child;

That you may see sweet Lucy Gray

Upon the lonesome wild.

O’er rough and smooth she traps along,

And never looks behind;

And sings a solitary song

That whistles in the wind.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850).

From “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, Part V:

And soon I heard a roaring wind:

lt did not come anear;

But with its sound it shook the sails,

That were so thin and sere.

The upper air burst into life!

And a hundred fire-flags sheen,

To and fro they were hurried about!

And to and fro, and in and out,

The wan stars danced between.

And the coming wind did roar more loud,

And the sails did sigh like sedge;

And the rain poured down from one black cloud;

The Moon was at its edge.

The thick black cloud was cleft, and still

The Moon was at its side:

Like waters shot from some high crag,

The lightning fell with never a jag,

A river steep and wide.

The loud wind never reached the ship,

Yet now the ship moved on!

Beneath the lightning and the Moon

The dead men gave a groan.

They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,

Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;

It had been strange, even in a dream,

To have seen those dead men rise.

The helmsman steered, the ship moved on;

Yet never a breeze up-blew;

The mariners all ’gan work the ropes,

Where they were wont to do;

They raised their limbs like lifeless tools –

We were a ghastly crew.

The body of my brother’s son

Stood by me, knee to knee:

The body and I pulled at one rope,

But he said nought to me.

‘I fear thee, ancient Mariner!’

Be calm, thou Wedding-Guest!

’Twas not those souls that fled in pain,

Which to their corses came again,

But a troop of spirits blest:

For when it dawned – they dropped their arms,

– And clustered round the mast;

Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths,

And from their bodies passed.

Around, around, flew each sweet sound,

Then darted to the Sun;

Slowly the sounds came back again,

Now mixed, now one by one.

Sometimes a-dropping from the sky

I heard the sky-lark sing;

Sometimes all little birds that are,

How they seemed to fill the sea and air

With their sweet jargoning!

And now ’twas like all instruments,

Now like a lonely flute;

And now it is an angel’s song,

That makes the heavens be mute.

It ceased; yet still the sails made on

A pleasant noise till noon,

A noise like of a hidden brook

In the leafy month of June,

That to the sleeping woods all night

Singeth a quiet tune.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).

In a further attempt to make clear the distinction between a recitative and declamatory treatment of the same subject matter in English, we present an additional example of a Psalm in the Authorized Version and the Countess of Pembroke’s translation – in this instance the ninety-eighth Psalm:

O Sing unto the LORD a New song,

for hee hath done marvellous things:

his right hand, and his holy arme hath gotten him the victorie.

The LORD hath made knowen his salvation:

his righteousnesse hath hee openly shewed in the sight of the heathen.

Hee hath remembred his mercie and his trueth

toward the house of Israel:

all the ends of the earth have seene

the salvation of our God.

Make a joyfull noise unto the LORD, all the earth:

make a lowd noise, and rejoyce, and sing praise.

Sing unto the LORD with the harpe:

with the harpe, and the voice of a Psalme.

With trumpets and sound of cornet:

make a joyfull noise before the LORD, the King.

Let the sea roare, and the fulnesse thereof:

the world, and they that dwell therein.

Let the floods clap their handes:

let the hills be joyfull together

Before the LORD, for he commeth to judge the earth:

with righteousnesse shall hee judge the world,

and the people with equitie.

CANTATE DOMINO

O sing Jehova, he hath wonders wrought,

A song of praise that newnesse may commend:

His hand, his holy arme alone hath brought

Conquest on all that durst with him contend.

He that salvation doth his ellect attend,

Long hid, at length hath sett in open view:

And now the unbeleeving Nations taught

His heavinly justice, yelding each their due.

His bounty and his truth the motives were,

Promis’d of yore to Jacob and his race

Which ev’ry Margine of this earthy spheare

Now sees performed in his saving grace.

Then earth, and all possessing earthy place,

O sing, O shout, O triumph, O rejoyce:

Make lute a part with vocall musique beare,

And entertaine this king with trumpet’s noise.

Hore, Sea, all that trace the bryny sands:

Thou totall globe and all that thee enjoy:

You streamy rivers clapp your swymming hands: You

Mountaines echo each at others joy, See on the

Lord this service you imploy, Who comes of

earth the crowne and rule to take:

And shall with upright justice judg the lands,

And equall lawes among the dwellers make.

Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke.]

It was once remarked by someone who had listened very superficially to what we have tried to demonstrate here – of how the art of poetry must be traced back to an interplay, exalted and interfused with super-sensible forces, between the spirit of breathing and the spirit of blood-circulation – it was once remarked: Well, the art of poetry will be mechanised! will be reduced to a purely mechanical system: A materialistically-minded verdict typical of our age! The only conceivable possibility is that the psychic and spiritual stand as abstract as can be in well-worn conceptual forms over against the solid material facts (to adopt an expression from the German classical period) – and those include the human organs and their functions in the human being. A true understanding of the close collaboration between the spiritual-super-sensible and the physical-perceptible is reached, however, only by one who everywhere sees spiritual events still vibrating on in material events. Anyone who follows the example of that critic who spoke against our intimations of the truly musical and imaginative qualities of poetry is really saying something – and very paradoxical it sounds – like this: There are theologians who affirm that God’s creative power is there to create the solid material world. But God’s creative power is materialised, if one says that God does not refrain from creating the solid material world. It is quite as clever to say that we materialise the art of poetry if we represent the super-sensible spirit as sufficiently powerful, not only to penetrate into materiality, but even into a rhythmical-artistic moulding of the breathing-process and circulatory-process – like Apollo playing on his lyre. The bodily-corporeal nature of man is again made one with the psychic-spiritual. This does not generate super-sensible abstractions in a Cloudcuckooland, but rather a genuine Anthroposophy, and an anthroposophical art sustained by Anthroposophy. We see how the spiritual holds sway and weaves within corporeal man, and how artistic creation means making rhythmical, harmonious and plastic that which is spiritual in the bodily-physical functions. The age-old, intuitive saying is once more seen to be true: the heart is more than this physiological organ situated in the breast, as known to external sight; the heart is connected with man’s entire soul-life, as being the centre of the blood-circulation. It must be felt anew that just as the heart is connected with the soul, so the essence of breathing is connected with the spiritual. There was a time when man felt this and still saw in the last departing breath the soul abandoning the body. For a clever, enlightened age which disregards such matters, a science of abstractions that is cut off from reality and inwardly dead may have a certain validity. But for a knowledge that is at the same time (in the sense of a Goethean perception) the foundation of true art – it must be said that this knowledge not only has to win through to the unity of the psychic-spiritual and physical corporeality in man, but has also to bring it to life artistically. A dead, abstract science can indeed be grounded on the dichotomy of matter and spirit. On this path it is not possible to create life-giving art. Hence our science, however appropriate it may be in all technical matters, however well-qualified to form the groundwork for everything technological, is eminently inartistic. Hence it is so alien to man; for Nature herself becomes an artist at the point where she produces man.

This, however, underlies particularly the art of poetry.

My dear Friends,

today we will begin with the recitation of a scene where we can trace the workings of a conscious endeavour on the part of the dramatist to bring style into drama. I will say only a few words in preparation, for you will find that the scene itself will show you how a real poet—in the best sense of the word—relates himself to this question of style, how he deals with it in practice.

Schiller's early plays were, as we know, not characterised by style. Die Räuber certainly not, but neither can Fiesko nor Kabale—no, nor even Don Carlos, be said to have attained to style. Then, for a while, Schiller's creative powers in that direction were exhausted, and he had to devote himself to other activities; and it was during this time that his relations with Goethe underwent a change. It is not too much to say that, having seen what Goethe's genius could create, Schiller took this work of Goethe's as the foundation for a further development of his own artistic ideal. Goethe's dramas became for him a kind of school at which he studied and prepared himself for new activity in the same field. We can follow the process step by step in the interchange of letters between the two poets, and in the records of their conversations. Nor need we be surprised that Schiller, who saw in Goethe the artist par excellence, should take him for his pattern, the Goethe who had created an Iphigenie and a Tasso, dramas where the language reaches a high level of style. Not that Schiller had any thought of letting drama develop exclusively in the 'direction of style in speech, he was naturally concerned for the totality of dramatic art; but from this time on, he devoted his best effort to the attainment of style. We can see it already in Wallenstein; and in the later dramas, in Maria Stuart, in Die Braut von Messina, in Die Jungfrau von Orleans, we find him concentrating more and more on the development of style in some aspect or another.

In Maria Stuart, from which our scene is taken, we have an attempt to develop a style that is different from that of Die Braut von Messin—a style, namely, in the treatment of mood. For what is so striking in this play is the successive moods that pervade the different scenes. The moods are of course evoked by the characters, especially by the prominent part taken in the play by two such antagonistic characters as Mary, Queen of Scots herself, and Queen Elizabeth; but altogether the drama runs its course, fundamentally speaking, in moods; we can even say that the characters live out their parts in moods. You need only study a few of these individually to see how they pass through mood after mood, as the situation changes. Take the momentous scene that Frau Dr. -Steiner will presently read to us, a scene that is outstandingly characteristic of the whole play. You have here an excellent example of stylised mood. There is, to begin with, the mood that can be observed in Mary herself, and that plays no small part also in the drama as a whole, the mood that arises from the fact that Mary is at first committed to the charge of a kindly inclined gaoler but comes later into the custody of one who is rigid in the discharge of his duties; and then we have all that happens as a result of the change. The mood is still at work in this remarkable scene that is so teeming with interest and incident, and we shall be able to watch how the characters of Mary and Elizabeth unfold under its influence—the characters also of others who are present.

I draw your attention to this because I want you to see how earnest Schiller is in his striving for style. After Wallenstein he sets out, in fact, to give each play style in a different way. Of the significance of this for the actor I will speak later, after you have listened to the scene. Let it suffice now to point out that in Maria Stuart it is moods that are stylised, whereas in Die Jungfrau von Orleans it is events: the successive events come before us there in truly grand manner. And then in Wilhelm Tell we have a stylising of character; Schiller attains in this play to what may verily be called a painting of the human soul. In Die Braut von Messina we find him endeavouring to follow Goethe as closely as possible by developing style in the inner form and picture of the stage. Lastly, he sets out with the intention of giving style to the whole interworking of men and events. That was in his Demetrius, which he did not live to finish.

So now we will ask you to listen to the scene in Schiller's Maria Stuart that portrays the development of the situation to which I have alluded.

(Frau Dr. Steiner):

Gegend in einem Park. Vorn mit Bäumen besetzt, hinten eine weite Aussicht.

Erster Auftritt.

(MARIA tritt in schnellem Lauf hinter Bäumen hervor. HANNA KENNEDY folgt langsam.)

KENNEDY

Ihr eilet ja, als wenn Ihr Hügel hättet,
So kann ich Euch nicht folgen, wartet doch!

MARIA

Lass mich der neuen Freiheit geniessen,
Lass mich ein Kind sein, sei es mit!
Und auf dem grünen Teppich der Wiesen
Prüfen den leichten, geflügelten Schritt.
Bin ich dem finstern Gefängnis entstiegen?
Hält sie mich nicht mehr, die traurige Gruft?
Lass mich in vollen, in durstigen Zügen
Trinken die freie, die himmlische Luft.

KENNEDY

O meine teure Lady! Euer Kerker
Ist nur um ein klein weniges erweitert.
Ihr seht nur nicht die Mauer, die uns einschliesst,
Weil sie der Bäume dicht Gesträuch versteckt.

MARIA

O Dank, Dank diesen freundlich grünen Bäumen,
Die meines Kerkers Mauern mir verstecken!
Ich will mich frei und glücklich träumen,
Warum aus meinem süssen Wahn mich wecken?
Umfängt mich nicht der weite Himmelsschoss?
Die Blicke, frei und fessellos,
Ergehen sich in ungemessnen Räumen.
Dort, wo die grauen Nebelberge ragen,
Fängt meines Reiches Grenze an,
Und diese Wolken, die nach Mittag jagen,
Sie suchen Frankreichs fernen Ozean.
Eilende Wolken! Segler der Lüfte!
Wer mit euch wanderte, mit euch schiffte!
Grüsset mir freundlich mein Jugendland!
Ich bin gefangen, ich bin in Banden,
Ach, ich hab keinen andern Gesandten!
Frei in Lüften ist eure Bahn,
Ihr seid nicht dieser Königin untertan.

KENNEDY

Ach, teure Lady! Ihr seid ausser Euch,
Die langentbehrte Freiheit macht Euch schwärmen.

MARIA

Dort legt ein Fischer den Nachen an!
Dieses elende Werkzeug könnte mich retten,
Brächte mich schnell zu befreundeten Städten.
Spärlich nährt es den dürftigen Mann.
Beladen wollt ich ihn reich mit Schätzen,
Einen Zug sollt er tun, wie er keinen getan,
Das Glück sollt er finden in seinen Netzen,
Nähm er mich ein in den rettenden Kahn.

KENNEDY

Verlorne Wünsche! Seht Ihr nicht, dass uns
Von ferne dort die Spähertritte folgen?
Ein finster grausames Verbot scheucht jedes
Mitleidige Geschöpf aus unserm Wege.

MARIA

Nein, gute Hanna. Glaub mir, nicht umsonst
Ist meines Kerkers Tor geöffnet worden.
Die kleine Gunst ist mir des grössem
Glücks Verkünderin. Ich irre nicht. Es ist
Der Liebe tätge Hand, der ich sie danke;
Lord Lesters mächtgen. Arm erkenn ich drin.
Allmählich will man mein Gefängnis weiten,
Durch Kleineres zum Grössern mich gewöhnen,
Bis ich das Antlitz dessen endlich schaue,
Der mir die Bande löst auf immerdar.

KENNEDY

Ach, ich kann diesen Widerspruch nicht reimen!
Noch gestern kündigt man den Tod Euch an,
Und heute wird Euch plötzlich solche Freiheit.
Auch denen, hört ich sagen, wird die Kette
Gelöst, auf die die ewge Freiheit wartet.

MARIA

Hörst du das Hifthorn? Hörst du's klingen,
Mächtigen Rufes, durch Feld und Hain?
Ach, auf das mutige Ross mich zu schwingen,
An den fröhlichen Zug mich zu reihe!
Noch mehr! 0 die bekannte Stimme,
Schmerzlich süsser Erinnerung voll.
Oft vernahm sie mein Ohr mit Freuden
Auf des Hochlands bergichten Heiden,
Wenn die tobende Jagd erscholl.

Zweiter Auftritt.
(PAULET. Die Vorigen.)

PAULET

Nun! Hab ich's endlich recht gemacht, Mylady?
Verdien ich einmal Euern Dank?

MARIA

Wie, Ritter? Seid Ihr's, der diese Gunst mir ausgewirkt?
Ihr seid's?

PAULET

Warum soll ich's nicht sein? Ich war
Am Hof, ich überbrachte Euer Schreiben—

MARIA

Ihr übergabt es? Wirklich, tatet Ihr's?
Und diese Freiheit, die ich jetzt geniesse,
Ist eine Frucht des Briefs—

PAULET (mit Bedeutung)

Und nicht die einzge!
Macht Euch auf eine grössre noch gefasst!

MARIA

Auf eine grössre, Sir? Was meint Ihr damit?

PAULET

Ihr hörtet doch die Hörner—

MARIA (zurückfahrend, mit Ahnung)
Ihr erschreckt mich!

PAULET

Die Königin jagt in dieser Gegend.

MARIA

Was?

PAULET

In wenig Augenblicken steht sie vor Euch.

KENNEDY

(auf MARIA zueilend, welche zittert und hinzusinken droht)
Wie wird Euch, teure Lady! Ihr verblasst.

PAULET

Nun! ist's nun nicht recht? War's nicht Eure Bitte?
Sie wird Euch früher gewährt, als Ihr gedacht.
Ihr wart sonst immer so geschwinder Zunge,
Jetzt bringet Eure Worte an, jetzt ist
Der Augenblick zu reden!

MARIA

Oh, warum hat man mich nicht vorbereitet!
Jetzt bin ich nicht darauf gefasst, jetzt nicht.
Was ich mir als die höchste Gunst erbeten,
Dünkt mir jetzt schrecklich, fürchterlich.—Komm, Hanna,
Führ mich ins Haus, dass ich mich fasse, mich
Erhole—

PAULET

Bleibt! Ihr müsst sie hier erwarten.
Wohl, wohl mag's Euch beängstigen, ich glaub's,
Vor Euerm Richter zu erscheinen.

Dritter Auftritt.
(GRAF SHREWSBURY zu den Vorigen.)

MARIA

Es ist nicht darum! Gott, mir ist ganz anders
Zumut.—Ach, edler Shrewsbury! Ihr kommt,
Vom Himmel mir. ein Engel zugesendet!
—Ich kann sie nicht sehn! Rettet, rettet mich
Von dem verhassten Anblick—

SHREWSBURY

Kommt zu Euch, Königin! Fasst Euern Mut
Zusammen! Das ist die entscheidungsvolle Stunde.

MARIA

Ich habe drauf geharret—Jahrelang
Mich drauf bereitet, alles hab ich mir
Gesagt und ins Gedächtnis eingeschrieben,
Wie ich sie rühren wollte und bewegen!
Vergessen plötzlich, ausgelöscht ist alles,
Nichts lebt in mir in diesem Augenblick,
Als meiner Leiden brennendes Gefühl.
In Blutgen Hass gewendet wider sie
Ist mir das Herz, es fliehen alle guten
Gedanken, und die Schlangenhaare schüttelnd
Umstehen mich die finstern Höllengeister.

SHREWSBURY

Gebietet Euerm wild empörten Blut,
Bezwingt des Herzens Bitterkeit! Es bringt
Nicht gute Frucht, wenn Hass dem Hass begegnet.
Wie sehr auch Euer Innres widerstrebe,
Gehorcht der Zeit und dem Gesetz der Stunde!
Sie ist die Mächtige.—Demütigt Euch!

MARIA

Vor ihr! Ich kann es nimmermehr.

SHREWSBURY

Tut's dennoch!
Sprecht ehrerbietig, mit Gelassenheit!
Ruft ihre Grossmut an, trotzt nicht, jetzt nicht
Auf Euer Recht, jetzo ist nicht die Stunde!

MARIA

Ach, mein Verderben ha`, ich mir erfleht,
Und mir zum Fluche wird mein Flehn erhört!
Nie hätten wir uns sehen sollen, niemals!
Daraus kann nimmer, nimmer Gutes kommen!
Eh mögen Feur und Wasser sich in Liebe
Begegnen, und das Lamm den Tiger küssen.—
Ich bin zu schwer verletzt—sie hat zu schwer
Beleidigt.—Nie ist zwischen uns Versöhnung!

SHREWSBURY

Seht sie nur erst von Angesicht!
Ich sah es ja, wie sie von Euerm Brief
Erschüttert war, ihr Auge schwamm in Tränen.
Nein, sie ist nicht gefühllos, hegt Ihr selbst
Nur besseres Vertrauen!—Darum eben
Bin ich vorausgeeilt, damit ich Euch
In Fassung setzen und ermahnen möchte.

MARIA (seine Hand ergreifend)

Ach, Talbot! Ihr wart stets mein Freund.—Dass ich
In Eurer milden Haft geblieben wäre!
Es ward mir hart begegnet, Shrewsbury!

SHREWSBURY

Vergesst jetzt alles! Darauf denkt allein,
Wie Ihr sie unterwürfig wollt empfangen.

MARIA

Ist Burleigh auch mit ihr, mein böser Engel?

SHREWSBURY

Niemand begleitet sie, als Graf von Lester.

MARIA

Lord Lester!

SHREWSBURY

Fürchtet nichts von ihm! Nicht er
Will Euern Untergang.—Sein Werk ist es,
Dass Euch die Königin die Zusammenkunft
Bewilligt.

MARIA

Ach! Ich wusst es wohl!

SHREWSBURY

Was sagt Ihr?

PAULET

Die Königin kommt!

(Alles weicht auf die Seite; nur MARIA bleibt, auf die KENNEDY gelehnt.)

Vierter Auftritt.
(Die Vorigen. ELISABETH. GRAF LEICESTER. Gefolge.)

ELISABETH (zu LEICESTER)

Wie heisst der Landsitz?

LEICESTER

Fotheringhayschloss.

ELISABETH (zu SHREWSBURY)

Schickt unser Jagdgefolg voraus nach London!
Das Volk drängt allzu heftig in den Strassen,
Wir suchen Schutz in diesem stillen Park.
(Talbot entfernt das Gefolge. Sie fixiert mit den Augen die MARIA, indem sie zu FAULET weiter spricht.)
Mein gutes Volk liebt mich zu sehr. Unmässig,
Abgöttisch sind die Zeichen seiner Freude,
So ehrt man einen Gott, nicht einen Menschen.

MARIA

(welche diese Zeit über halb ohnmächtig auf die Amme gelehnt war, erhebt sich jetzt, und ihr Auge begegnet dem gespannten Blick der ELISABETH. Sie schaudert zusammen und wirft sich wieder an der Amme Brust)
O Gott, aus diesen Zügen spricht kein Herz!

ELISABETH

Wer ist die Lady?
(Ein allgemeines Schweigen.)

LEICESTER

Du bist zu Fotheringhay, Königin.

ELISABETH

(stellt sich überrascht und erstaunt, einen finstern Blick auf LEICESTER richtend)
Wer hat mir das getan? Lord Lester!

LEICESTER

Es ist geschehen, Königin—und nun
Der Himmel deinen Schritt hieher gelenkt,
So lass die Grossmut und das Mitleid siegen!

SHREWSBURY

Lass dich erbitten, königliche Frau,
Dein Aug auf die Unglückliche zu richten,
Die hier vergeht vor deinem Anblick.

(MARIA rafft sich zusammen und will auf die ELISABETH zugehen, steht aber auf halbem Wege schaudernd still, ihre Gebärden drücken den heftigsten Kampf aus.)

ELISABETH

Wie, My lords?
Wer war es denn, der eine Tiefgebeugte
Mir angekündigt? Eine Stolze find ich,
Vom Unglück keineswegs geschmeidigt.

MARIA

Sei's!
Ich will mich auch noch diesem unterwerfen.
Fahr hin, ohnmächtger Stolz der edeln Seele!
Ich will vergessen, wer ich bin und was
Ich litt; ich will vor ihr mich niederwerfen,
Die mich in diese Schmach herunterstiess.
(Sie wendet sich gegen die Königin.)
Der Himmel hat für Euch entschieden, Schwester!
Gekrönt vom Sieg ist Euer glücklich Haupt;
Die Gottheit bet ich an, die Euch erhöhte!
(Sie fällt vor ihr nieder.)
Doch seid auch Ihr nun edelmütig, Schwester!
Lasst mich nicht schmachvoll liegen! Eure Hand
Streckt aus, reicht mir die königliche Rechte,
Mich zu erheben von dem tiefen Fall!

ELISABETH (zurücktretend)

Ihr seid an Euerm Platz, Lady Maria!
Und dankend preis ich meines Gottes Gnade,
Der nicht gewollt, dass ich zu Euern Füssen
So liegen sollte, wie Ihr jetzt zu meinen.

MARIA (mit steigendem Affekt)

Denkt an den Wechsel alles Menschlichen!
Es leben Götter, die den Hochmut rächen!
Verehret, fürchtet sie, die schrecklichen,
Die mich zu Euern Füssen niederstürzen!—
Um dieser fremden Zeugen willen, ehrt
In mir Euch selbst! entweihet, schändet nicht
Das Blut der Tudor, das in meinen Adern
Wie in den Euern fliesst!-O Gott im Himmel!
Steht nicht da, schroff und unzugänglich wie
Die Felsenklippe, die der Strandende
Vergeblich ringend zu erfassen strebt.
Mein alles hängt, mein Leben, mein Geschick,
An meiner Worte, meiner Tränen Kraft;
Löst mir das Herz, dass ich das Eure rühre!
Wenn Ihr mich anschaut mit dem Eisesblick,
Schliesst sich das Herz mir schaudernd zu, der Strom
Der Tränen stockt, und kaltes Grausen fesselt
Die Flehensworte mir im Busen an.

ELISABETH (kalt und streng)

Was habt Ihr mir zu sagen, Lady Stuart?
Ihr habt mich sprechen wollen. Ich vergesse
Die Königin, die schwer beleidigte,
Die fromme Pflicht der Schwester zu erfüllen,
Und meines Anblicks Trost gewähr ich Euch.
Dem Trieb der Grossmut folg ich, setze mich
Gerechtem Tadel aus, dass ich so weit
Heruntersteige—denn Ihr wisst,
Dass Ihr mich habt ermorden lassen wollen.

MARIA

Womit soll ich den Anfang machen, wie
Die Worte klüglich stellen, dass sie Euch
Das Herz ergreifen, aber nicht verletzen!
O Gott, gib meiner Rede Kraft und nimm
Ihr jeden Stachel, der verwunden könnte!
Kann ich doch für mich selbst nicht sprechen, ohne Euch
Schwer zu verklagen, und das will ich nicht.
—Ihr habt an mir gehandelt, wie nicht recht ist,
Denn ich bin eine Königin wie Ihr,
Und Ihr habt als Gefangne mich gehalten.
Ich kam zu Euch als eine Bittende,
Und Ihr, des Gastrechts heilige Gesetze,
Der Völker heilig Recht in mir verhöhnend,
Schlosst mich in Kerkermauern ein; die Freunde,
Die Diener werden grausam mir entrissen,
Unwürdgem Mangd werd ich preisgegeben,
Man stellt mich vor einschimpfliches Gericht—
Nichts mehr davon! Ein ewiges Vergessen
Bedecke, was ich Grausames erlitt.
—Seht! Ich will alles eine Schickung nennen;
Ihr seid nicht schuldig, ich bin auch nicht schuldig;
Ein böser Geist stieg aus dem Abgrund auf,
Den Hass in unsern Herzen zu entzünden,
Der unsre zarte Jugend schon entzweit.
Er wuchs mit uns, und böse Menschen fachten
Der unglückselgen Flamme Atem zu.
Wahnsinnge Eiferer bewaffneten
Mit Schwert und Dolch die unberufne Hand—
Das ist das Fluchgeschick der Könige,
Dass sie, entzweit, die Welt in Hass zerreissen
Und jeder Zwietracht Furien entfesseln.
—Jetzt ist kein fremder Mund mehr zwischen uns—
(nähert sich ihr zutraulich und mit schmeichelndem Ton)
Wir stehe einander selbst nun gegenüber.
Jetzt, Schwester, redet! Nennt mir meine Schuld;
Ich will Euch völliges Genügen leisten.
Ach, dass Ihr damals mir Gehör geschenkt,
Als ich so dringend Euer Auge suchte!
Es wäre nie so weit gekommen, nicht
An diesem traurgen Ort geschähe jetzt
Die unglückselig traurige Begegnung.

ELISABETH

Mein guter Stern bewahrte mich davor,
Die Natter an den Busen mir zu legen.
—Nicht die Geschicke, Euer schwarzes Herz
Klagt an, die wilde Ehrsucht Eures Hauses.
Nichts Feindliches war zwischen uns geschehn
Da kündigte mir Euer Ohm, der stolze,
Herrschwütge Priester, der die freche Hand
Nach allen Kronen streckt, die Fehde an,
Betörte Euch, mein Wappen anzunehmen,
Euch meine Königstitel zuzueignen,
Auf Tod und Leben in den Kampf mit mir
Zu gehn.—Wen rief er gegen mich nicht auf?
Der Priester Zungen und der Völker Schwert,
Des frommen Wahnsinns fürchterliche Waffen;
Hier selbst, im Friedenssitze meines Reichs,
Blies er mir der Empörung Flammen an
Doch Gott ist mit mir—und der stolze Priester
Behält das Feld nicht.—Meinem Haupte war
Der Streich gedrohet, und das Eure fällt!

MARIA

Ich steh in Gottes Hand. Ihr werdet Euch
So blutig Eurer Macht nicht überheben—

ELISABETH

Wer soll mich hindern? Euer Oheim gab
Das Beispiel allen Königen der Welt,
Wie man mit seinen Feinden Frieden macht.
Die Sankt Barthelemi sei meine Schule!
Was ist mir Blutsverwandtschaft, Völkerrecht?
Die Kirche trennet aller Pflichten Band,
Den Treubruch heiligt sie, den Königsmord;
Ich übe nur, was Eure Priester lehren.
Sagt! Welches Pfand gewährte mir für Euch,
Wenn ich grossmütig Eure Bande löste?
Mit welchem Schloss verwahr ich Eure Treue,
Das nicht Sankt Peters Schlüssel öffnen kann?
Gewalt nur ist die einzge Sicherheit;
Kein Bündnis ist mit dem Gezücht der Schlangen.

MARIA

Oh, das ist Euer traurig finstrer Argwohn!
Ihr habt mich stets als eine Feindin nur
Und Fremdlingin betrachtet. Hättet Ihr
Zu Eurer Erbin mich erklärt, wie mir
Gebührt, so hätten Dankbarkeit und Liebe
Euch eine treue Freundin und Verwandte
In mir erhalten.

ELISABETH

Draussen, Lady Stuart,
Ist Eure Freundschaft, Euer Haus das Papsttum,
Der Mönch ist Euer Bruder—Euch zur Erbin
Erklären! Der verräterische Fallstrick!
Dass Ihr bei meinem Leben noch mein Volk
Verführet, eine listige, Armida,
Die edle Jugend meines Königreichs
In Eurem Buhlemetze schlau verstricktet—
Dass alles sich der neu aufgehnden Sonne
Zuwendete, und ich—

MARIA

Regiert in Frieden!
Jedwedem Anspruch auf dies Reich entsag ich.
Ach, meines Geistes Schwingen sind gelähmt;
Nicht Grösse lockt mich mehr—Ihr habt's erreicht,
Ich bin nur noch der Schatten der Maria.
Gebrochen ist in langer Kerkerschmach
Der edle Mut—Ihr habt das Äusserste an mir
Getan, habt mich zerstört in meiner Blüte!
—Jetzt macht ein Ende, Schwester! Sprecht es aus,
Das Wort, um dessentwillen Ihr gekommen,
Denn nimmer will ich glauben, dass Ihr kamt,
Um. Euer Opfer Grausam zu verhöhnen.
Sprecht dieses Wort aus! sagt mir: ' Ihr seid frei,
Maria! Meine Macht habt Ihr gefühlt,
Jetzt lernet meinen Edelmut verehren! '
Sagt's, und ich will mein Leben, meine Freiheit
Als ein Geschenk aus Eurer Hand empfangen.
—Ein Wort macht alles ungeschehn. Ich warte
Darauf. Oh, lasst mich's nicht zu lang erharren!
Weh Euch, wenn Ihr mit diesem Wort nicht endet!
Denn wenn Ihr jetzt nicht segenbringend, herrlich,
Wie eine Gottheit von mir scheidet—Schwester!
Nicht um dies ganze reiche Eiland, nicht
Um alle Länder, die das Meer umfasst,
Möcht ich vor Euch so stehn wie Ihr vor mir!

ELISABETH

Bekennt Ihr endlich Euch für überwunden?
Ist's aus mit Euren Ränken? Ist kein Mörder
Mehr unterweges? Will kein Abenteurer
Für Euch die traurge Ritterschaft mehr wagen?
—Ja, es ist aus, Lady Maria. Ihr verführt
Mir keinen mehr. Die Welt hat andre Sorgen.
Es lüstet keinen, Euer—vierter Mann
Zu werden, denn Ihr tötet Eure Freier
Wie Eure Männer!

MARIA (auffahrend)

Schwester! Schwester!
O Gott! Gott! Gib mir Mässigung!

ELISABETH

(sieht sie lange mit einem Blick stolzer Verachtung an)
Das also sind die Reizungen, Lord Lester,
Die ungestraft kein Mann erblickt, daneben
Kein andres Weib sich wagen darf zu stellen!
Fürwahr! Der Ruhm war wohlfeil zu erlangen,
Es kostet nichts, die allgemeine Schönheit
Zu sein, als die gemeine sein für alle!

MARIA

Das ist zuviel!

ELISABETH (höhnisch lachend)

Jetzt zeigt Ihr Euer wahres
Gesicht, bis jetzt war's nur die Larve.

MARIA

(von Zorn glühend, doch mit einer edeln Würde)
Ich habe menschlich, jugendlich gefehlt
Die Macht verführte mich, ich hab es nicht
Verheimlicht und verborgen, falschen Schein
Hab ich verschmäht mit königlichem Freimut.
Das Ärgste weiss die Welt von mir, und ich
Kann sagen, ich bin besser als mein Ruf.
Weh Euch, wenn sie von Euern Taten einst
Den Ehrenmantel zieht, womit Ihr gleissend
Die wilde Glut yerstohlner Lüste deckt.
Nicht Ehrbarkeit habt Ihr von Eurer Mutter
Geerbt; man weiss, um welcher Tugend willen
Anna von Boleyn das Schafott bestiegen.

SHREWSBURY

(tritt zwischen beide Koniginnen)
O Gott des Himmels! Muss es dahin kommen!
Ist das die Mässigung, die Unterwerfung,
Lady Maria?

MARIA

Mässigung! Ich habe
Ertragen, was ein Mensch ertragen kann.
Fahr hin, lammherzige Gelassenheit!
Zum Himmel fliehe, leidende Geduld!
Spreng endlich deine Bande, tritt hervor
Aus deiner Höhle, langverhaltner Groll!—
Und du, der dem gereizten Basilisk
Den Mordblick gab, leg auf die Zunge mir
Den giftgen Pfeil—

SHREWSBURY

Oh, sie ist ausser sich!
Verzeih der Rasenden, der schwer Gereizten!
(ELISABETH, vor Zorn sprachlos, schiesst wütende Blicke auf MARIEN.)

LEICESTER

(in der heftigsten Unruhe, sucht die Elisabeth hinwegzuführen)
Höre
Die Wütende nicht an! Hinweg, hinweg
Von diesem unglückselgen Ort!

MARIA

Der Thron von England ist durch einen Bastard
Entweiht, der Briten edelherzig Volk
Durch eine listge Gauklerin betrogen.
—Regierte Recht, so läget Ihr vor mir
Im Staube jetzt, denn ich bin Euer König.
(ELISABETH geht schnell ab, die Lords folgen ihr in der höchsten Bestürzung.)

---

MARY STUART
by Schiller
Act III, Scene 1

In a Park. In the foreground Trees; in the background a distant Prospect.

(MARY advances, running from behind the trees: HANNAH KENNEDY follows slowly.)

KENNEDY

You hasten an as if endow'd with wings—
I cannot follow you so swiftly—wait.

MARY

Freedom returns! O let me enjoy it—
Let me be childish—be childish with me!
Freedom invites me! O let me employ it,
Skimming with winged step light o'er the lea;
Have I escaped from this mansion of mourning?
Holds me no more the sad dungeon of care?
Let me, with joy and with eagerness burning,
Drink in the free, the celestial air!

KENNEDY

O, my dear Lady! but a very little
Is your sad gaol extended; you behold not
The wall that shuts us in; these plaited tufts
Of trees hide from your sight the hated object.

MARY

Thanks to these friendly trees, that hide from me
My prison walls, and flatter my illusion!
Happy I now may dream myself, and free;
Why wake me from my dream's so sweet confusion?
The extended vault of heaven around me lies,
Free and unfetter'd range my wandering eyes
O'er space's vast immeasurable sea!
From where yon misty mountains rise on high,
I can my empire's boundaries explore;
And those light clouds which, steering southwards, fly,
Seek the mild clime of France's genial shore.
Fast fleeting clouds! ye meteors that fly;
Could I but with you sail through the sky!
Tenderly greet the dear fand of my youth!
Here I am captive! oppress'd by my foes,
No other than you may carry my woes,
Free thro' the ether your pathway is seen,
Ye own not the power of this tyrant Queen.

KENNEDY

Alas! dear Lady! You're beside yourself,
This long-lost, long-sought freedom makes you rave.

MARY

Yonder's a fisher returning to home;—
Poor though it be, would he lend me his wherry,
Quick to congenial shores would I ferry.
Spare is his trade, and labour's his doom—
Rich would I freight his vessel with treasure,
Such a draught should be his as he never had seen,
Wealth should he find in his nets without measure,
Would he but rescue a poor captive Queen.

KENNEDY

Fond, fruitless wishes! See you not from far,
How we are follow'd by observing spies?—
A dismal, barb'rous prohibition scares
Each sympathetic being from our path.

MARY

No, gentle Hannah! Trust me, not in vain
My prison gates are open'd. This small grace
Is harbinger of greater happiness.
No! I mistake not—'tis the active hand
Of love to which I owe this kind indulgence.
I recognise in this the mighty arm
Of Leicester. They will by degrees expand
My prison; will accustom me, through small,
To greater liberty, until at last
I shall behold the face of hüll whose hand
Will dash my fetters off, and that for ever.

KENNEDY

O, my dear Queen! I cannot reconcile
These contradictions. 'Twas but yesterday
That they announc'd your death, and all at once,
today, you have such liberty. Their chains
Are also loos'd, as I have oft been told,
Whom everlasting liberty awaits.
(Hunting horns at a distance.)

MARY

Hear'st thou the bugle, so blithely resounding?
Hear'st thou its echoes through wood and through plain?
Oh, might I now, on my nimble steed bounding,
Join with the jocund, the frolicsome train!
(Hunting horns heard again.)
Again! O this sad and this pleasing remembrance!
These are the sounds, which, so sprightly and clear,
Oft, when with music the hounds and the Korn,
So cheerfully welcom'd the break of the morn,
On the heaths of the Highlands delighted my ear.

Scene II.
(Enter PAULET.)

PAULET

Well! have I acted right at last, my Lady?
Do I for once, at least, deserve your thanks?

MARY

How! Do I owe this favour, Sir, to you?

PAULET

Why not to me? I visited the Court,
And gave the Queen your Letter.

MARY

Did you give it?
In very truth did you deliver it?
And is this freedom which I now enjoy,
The happy consequence?

PAULET

(significantly)

Nor that alone;
Prepare yourself to see a,greater still.

MARY

A greater still! What do you mean by that?

PAULET

You heard the bugle-horns?

MARY

(starting back with foreboding apprehension)
You frighten me—

PAULET

The Queen is hunting in the neighbourhood—

MARY

What!

PAULET

In a few moments she'll appear before you.

KENNEDY

(hastening towards MARY, about to fall)
How fare you, dearest Lady?—you grow pale.

PAULET

How? Is't not well? Was it not then your pray'r?
'Tis granted now, before it was expected;
You who had ever such a ready Speech,
Now summon all your powers of eloquente,
The important time to use them now is come.

MARY

O, why was I not told of this before?
Now I am not prepar'd for it—not now—
What, as the greatest favour, I besought,
Seems to me now most fearful:—Hannah, come,
Lead me into the house, till I collect
My spirits.

PAULET

Stay;—you must await her fiere.
Yes!—I believe you may be well alarm'd
To stand before your judge.

Scene III.
(Enter the EARL OF SHREWSBURY.)

MARY

'Tis not for that,
O God! Far other thoughts possess me now.
O, worthy Shrewsbury! You come, as though
ou were an angel sent to me from heav'n.
I cannot, will not see her. Save me, save me
From the detested sight!

SHREWSBURY

Your Majesty,
Comraand yourself, and summon all your courage;
'Tis the decisive moment of your fate.

MARY

For years I've waited, and prepared myself.
For this I've studied, weigh'd, and written down
Each ward within the tablet of my mem'ry,
That was to touch, and move her to compassion.
Forgotten suddenly, effac'd is all.
And nothing lives within me at this moment,
But the fierte, burning feeling of my wrongs.
My heart is turn'd to direst hate against her;
All gentle thoughts, all sweet forgiving words
Are gone, and round me stand with grisly mien,
The fiends of hell, and shake their snaky locks!

SHREWSBURY

Command your wild, rebellious blood;—constrain
The bittemess which fills your heart. No good
Ensures, when hatred is oppos'd to hate.
How muck soe'er the inward struggle tost,
You must submit to stern necessity,
The pow'r is in her hand, be therefore humble.

MARY

To her? I never can.

SHREWSBURY

But pray, submit.
Speak with respect, with calmness!
Strive to move Her magnanimity; insist not, now,
Upon your rights, not not the season.

MARY

Ah! woe is me! I've pray'd for my destruction,
And, as a curse to me, my prayer is heard.
We never should have seen each other—never!
O, this can never, never come to good.
Rather in love could fixe and water meet,
The timid lamb embrace the roaring tiger!—
I have been hurt too grievously; she hath
Too grievously oppress'd me;—no atonement
Can make us friends!

SHREWSBURY

First see her, face to face:
Did I not see how she was mov'd at reading
Your letter? How her eyes were drown'd in tears?
No—she is not unfeeling; only place
More confidence in her. It was for this
That I came on before her, to entreat you,
To be collected—to admonish you—

MARY

(seizing his hand)

Oh, Talbot! you have ever been my friend,
Had I but stay'd beneath your kindly care!
They have, indeed, misused me, Shrewsbury.

SHREWSBURY

Let all be now forgot, and only think
How to receive her with submissiveness.

MARY

Is Burleigh with her too, my evil genius?

SHREWSBURY

No one attends her but the Earl of Leicester.

MARY

Lord Leicester?

SHREWSBURY

Fear not him; it is not he
Who wishes your destruction,—'twas his work,
That here the Queen hath granted you this meeting.

MARY

Ah! well I knew it.

SHREWSBURY

What?

PAULET

The Queen approaches. (They all draw aride;

MARY

alone remains, leaning on KENNEDY.)

Scene IV. (Enter ELIZABETH, EARL OF LEICESTER, and Retinue.)

ELIZABETH (to LEICESTER)

What seat is that, my Lord?

LEICESTER

'Tis Fotheringay.

ELIZABETH (to SHREWSBURY)

My Lord, send back our retinue to London;
The people crowd too eager in the roads,
We'll seek a refuge in this quiet park.
(TALBOT sends the train away. She looks steadfastly at MARY, as she speaks further with PAULET.)
My honest people love me overmuch.
These signs of joy are quite idolatrous.
Thus should a God be honour'd, not a mortal.

MARY

(who the whole time had leaned, almost fainting, on KENNEDY, rises now, and her eyes meet the steady piercing look of ELIZABETH; she shudders and throws herself again upon KENNEDYS bosom)
O God! from out these features speaks no heart.

ELIZABETH

What lady's that?—
(A general, embarrassed silence.)

LEICESTER

You are at Fotheringay,
My Liege!

ELIZABETH

(as if surprised, casting an angry look at LEICESTER)
Who hath done this, my Lord of Leicester?

LEICESTER

'Tis past, my Queen;—and now that heav'n hath led
Your footsteps hither, be magnanimous;
And let sweet pity be triumphant now.

SHRBWSBURY

O royal mistress! yield to our entreaties;
O cast your eyes on this unhappy one,
Who stands dissolved in anguish.
(MARY collects herself, and begins to advance towards ELIZABETH, stops shuddering at half-way:—her action expresses the most violent internal struggle.)

ELIZABETH

How, my Lords!
Which of you then announc'd to me a prisoner
Bow'd down by woe? I see a haughty one,
By no means humbled by calamity.

MARY

Well be it so :—to this will I submit.
Farewell high thought, and pride of noble mied!
I will forget my dignity, and all
My sufferings; 1 will fall before her feet,
Who hath reduced me to this wretchedness.
(She turn towards the QUEEN.)
The voice of Heav'n decides for you, my sister,
Your happy brows are now with triumph crown'd,
I bless the Power Divine, which thus hath rais'd you.
(She kneels.)
But in your turn be merciful, my sister:
Let me not lie before you thus disgraced;
Stretch forth your hand, your royal hand, to raise
Your sister from the depths of her distress.

ELIZABETH (stepping back)

You are rohere it becomes you, Lady Stuart;
And thankfully I prize my God's protection,
Who hath not suffer'd me to kneel a suppliant
Thus at your feet, as you now kneel at mine.

MARY

(with increasing energy of feeling)
Think on all earthly things, vicissitudes.
Oh! there are gods who punish haughty pride:
Respect them, honour them, the dreadful ones
Who thus before thy feet have humbled me!
Before these strangers' eyes, dishonour not
Yourself in me: profane not, nor disgrace
The royal blood of Tudor. In my veins
It flows as pure a stream, as in your own.
O! for God's pity, stand not so estranged
And inaccessible, like some tall cliff,
Which the poor shipwreck'd mariner in vain
Struggles to seize, and labours to embrace.
My all, my life, my fortune now depends
Upon the influence of my words and tears;
That I may touch your heart, O! set inne free.
If you regard me with those icy looks,
My shudd'ring heart contracts itself, the stream
Of tears is dried, and frigid horror chains
The words of supplication in my bosom!

ELIZABETH (cold and severe)

What would you say to me, my Lady Stuart?
You wish'd to speak with me; and I, forgetting
The Queen, and all the wrongs I have sustain'd,
Fulfil the pious duty of the sister,
And graut the boon you wished for of my presence.
Yet 1, in yielding to the gen'rous feelings
Of magnanimity, expose myself
To rightful censure, that 1 stoop so low.
For well you know, you would have had me murder'd.

MARY

O! how shall I begin? O, how shall I
So artfully arrange my cautious words,
That they may touch, yet not offend your heart?—
Strengthen my words, O Heav'n! and take from them
Whate'er might wound. Alas! I cannot speak
In my own cause, without impeaching you,
And that most heavily. I wish not so;
You have not, as you ought, behav'd to me;
I am a Queen, like you, yet you have held me
Confin'd in prison. As a suppliant
I came to you, yet you in me insulted
The pious use of hospitality;
Slighting in me the holy law of nations,
Immur'd me in a dungeon—tore from me
My friends and servants; to unseemly want
I was exposed, and hurried to the bar
Of a disgraceful, insolent tribunal.
No more of this ;—in everlasting silence
Be buried all the cruelties I suffer'd!
See—I will throw the blame for all an fate,
'Twas not your fault, no more than it was raine.
An evil spirit rose from the abyss,
To kindle in our hearts the flames of hate,
By which our tender youth had been divided.
It grew with us, and bad designing men
Fann.'d with their ready breath the fatal fixe:
Frantics, enthusiasts, with sword and dagger
Arm'd the uncall'd-for hand! , This is the curse
Of kings, that they, divided, tear the world
In pieces with their hatred, and let loose
The raging furies of all hellish strife!
No foreign tongue is now between us, sister,
(approaching her confidently, and with aflattering tone)
Now stand we face to face; now, sister, speak;
Name but my crime, fully satisfy you,—
Alas! had you vouchsaf'd to hear me then,
When I so earnest sought to meet your eye,
It never would have come to this, nor would,
Here in this mournful place, have happen'd now
This so distressful, this so mournful meeting.

ELIZABETH

My better stars preserv'd me. I was warn'd,
And laid not to my breast the pois'nous adder!
Accuse not fate! your own deceitful heart
It was, the wild ambition of your house:
As yet no enmities had pass'd between us,
When your imperious linde, the proud priest,
Whose shameless hand grasps at all crowns, attack'd me
With unprovok'd hostility, and taught
You, but too docile, to assume my arms,
To vest yourself with my imperial title,
And meet me in the lists in mortal strife:
What arms employed he not to storm my throne?
The curses of the priests, the people's sword,
The dreadful weapons of religious frenzy,—
Ev'n here in my own kingdom's peaceful haunts,
He fann'd the flames of civil insurrection;—
But God is with me, and the haughty priest
Has not maintain'd the field. The blow was aim'd
Full at my head, but yours it is which falls!

MARY

I'm in the hand of Heav'n. You never will
Exert so cruelly the pow'r it gives you.

ELIZABETH

Who shall prevent me? Say, did not your uncle
Set all the kings of Europe the example,
How to conclude a peace with those they hate?
Be mine the school of Saint Bartholomew;
What's kindred then to me, or nations' laws?
The church can Break the Bands of ev'ry duty;
It consecrates the regicide, the traitor;
I only practise what your priests have taught!
Say then, what surety can be offer'd me,
Should I magnanimously loose your Bonds?
Say, with what lock can I secure your faith,
Which by St. Peter's keys cannot be open'd?
Force is my only surety; no alliance
Can be concluded with a rate of vipers.

MARY

O! this is but your wretched, dark suspicion!
For you have constantly regarded me
But as a stranger, and an enemy.
Had you declar'd me heir to your dorainions,
As is my right, then gratitude and love
In me had fix'd, for you, a faithful friend
And kinswoman.

ELIZABETH

Your friendship is abroad,
Your house is Papacy, the monk your brother.
Name you my successor! The treach'rous snare!
That in my life you might seduce my people;
And, like a sly Armida, in your net
Entangle all our noble English youth;
That all might turn to the new rising sun,
And I—

MARY

O sister, rule your realm in peace:
I give up ev'ry claim to these domains—
Alas! the pinions of my soul are lam'd;
Greatness entices me no more: your point
Is gain'd; I am but Mary's shadow now—
My noble spirit is at last broke down
By long captivity:—you've done your worst
On me; you have destroy'd me in my bloom!
Now, end your work, my sister:—speak at length
The word, which to pronounce has brought you hither;
For I will ne'er believe that you are come
To mock unfeelingly your hapless victim.
Pronounce this word;—say, Mary, you are free:
You have already felt my pow'r,—learn now
To honour too my generosity.'
Say this, and I will take my life, will take
My freedom, as a present from your hands.
One word makes all undone;—I wait for it ;—
O let it not be needlessly delay'd.
Wde to you, if you end not with this word!
For should you not, like some divinity,
Dispensing noble blessing, quit me now,
Then, sister, not for all this island's wealth,
For all the realms encircled by the deep,
Would I exchange my present Lot for yours.

ELIZABETH

And you confess at last, that you are conquer'd:
Are all your schemes run out? No more assassins
Now an the road? Will no adventurer
Attempt again, for you, the sad achievement?
Yes, madam, it is over:—You'll seduce
No mortal more. The world has other cares;—
None is ambitious of the dang'rous honour
Of being your fourth husband :—
You destroy Your wooers like your husbands.

MARY

(starting angrily)

Sister, sister!—
Grant me forbearance, all ye powr's of heav'n!

ELIZABETH

(regards her long, with a Look of proud contempt)
Those then, my Lord of Leicester, are the charms
Which no man with impunity can view,
Near which no woman Bare attempt to stand?
In sooth, this honour has been cheaply gain'd;
She who to all is common, may with ease
Become the common object of applause.

MARY

This is too much!

ELIZABETH (laughing insultingly)

You show us now, indeed,
Your real face; till now 'twas but the mask.

MARY

(burning with rage, yet dignified and noble)
My sins were human, and the faults of youth;
Superior force misled me. I have neuer
Denied or sought to hide it: I despis'd
All false appearance as became a Queen.
The worst of me is known, and I can say,
That I am better than the fame I bear.
Woe to you! when, in time to come, the world
Shall draw the rohe of honour from your deeds,
With which your arch-hypocrisy has veil'd
The raging flames of lawless secret Lust.
Virtue was not your portion from your mother;
Well know we what it was which brought the head
Of Anna Boleyn to the fatal block.

SHREWSBURY

(stepping between both Queens)
O! Heav'n! Alas, and must it come to this!
Is this the moderation, the submission,
My Lady?—

MARY

Moderation! I've supported
What human nature can support: farewell,
Lamb-hearted resignation, passive patience,
Fly to thy native heaven; hurst at length
Thy Bonds, come forward from thy dreary cave,
In all thy fury, long-suppressed rancour!
And thou, who to the anger'd basilisk
Impart'st the murd'rous glance, O, arm my tongue
With poison'd darts!

SHREWSBURY

She is beside herself!
Exasperated, mad! My Liege, forgive her.
(ELIZABETH, speechless with anger, casts enraged Looks at MARY.)

LEICESTER

(in the most violent agitation; he seeks to lead ELIZABETH away)
Attend not to her rage! Away, away,
From this disastrous place!

MARY

(raising her voice)

A Bastard soils,
Profanes the English throne! The gen'rous Britons
Are cheated by a juggler (whose whole figure
Is false and painted, heart as well as face!).
If right prevail'd, you now would in the dust
Before me lie, for I'm your rightful monarch!

(ELIZABETH hastily quits the stage; the Lords follow her in the greatest consternation)

(From the translation by Joseph Mellish.)

In some dramas we can see quite clearly, when we look into the question of their origin, that it is the theme, the plot with its characters, that has inspired the dramatist to write bis drama. This was true more or less of Schiller when, as a young man, he set himself to compose Die Räuber. All through the play we can see that what interests him is the subject-matter in the widest sense of the word. He is attracted by the event and the characters that take part in it; he wants to make poetry of them. The same can be said even of Goethe in one period of his life. At the time when he was beginning to compose Faust and was writing also Götz von Berlichingen, his main interest was in the plot and the characters. Faust is a character that interests him intensely. And then, what a Faust can experience—that too has a great attraction for him. And in Götz von Berlichingen it is in the first place the Nero himself, and then the time in which he lived; these two themes were of lively interest to Goethe.

But now look at Schiller embarking upon his Maria Stuart. We have here quite another situation. Maria Stuart is the result of a conscious endeavour on Schiller's part to be an artist in the realm of drama. His whole desire is to compose plays that shall be artistic; and he looks round for material to serve bis purpose. He looks for a material that will lend itself to the style he wants to develop. His starting-point was by no means the story of Mary, Queen of Scots; he sets out in search of a theme upon which he can successfully create a drama where it shall be the moods that give style to the piece.

Now the initial purpose of the dramatist is of no little significance for the actor; and if we are making plan for a school of dramatic art, we ought certainly to arrange that both kinds of drama are studied. The students should practise with dramas where the poet's interest lies mainly in the plot,—such a drama, for instance, as Götz von Berlichingen, or Die Räuber; and they should work also with dramas like Maria Stuart, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, Die Braut von Messina, or Wilhelm Tell. And while the students are studying in this way the different dramatic styles, that will also be the moment for them to pass from a study that concerns itself purely with acting to a study that, instead of merely asking all the time: How are we to do this?—How are we to do that?, takes rather for its theme the entire play itself as a work of art. I will give you an example.

Wilhelm Tell is a play that provides excellent opportunity for an actor to develop style in his work by studying the style of the piece. But it should be made clear to the student that in this play Schiller's style comes to grief in many places. The fact will be forcibly brought home to you if you should ever happen to hear some orthodox professor of literature interpreting one of the scenes in a way that may possibly accord with the illusions of a professor who has more credulity than discernment, but does not at all accord with real life. What a wonderful scene that is,' you might hear him say to his pupils, where Tell declines to attend the meetings the others are holding, declaring that he is a man of deeds and not of words, and that he will leave it to them to do the talking, and hold himself ready to be called on when the moment for action has come.' I did once hear a credulous professor speak in this way to a still more credulous audience of both young and old! And then all too easily such a view becomes the accepted interpretation and is handed down and repeated as if it were an indisputable truth. And we can see it spreading like a disease through the schools, and indeed wherever it has a chance to push its way in. No one stops to ask : But is it possible that Teil should speak like that? For it certainly is not possible! True, Tell had the character that Schiller means to give him. He was not a man of many words ; you would not find him taking a front seat in the meetings and making grandiloquent Speeches. But he would be there. He would be sitting at the back and listening. Tell was not the kind of man to boast that he let the others do the talking and wanted only to be called on when it was time for action,—which would give the impression that he had himself no idea as to what ought to be done! It is simply not true, the way Schiller makes Tell speak in that passage, and the student has here a good opportunity of learning to judge for himself without bias,—and that is supremely important where art is concerned. What Schiller has done in this passage is to push the stylisation too far. Then it can become routine,—which it must never do, it must always have life.

And now let us suppose, die actor—or the student—takes a drama of the one or the other kind as subject for his study. How will he proceed with a drama like Die Räuber or Don Carlos? or, on the other hand, with a drama like Maria Stuart or Die Braut von Messina? For a drama of the first kind, the right course will be to work only for a shorter time at the development of mime and gesture whilst another does the reciting, and to lead over quite soon to simultaneous speaking and acting. There must of course always be first the practice in gesture to the accompaniment of a reciter, but in this case not for long; the student should as soon as possible unite the gesturing with the spoken word.

With a drama of the second kind, the actor or student will require to practise the silent gesture and mime with a reciter speaking the words for him, for a much longer period. He should indeed defer till as late as possible the union in his own person of gesture and word. By following this method he will attain a result which there is no need to attain in the former type of drama and which could even perhaps be detrimental there to the performance of his part. I mean the following. The gesture, having through long practice come to rest, as it were, in die actor, continues to be present there in him and co-operates in the forming of the word,—the actor of course meanwhile quite unconscious of the process ; it happens instinctively as far as he is concerned. And if we want to stage a drama that is first and foremost, in its whole intention, a work of art, dien we have to make .sure that all through our study of it we succeed in uniting the art of the acting with the art, the poetry, that is in the play itself. Only then will the art of the acting make its right contact with the audience; and upon that, after all, everything depends.

The audience will not easily be brought into a mood that grips them in their very soul, if we put before them a realistic scene which is, in addition, realistically acted. It is quite possible to fascinate people with a realistic scene, so that for the moment they give their whole attention; but if we sincerely want to reach our audience, there can be no better way than by lifting them right out of naturalistic experience, and taking them up to the level of art.

Let us take now the scene that has been read to us and imagine we have to consult together how we shall proceed to stage it. Giving our attention first to the question of scenic effect, how shall we create the right environment for die words that are spoken in this scene?

To build up a décor from a naturalistic point of view, to paint, let us say, a forest as naturalistically as possible, would most certainly not achieve our object. For could anyone imagine that such a scene as this (the scene ends, you will remember, in a manner that is directly contrary to the will of everyone present, takes them one and all by surprise),—could anyone imagine that the motif of the scene could be rendered with style if we set out to surround it with the mood of a forest? The one and only thing to do is let the surroundings of the scene present, by your artistic treatment of them, the mood that belongs to this juncture in the play.

I must here allude to a request that has been handed me in writing, asking if I would add a little more to what I said the other day about the painting of stage scenery. But, my dear friends, so far as my memory goes, I have not spoken at all on this subject. What I said then was in reference to landscape painting.¹ We were considering the character of art in general, and took landscape painting for our example. I do not like to be misunderstood in this way. I have up to now said nothing whatever about painting for the stage. As a matter of fact, the very first thing you must realise in this connection is that for stage d&or, painting as an art does not come into question. We have to rely on our equipment for stage lighting, etc., to do the painting for us.

To return to the scene from Maria Stuart, our main concern should be that the speakers have around them the mood of the scene with all the successive changes it undergoes.

Now on the matter of moods there is bound to be always some difference of opinion, but 1 think no one will find it seriously discordant if we propose to arrange for the whole stage to be suffused during this scene with a reddish lighting. The colour will naturally have to change a lade as the scene goes on, but can always keep a fundamental reddish tone. At the end of the scene, where Mary speaks so sharply, the reddish tone can, as it were, pierce inwards into itself and become dazzling yellow. There will also be not a few other modifications here and there. For example, right at the beginning of the scene, where Mary is in a thoroughly sentimental wein, you can introduce into the general reddish mood a bluish-violet mood. That then will be your first question settled.

And now, how are you going to see that your wings and back-drop make their right contribution to the mood of the scene? Impossible to have there a realistically painted picture of a bit of forest. Trees, however, you must have; and what about their colour? The scene demands that the colouring of the trees shall harmonise with the mood of the lighting. You cannot paint into a red mood trees that are absolutely green; you will have to introduce a touch of red into their colour. And in order to provide something on which the eye can rest when Mary grows sarcastic, you can take yellow also on to your palette,—I should rather say, on to your brush; for one should never paint from a palette, but always with water colours. Then the actors will have around them a true picture of the mood of the scene.

And it will be the same with all your arrangements for the staging of the play. When you come to the question of costume, you must realise that it is of no use to set about inventing all manner of fancy dresses which only make the wearers look queer and awkward. That is not the way to attain style. Costumes should be cut to suit the wearers; it is in the colour that you will have to let style come in,—in the choice of colour, in the harmony of the colours worn by different parts. And here one will not be so childish as to snatch at the first idea that offers, which would naturally mean in this rase that Mary should wear black. Black should appear on the stage only in the rare cases where it is justified from an artistic point of view. As a matter of fact, on the stage black obliterates itself, makes a void. Devils, or beings of such ilk, we can allow to appear in black, but we ought never to think of using black for any other purpose. Mary will have to be dressed in dark violet. Her colour should be chosen first. (For the achievement of style, it is always important to know where to begin.) Then, with Mary in violet, you cannot do otherwise than choose for Elizabeth a dress of reddish-yellowish colour; and the colours of the other characters will be gradually shaded as taste requires.

Working in this way, you will get your picture. And you will see, your audience will understand it. Provided it has been faithfully built up on these lines the picture will make its appeal.

For how is it that the actor of today finds it so difficult to carry bis audience with him? Simply because we are not sufficiently in earnest about this question of style. We want to attain style, but we do not set about it seriously enough. We ought not really to complain so muck of the audience; it is never die audience who are to blame. It is the art itself that is wanting! But, my dear friends, how can we expect to achieve art if, behind the founding of our theatres, lie impulses and motives such as are disclosed in the following well-authenticated incident?

A big theatre was once started in a town by a journalist who was also a playwright, and who took on himself the direction of the theatre. It was named after a distinguished classical author. Externally, you see, the founder was trying to do die thing in style. ‚Arrangements were also made for a speech to be given at the opening ceremony, in which very fine things were said about this author, and about the splendid future that the theatre would have if it followed in his footsteps; for he had himself been eminent in the art of the stage and had laid down many golden rules for its practice.

If now a true devotion to art in the highest sense had begun to manifest in the work of that theatre—naturally, fare of a lighter kind being offered also now and again in deference to public taste—it might have been in quite good style to open the theatre with a Speech of this kind. But style has to be something inward; it has to be livingly experienced. And I would ask you now to judge for your-selves whether there really was style in the enterprise, when I tell you what took place immediately after the official opening,—despite the high-sounding words that had been spoken by the director. There had of course been other Speeches too, including one by the chairman of the theatre committee, who spoke in becoming terms of the director, and so on, and so on. Yes, there was style in the opening ceremony; but of what kind? There was no life in it!—as all too quickly became apparent! For what happened when the function was over and the audience had dispersed? Among the people around such a director there will generally be some who are sincere idealists. Not many; but there will be a few. One such—or perhaps only a semi-idealist—went up to the director and said: ‘I wish you all success! Running your theatre in the way you have described, you will be helping to revive and restore art.’ To which the director replied: But it's the profits I'm after!'

Yes, you see how it is! The style of which the opening ceremony gave promise has all crumbled to dust. It was not in the man's heart, not in his inner being. Style has, in fact, become in our day something which people no longer feel in life, they are insensitive to it; and that is why I find it so important to impress upon you that he alone can hope to achieve style in art who sets out in all seriousness to live in it.

• 1. See Lecture 10.

Last night I tried to give some thoughts here about what a spiritual scientific worldview sets out to achieve, about the sources from which it originates, and I tried to draw attention to how this spiritual scientific worldview wants to place itself in a similar way in the spiritual cultural development of humanity, as the natural scientific worldview placed itself in the spiritual life of humanity centuries ago. Most of the honored audience is aware that here in this country, near Basel, on a hill surrounded by beautiful natural surroundings, in Dornach, a building is to be erected - work on this building has already progressed to a certain extent - that is intended to serve the spiritual-scientific world view, and which is to be, so to speak, a place where this spiritual-scientific world view can be cultivated in a right and dignified way.

Now, of course, it is certainly not possible to judge anything that is unfinished. But among the many voices and judgments that have come from the outside world to those who have to do with this building, there is so much that is adventurous, so much that is completely misunderstood and inaccurate, that it might perhaps be of interest to talk here in this city, in whose vicinity this building is located, about the principle of what is intended with this building. I would like to make it clear that this evening I will not be discussing the artistic or other details of this building, but will confine myself to a general description of what characterizes this building as a setting for spiritual scientific research. Anyone who has become familiar with the spiritual scientific world view and at the same time is aware of the prevailing habits of thought and feeling in the present day will not be at all surprised when those who have not yet concerned themselves much with the spiritual scientific world view see all kinds of fantastic, dreamy, perhaps even crazy and twisted things in it. Basically, however, this will appear quite natural to anyone whose whole soul is immersed in the spiritual-scientific world view. But nor will anyone be surprised that the architectural framework of such a structure, which - and this should be stated explicitly - is undertaken as a first, weak attempt, can often appear to the outside world as something adventurous, fantastic, and strange. After all, what lives in this spiritual-scientific world-view current, with all the people who profess this world-view current, is often and quite understandably taken at face value today.

To mention just one thing, really only as something symptomatic: After a lecture I was once asked whether a woman who embraces the spiritual scientific world view must wear her hair short and eccentric clothing. Surely that is not particularly appealing? Yes, I was also asked whether anyone could believe that women could somehow advance in their spiritual development by cutting their hair and wearing peculiar clothes? Such questions have really been asked, and they are actually not fundamentally different from some of the strange things that can be heard from some quarters, not only about the way the Dornach building is shaped, but also about what is to be done in this Dornach building, what mysterious things are to take place in this building in the future. I believe that an understanding of the design of this building as a house for spiritual science can best be gained by sketching out at least a few strokes of the origin of the building.

Spiritual science has been practised by a number of people for years. It goes without saying that at the beginning of its development it had to be cultivated in the spaces that are currently available in the world. Now it became apparent in various cities, including one in Germany, that the premises that had been used until then were gradually becoming too small as the number of participants in the spiritual-scientific worldview grew. So they thought about how to build their own house in this city for the cultivation of the spiritual-scientific worldview. Since the spiritual-scientific worldview not only produces certain ideas of beauty and art from its sources, but can also have a fertilizing effect on artistic creativity itself, the aim was to construct a building that, in its uniqueness, would be a framework for spiritual science, so that the world of feeling corresponding to this way of thinking would be expressed in the artistic form.

Another idea was connected with this. The need arose to express what spiritual science has to say about the laws and facts of the spiritual world not only through words, which in a certain way can only hint at the spiritual facts and spiritual laws hidden behind the physical, but to express it in a living presentation, one could say - if the word is taken with the necessary seriousness - to express it through a theatrical presentation. How could one arrive at this necessity for a theatrical presentation from the spiritual science itself?

Well, spiritual science wants to be something that, although the human soul rises through spiritual science to the regions of spiritual life, of the invisible and the supersensible, nevertheless directly engages with life. Spiritual science does not want to be something unworldly and escapist; in the strictest sense of the word, it wants to be a servant of life, a servant of life for those souls who, for enlightenment about what they experience in life, need insight into the deep connections of existence.

Take, for example, something very close at hand. People meet each other in life. We know that one soul meets another; perhaps at first the other person does not make any particular impression on the first, even though the first has the opportunity to get to know them well. In this way, you get to know hundreds and hundreds of people without being particularly impressed by any of them. But it is not like that with one soul. You feel drawn to this one soul in the first hour, perhaps even earlier, in the deepest sense. You feel something related in it; you do not ask what the relationship is; but that, of which we are not even aware, lives in the subconscious depths of the soul's life. It becomes the shaping of our further life. We are brought together with such a personality by bonds that are of deep, most important significance for our further life.

Spiritual science shows that man has a soul essence that can be brought, through the development of himself, to lift itself out of the physical and can be viewed purely spiritually. Spiritual science, not through philosophical speculation but through direct, real soul experience, thus learns that an eternal being, which goes through birth and death and is linked to the physical body for the time between birth - or let us say conception - and death, is present in man. And just as we have seen that our soul essence, before it enters its physical existence through birth or conception from a spiritual world, was already present in earlier earthly lives, so too does spiritual science show that our soul essence, when it has passed through the gate of death, has gone through a life between death and a new birth, in order to then bring to expression in a new life what it has carried through the spiritual world as results, as fruits one might say, of this life, in order to shape it anew in a new life. All these things are difficult for today's way of thinking to understand, but at the same time they are things that in the not too distant future will certainly have entered into the general consciousness of mankind to such an extent that human life will no longer be imaginable without these things being taken for granted.

Now, in response to what was said yesterday, I would like to say that even in ordinary life, without a person becoming a spiritual researcher, he goes out of his physical body with his soul every night from the moment he falls asleep until he wakes up and lives in a purely spiritual world. I already mentioned yesterday that dreams arise, dreams about the nature of external experiences, about the nature of what passes by during the day. Of course, these dreams are not such that they can provide enlightenment about the spiritual worlds. But if one does not approach the dream life superficially, as often happens today, but interprets it oneself with the probe of spiritual research, if one can see through the chaotic, the fantastic of dream experiences with understanding, and if one can separate from these what is only reminiscence, only memory of everyday life, then something remains at the bottom of the dream images that can be characterized as saying: there is something in dreams that has not been lived out in ordinary physical life.

Let us assume that we met with some personalities one day. We can then dream of them and of what we experienced with them. What we dream can be completely different from any memories, but it does not have to be that way. These experiences that we had with individual personalities can be transformed in such a way that we say to ourselves: “You neither experienced this in being with these personalities, nor did you think this.” The whole thing has shifted, so to speak, and something different has emerged from it. And if you now investigate – I can only briefly hint at this – you realize that in this unexperienced, but in the dream pushing through, something lives out of what still keeps us away from the personalities we have come together with, but what contains the seeds of something that will be experienced with them in a later life, something that is carried through the gate of death and will bring one together again with these personalities in a later life.

Now it seems fantastic what I am saying, but the one who can examine dreams in a spiritual scientific way knows that in these dreams, albeit chaotically, that which becomes fate for a person in later lives is already announced in the soul. We carry something in the depths of our minds that reaches into the distant, distant future, and what is just as decisive for our destiny in later life as the plant germ is for the formation of the flowers and leaves of the plant. And in the same way, in what we experience as fate, we can see the results of what was formed in the core of our soul in earlier earthly experiences. This is how man stands in the world. When he meets another person, there are forces at the bottom of his soul, soul forces, which he is not aware of, but in which he is alive. I would like to say that human life is interwoven, permeated and interwoven by that which determines man, which sometimes determines him to the most important and weighty actions of his life, but which does not come up so much in full day consciousness. How we place ourselves in life, how we place ourselves in the whole world, how we are determined by other people, by the whole world and its events, is based on hidden, supersensible experiences.

'If you look at modern dramatic art, it represents above all what takes place consciously in front of people. And it is quite natural that a drama appears all the more transparent the more it is composed merely of what can be directly surveyed. Those deeper forces that determine the human soul, that are connected with the soul, insofar as there is something in this soul that goes beyond birth and death, cannot be represented in ordinary drama. But the fact that life is dominated by such forces is an immediate result of spiritual science. Now spiritual science, by living out itself, not theoretically, not philosophically, but genuinely artistically, can come to a dramatic representation of life through something other than the word, so that in the play, in the way how the dramatic characters are juxtaposed and grouped, how the entire dramatic action is shaped, the deepest forces of life are expressed, which we do not talk about in ordinary life and which we often do not bring to consciousness. What determines and rules life from its depths can basically only be understood if one looks into this life with the same methods that spiritual science uses to look into what is behind external nature, into what transcends and determines the world. A deepening of human relationships, a deepening of the human soul's relationship to the world, that is what must underlie such drama, I would say, such dramatic expression of the facts of spiritual science.

So, in order to, so to speak, sensualize what spiritual science has to say about human life, dramatic representations had to be presented. In the early days we had to present such dramatic performances in ordinary theaters. It is understandable that the ordinary theaters, which are really - nothing at all should be said against them - intended for quite different tasks and goals, cannot provide the right setting for what this spiritual scientific worldview wants. Thus the idea arose from these and other reasons, arising out of pure necessity, to carry out such a building project ourselves and in doing so to combine an auditorium with a space – which does not need to be called a 'stage' – a space that is suitable for allowing such performances, drawn from the spiritual-scientific point of view, to be performed in it.

I am mentioning all this about the origin of our plan because all sorts of things have been said about what this building should contain. It has been thought that ghosts will only haunt the place, that ghosts will be cited there, that people will come into contact with all kinds of ghosts. No, that is not the case, but it is a matter of seriously grasping the depths of life, which are there, which people long and thirst for, and which are presented to the human soul through spiritual science, not through spooks and ghosts, but through artistic creation, artistic design with the means, which must be means of expression for that which has been hinted at as grounding life ever more deeply. It is with these means, these forms of expression, that spiritual science should speak to the audience in this building. This building in Dornach is therefore intended to be a house for cultivating spiritual science through the word and spiritual science through presentation. It goes without saying that as spiritual science advances, many other things will be connected with it, but it had to be be mentioned.

Now, basically, everything that is expressed in art, if it is to be real art, is a revelation of that which works through the human soul as a world view. Otherwise, art remains a mere appendage of life, an idle addition to life. Let us try to imagine ourselves in those art epochs that were truly great epochs of artistic development. Of course, because of the limited time available to us today, we can only touch on the most characteristic aspects, but let us try to realize how, in the dawn of the Italian Renaissance, Renaissance painting, in all that it offered, was in the deepest, most characteristic sense of the word an expression of what permeated and inspired the Christian world view at that time, what was revealed in it. There we see in Leonardo da Vinci's, in Michelangelo's, in Raphael's creations, what pervaded the mind as a world view. All art that does not flow with inner necessity from a world view is only an addition to life and not art in the real sense.

However, it must be clear that when we speak of a “world view,” we do not mean that it demands to flow out into art, as it were, and also not in such a way that this world view only touches our minds, as is the case with some modern philosophical or scientific world views that only affect the mind. When a worldview is built on mere philosophical or scientific concepts and ideas based on reason, there is no need to create or shape the framework, the architecture, in which the word of this worldview is expressed. But when a worldview seizes the entire human soul, when everything that vibrates in the human soul, in feelings and will impulses, is seized by this worldview, when the whole person belongs to this worldview, then this worldview is one that is not merely conceived, but brings the human being into connection with the whole world around him, then this world view is one that does not merely live in its concepts, but, by forming its relationship to the world around it, sees in all that it sees in its surroundings a continuation of its own inner in every tree, every cloud, every mountain.

Everything that surrounds us externally and everything that can be spiritually assumed behind what surrounds us externally wants to be grasped in a living connection with what we experience inwardly. Through his world view, the human being wants to grow together with everything that surrounds him; he wants to grasp his surroundings, not only in abstract understanding, but he wants to grasp spiritually and soulfully with his whole mind what extends out there in space. When, therefore, the world view takes hold of the whole person, it demands to flow out and radiate into the form, into everything that surrounds us. Since we cannot pursue a worldview in the great outdoors according to the needs of today's life, since it does not provide us with the space in which we can pursue a worldview, a spiritual-scientific worldview demands that it be framed by that with which the person pursuing this worldview is truly and inwardly connected.

Let us just realize that there is a core of being in every human being that is spiritual and soulful, that goes out of the human being in sleep. Let us realize that this spiritual-soul core of our being can become independent of the physical human being by recognizing, by grasping the whole world in a living, cognizing way. This core of being unites with the outer world in a completely different way than the human being who only uses the senses and his brain-bound intellect. While we are in the world of the senses, the human being stands here; the world is outside, is, as it were, spatially removed. As we advance into spiritual knowledge, we have to recognize that this spiritual knowledge is something that is much more intimately connected with the things and beings that are to be grasped by this spiritual knowledge than the sensual things are grasped by our senses. When the spiritual researcher with his soul-spiritual relates in such a way that he recognizes outside of his body – as I explained yesterday – he merges, as it were, identifies with everything in the environment. While we, when we stretch out our hand and point to something sensual, keep this sensuality outside of us, when we recognize something spiritually or soulfully, we connect with everything that fills the spiritual and soul world; we immerse ourselves in the spiritual and soul realm.

Let us now bear in mind that this spiritual scientific worldview should be expressed in the artistic realm. Is it not natural then that the need arises to have such an architecture, such an artistic framework, from which the soul can imagine: if you take the next thing that surrounds you here, should it not be something that arises directly from your spiritual-soul life itself; should it not be something that you would like to experience when you want to be with your immediate surroundings? Well, it necessarily follows that a very special form, a very special spatial arrangement, emerges. When we make a physical gesture, we are satisfied when the hand or the arm takes on the form of this gesture. When we speak of the spiritual context in which the soul comes into contact with its surroundings through spiritual knowledge, the gestures come out of us, the gestures directly populate our surroundings; that which otherwise lives in our skin, in that we are physical human beings, that comes out of us in spiritual knowledge, one might say it becomes a spiritual gesture that lovingly embraces the surroundings.

What this spiritual gesture wants to grasp, what it wants to touch, what it wants to see, the forms in which it wants to live, that is what the basic design must provide for a building in which spiritual science is practised. The forms, the colors, everything artistic must arise directly out of that which can be experienced with the world when it is understood spiritually. Thus, a building that is to serve the spiritual scientific world view is so directly connected to the essence of spiritual science itself in its forms, colors, and everything that is created, that spiritual science must transform itself out of its ideas and words into artistic forms. And by transforming itself in this way into artistic forms, it creates the necessary artistic framework for what must be done within the structure.

Now, very specific difficulties arise here from the thought habits of our time. Spiritual science is really only in its beginning, and that which shines forth for the human being, perhaps not so very far in the future, for the one who stands in spiritual science with his whole soul, is nevertheless quite fundamentally present in what we can pursue in the present as spiritual science. Hence it is that among those who today approach spiritual science, there are many who, though not attached to outward materialistic prejudices, are still attached to other prejudices. How often must we see that just those who approach spiritual science with inner zeal of their soul, often with fanatical zeal, yes, even too fanatical zeal, with fanatical zeal that borders on untruthfulness, still cling to all kinds of concepts from mysticism and theosophy, which one would like to overcome through true spiritual science. Do we not very often hear a popular definition of mysticism today: Mysticism is that which cannot be understood, that which cannot be grasped. Mysticism is that which must remain hidden. Some people believe themselves to be infinitely profound when they utter the word “occult” every quarter of an hour, when they say, “These are occult truths!” It is precisely through the clarity made possible by spiritual science that one would like to eliminate such things.

I myself have experienced (please forgive me for mentioning such examples in order to characterize them) how, twenty-seven or twenty-eight years ago, in the city where I lived at the time, various Theosophists approached me and explained what otherwise reasonable people take for an ordinary poem or a dramatic poem, or otherwise a work of art or even a painting, they have explained it by looking for this or that meaning in it, which one must first spin into it if one wants to find it in it. If they wanted to say something very significant to show that they know more than ordinary reasonable people, then they said: That is abysmally deep! That was something you could hear at every turn back then; it was thought to be a very special way of saying something. Sometimes people don't seek to penetrate the things of the world, but rather to put something into them, to mix something in; and what they don't understand, what they don't penetrate, seems particularly deep to them.

We have even had to experience, for example, that Shakespeare's 's “Hamlet” drama, which everyone must take as self-explanatory, has been interpreted by Theosophists in such a way that one principle is seen in Hamlet, another principle in other characters and yet another in yet others; all sorts of things were pulled in and added. It was miserable, terrible. One could say: Yes, this Shakespeare did not just want to depict this dreamy Danish prince, but a particular principle. As if the work of art would gain something by turning a human being into an allegorical-symbolic straw man and a dramatic structure into an external skeleton of Theosophical-philosophical truths! It can happen that one seeks what is truly deeper in the symbols and allegories, while life becomes impoverished when one sees it only in symbols and allegories.

The rich life becomes impoverished when one believes that one can find something deeper in the symbols. There are people who see something special in putting a pentagram on any old wall or anywhere else. They don't realize what this pentagram is, they don't understand it at all, but this pentagram, that is the number five, the pentagram is directed upwards, you can talk a lot about it, you can whisper and obscure a lot about it and obscure, and if you can say something that is not really connected with the five lines that are intertwined, then you are convinced that you have said or expressed something particularly profound. Or even if you attach the snake staff, the so-called Caduceus, somewhere, then you believe you have done something very special. Anyone who somehow puts up such abstract symbols and forms and believes that they have something to do with art is like someone who has notes in front of him and spins and theorizes all kinds of abstractions about their form, while only the person who has a natural relationship to the notes, to whom the musical concepts arise, can truly appreciate the notes, in that the sound fixed in the notes comes to life in such a way that the sound lives in the mind. Only in relation to what lives in the mind can that which is recorded with the external note symbols have any meaning.

When it comes to a building that is intended to serve true spiritual science, it is only natural to have to deal with such misconceptions, which come from false mysticism, false theosophy, and all kinds of adventurous ideas. If the intention is not to express some kind of empty concepts in stone and wood, but to depict something artistic, then it is eminently necessary that nothing be given a symbolic form by a philosophical or theosophical idea or some mystical non-idea , but it is necessary that what emanates from the idea, what the mind experiences inwardly, shapes itself through the creative power of the soul into form and color, so that the art does not need an explanation, but explains itself. Art that needs an explanation is not art at all.

The aim is that anyone who understands the language of this structure should not need an explanation of the structure. Of course, no one who has not learned Spanish cannot understand a Spanish poem. Those who understand the language of spiritual science do not need an explanation of the structure; for them, without a word being said, there is something self-explanatory in this structure because they have their joy, their upliftment, an inner realization of the soul forces from the direct connection with what is standing there, with what really lives in the form and in the color. One would like to say that a picture is no longer a real work of art, where one needs to write below what it actually represents. A picture is only a work of art when one has only to look at it and when all that the picture has to say follows from what one sees. If we therefore seek symbolism or allegory in the Dornach building, if we seek something that requires us to answer the question, “What does this or that mean?” after every step, then nothing will be found in the Dornach building that corresponds to this. But if we seek something in the Dornach building that provides answers to the question, “Which forms does one find beautiful who has a spiritual-scientific feeling? What forms would he who wishes to gather his spiritual strength around him like to have around him? Then the answer to these questions will be found in the Dornach building.

But in a certain respect spiritual science is something that seeks to establish itself as a new element in our cultural life. It is therefore understandable that such a setting must also be something that, in a certain way, introduces something new into our artistic life. And here, at this point, I would like to emphasize that I ask you not to believe that what one might have in mind as architecture, or as an artistic expression of what spiritual science can give, has already been achieved in the Dornach building. The Dornach building is a beginning, and as a beginning it is as incomplete as any beginning can be. The limited funds that were available, despite the fact that the building took up considerable funds for certain concepts, only allowed the very first step to be taken. And even the work that was necessary from circles of friends could initially only make a very first start on what can present itself to the soul as a new style of art, as it must arise out of spiritual science itself.

Therefore, I would ask you to consider this Dornach building only from the point of view of a very first, primitive beginning, with all the defects and imperfections of a beginning; to consider it only from the point of view of asserting aspects of artistic creation of forms that correspond to spiritual-scientific feeling and sensing, not to spiritual-scientific thinking, but to feeling and sensing when it is artistically intensified. What is being built today, still very imperfectly, on that beautiful hill outside, is really the primitive beginning of something that will one day be formed into a real beauty, into an adequate expression of what spiritual science has to give to human cultural development. Therefore, it must seem quite understandable when so many objections are raised from this or that side against what is being built out there, when so much is found to be imperfect and incomplete. But I would like to mention some of the, one could say, basic feelings that can guide one in the architecture of such a building.

As I said, I cannot go into details today due to the limited time. I would just like to recall a saying of Michelangelo, in reference to the old master of architectural art, Vitruvius, a saying that truly reflects the idea, the essence of architecture. Michelangelo says: Only he who knows human anatomy is capable of truly grasping the inner necessity that underlies an architectural plan. It is a strange saying, but for someone who can engage with such things, it is perfectly understandable. When we survey the whole of nature, when we bring to our soul all the forces at work in nature, when we bring to our soul the formations that live in nature, then we ask ourselves: for an unbiased observer of the whole of nature and the world, where does all this world-becoming, all this world activity, point to? They point ultimately to the human form. In the human form, there is something before us of which we can say, in terms of form and in terms of the way it expresses itself, that Goethe's words apply: 'Man is placed at the summit of nature, so he regards himself as a whole nature that has to produce a summit within itself once again. To do so, he elevates himself by permeating himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally rising to the production of the work of art, which takes a prominent place alongside his other deeds and works.

That that which man himself then reshapes when he, as an artist, continues nature, so to speak, will therefore gain the most diverse points of reference precisely from what has been shaped from the whole world and its secrets into the human form, the human structure with all its gestures, with all its life. Today, it is not possible to go into architectural styles or the development of architecture. Those who are truly familiar with the development of architecture know that, while it is true that the essence of artistic creation is most difficult to see in architectural art, it is also expressed in this architectural art. But because this essence of artistic creation is most difficult to see in architectural art, it shall be shown in sculpture. The same could be shown in painting, in music, in other arts.

In our time, precisely because the materialistic view and attitude has taken hold of everything, there is little real insight into what the essence of artistic creation actually is, which is the emergence of art from the inner soul activity of the human being. Today, the artist is so often obliged to rely on the model, and the person who looks at something that is a work of art has the first question: Is this natural? Does it depict this or that naturally? Such judgments do not belong to real art, but to the decline of art. Real art is connected with what happens inwardly in man. When the sculptor creates a face, something of the feelings and inner soul experiences must truly live in him, which the physiognomy, which even the gesture of the face, conjures up from the depths of the soul. If it lives in the soul of the artist, then what lives in him feeling and creating can pour out into what he shapes.

The forms that we reproduce architecturally are not so close to what we experience directly or what lives in our soul. But in a certain way, what can be architecturally designed does arise from what is experienced in the human soul. I have already indicated how the gesture is continued, how that which can be created in the environment emerges from the movement, from the gesture - not from the gesture that the physical hand makes, but from the gesture that the spiritual organs make when they want to grasp the immediate environment. What is experienced inwardly, to be shaped in forms and colors and in other artistic means so that one stands in everything in it, so that what one creates in space as forms and colors is a continuation of the inner being that flows out into the forms, into all curves and inclinations, into all colors that cover the walls: that is what spiritual science wants to show.

Let us look at how the building should be designed from this point of view. As was explained in the description of the genesis, the challenge is to present to the audience's eyes and ears something that becomes clear to human knowledge through the results of spiritual science. Spiritual science is something that should be absorbed by the soul in a concentrated way; those who want to absorb what is presented in spiritual science must be concentrated. We are therefore dealing with a space for the audience and a space for what is to be presented from the sources of spiritual science.

When a person is collected, he must close himself off from the outside world; he must, as it were, hold his powers together. This is the outer nature of the structure. What kind of space will have to be created if what is in the people who are in such a space is to express itself meaningfully, but also to continue in the surroundings? It is quite clear, not for abstract concepts but for artistic sensibilities, that a rotunda must be created and that, above all, the collection can best be presented in a dome-shaped space. The dome-shaped conclusion expresses what is really alive there, not in a symbolic or allegorical way, but rather in such a way that, as it were, an excavation is made in the room, I would say, that the space is pushed back, and the way the space is pushed back results in the architectural form. In essence, therefore, such a building, which is based on interior design, must be a building that takes its form from the fact that what happens in it vibrates and bumps into its surroundings, and that the vibrations persist. What I have only hinted at so far could be developed further. It would then become clear that two rotundas are created by the two departments - the one derived from the humanities and the other from the audience; two rotundas that are connected, however, that must belong together. This would become clear, not through abstract thought, but by feeling it out in a very artistic way. The two interconnected round structures would arise in the middle, overlapping and closed at the top by parts of spherical surfaces (Figs. 1, 3, 8, 9).

It goes without saying that the exterior architecture, I would say, is of lesser importance for such a building, which is dedicated to inner contemplation and concentration. Everything that seeks to be artistically shaped in forms and colors must arise from within, must be projected from the inside out. What is formed on the outside is, so to speak, that which arises from the fact that, by repelling the waves of the world, the other waves of the world approach again, meet with what reaches out into space; and in the encounter, what is formed is, if I may use the word, the outer form, the outer decoration. But the whole must be formed out of this fundamental idea. Out of this fundamental idea, but out of the felt, sensed fundamental idea, this outer form necessarily arose. Technically, it was not at all easy to execute what you see executed there: to join spherical surfaces together in such a way that the thing can technically exist. And I may mention here that we were able to solve this problem, which has not been solved in architecture before, through the insight and efforts of a Basel engineer friend of ours. In this way we gave the outer form.

In the same way, we must think about how the building itself is to be designed. If you walk around the building, you will find three gates (Figs. 3-9). These three gates are designed in such a way that you may wonder about their forms. Why are these forms exactly as they appear to us? Is there an answer to the question: Do these gates have to be designed in this way?

Yes, you can get an answer, but it cannot be an abstract, philosophical one, nor can it be an unartistic one , but one could say something like this: Yes, I also know something else where something comes in from the outside into an interior, how people will enter through the gate into the interior, I know, for example, the human eye. Light enters through the eye to do its work, the weaving of light, inside the human being. And now do not ask for some abstract idea of how the eye is formed, but feel how the light necessarily evokes a very specific design of the eye. In order for light to come from the outside into the human interior, it needs the eye; in order for the light to propagate, it must come into the interior through something that is designed like the eye. Look at our gates, then you will have to give the answer: Let us assume that there are people who want to gain a certain relationship with spiritual science; these people enter this room from the outside through the gate. The fact that they enter, felt and sensed vividly, should be expressed in these forms of the gate.

And again, we enter the room (Figs. 28, 29). From the way I have depicted it, you can see that there are spectators sitting in it. In the smaller room, which is also a round structure and adjoins the other (Figs. 55, 62), something is taking place that is a revelation. It is not a ghostly or spectral revelation, but a natural revelation of the results of spiritual science, only it is completely transformed from the philosophical-theoretical into the artistic. There are spectators concentrating on what is happening in the space of the performance. The spectators' attention rushes through the space. Now let us imagine that this space, completely animated by the attention of the spectators, should reveal itself within itself. The whole atmosphere, which, so to speak, must take hold of the soul when it feels: There are spectators, there are listeners, there are attentive people, people in whose souls what is happening before them is taking place, this whole atmosphere, this feeling is continued in the structure of the columns that run along the room, is continued in the peculiar sculptural forms that .

There is a single axis of symmetry that runs from the entrance through the center of the room, and the shapes on the individual columns indicate that the audience's attention is directed towards the performance space, and that what emanates from the performance space in turn comes towards them (Fig. 29). If you look at what the columns are supporting, you will recognize from the forms carved out of the wood how attention really does encounter what comes towards it from the representational space, and how this is continued. It is not just depicted, it is really captured in the gestures in these wooden structures in the living life.

The whole thing is designed down to the material. I have heard it said that it is a complicated idea of these Theosophists out there in Dornach that they make their wooden columns in such a way that they always use different woods for the individual columns. Such a question arises precisely from the urge to get something philosophical and theoretical as an answer, and not an artistic feeling, not something that reaches in from direct life. What can one say in answer to someone who asks: Why do you make your columns out of different types of wood? One can perhaps answer: Have you ever seen a violin with only A strings? No, there are different strings; it has to do with the design of the violin. The whole structure is built for life, for direct feeling and sensing, right down to the material. Therefore, the structure should express what lives in spiritual science completely artistically and only artistically, not abstractly meaningfully. It was, of course, necessary for the individual artistic fields to develop in very specific ways, because spiritual science, as it were, seeks to penetrate the secrets of existence in the sensory world. This means that what would otherwise be developed as art only in direct connection with sensuality is shaped in a different way.

The interior of that dome – which can only be called a dome in a figurative sense, because it is not a dome at all, but only a spherical termination – this interior is painted (Figs. 29, 62). But this painting is based on something other than what usually underlies painting. Of course, the painting cannot depict what really is in the materialistic sense of the word. This painting shows the way in which a being, an object, a landscape is illuminated, what flits across the external material reality; it shows what in the next moment can no longer be there, it shows the fleeting, that for which the objects are only the cause of its being there. In a still completely different sense, our painting must have an effect.

Do you remember what I said before: that the essence of artistic creation is that the artist himself is present in what is created by the artist, that the artist, by shaping the material, shapes something that lives within him, where he is inwardly present, not painting after something external, but rather shaping the external itself according to what is within him. That this can also be transferred precisely to the principle of painting may not yet be universally understood today. But there is a way of thinking about it: How would you experience it in your mind if you, I would say, saw the world through and through red? Would it affect your mind differently? That the question is justified was known to those who had a somewhat deeper connection to art at all times. Goethe, for example, remarked that if someone wanted to depict how, at the end of earthly existence, the wrath of the world would pour out over all that is sinful in humanity, this divine wrath would have to shine in a red-hot light. Here we see how colors merge into the moral, into the soul-spiritual.

What do we experience in red, in green, in blue? Just as the form can be experienced, so can the color. Then one is not dealing with a reproduction of the colors of what light offers as a coloration; then one crawls into the color, so to speak, and experiences the essence of the color, and by living out in the color, one creates from the essence of the color itself. Thus, in our entire wall painting, nothing should be copied, but from the inner reason of things, insofar as they have something to do with color or with the moral, the spiritual-soul, which is expressed in color, the form should be created from the color itself. What is painted on the walls should express itself, not something else; it should speak to us through itself.

And so the whole structure is formed in such a way that the walls, as it were, are not real walls. The spiritual scientist is convinced that, just as he as a physical person is surrounded by air and the rest of the physical world, he as a spiritual being is surrounded by the spiritual, with all its entities and processes, which fills and fulfills the world. While a building is otherwise designed to be thought of as complete, it must be said of our building that, however much it is a frame for the gathering audience, it is at the same time something that cancels itself out. Seen from within, this ceiling should give the impression that basically there is nothing there, but that we know that by looking up at this ceiling, this ceiling lifts itself up; it becomes a spiritual direction, into infinite spiritual expanses it is the beginning. We will basically have no walls despite the frame, but something that is permeable, that leads into distant worlds, into vast worlds. And it is the same with architecture, with sculpture, with column forms, with everything that surrounds us. It should not shut us off; it should lead us out into the expanses and distances of the spiritual world. The walls must be placed in such a way that one says: when one takes the step out, that must be the first thing, and if one pursues this further, one comes out into the expanses of the spiritual world. Walls that destroy themselves through what they are, that is what, in a certain respect, is the goal of a new art, even if, as I have indicated, it is only in its very beginning.

And something else may be said. Anyone who enters our building today will be able to say: Yes, everything that is so often regarded as the actual architecturally correct, as the noblest forms of architecture, is basically no longer there here. And there is some truth to that. If we take an extreme case and look at a Greek building in its harmonious forms, built by the forces that act outside as spatial forces, brought into beautiful harmony, then we cannot say: our building is designed in the same way. The Greek building is designed in such a way that it represents the highest level of utilization of the forces of space, of pressure, or, as they are called, of gravity, which otherwise fills space. In our case, a breath of the living and weaving permeates the entire building. While we have something mathematical in Greek temple construction, something that comes from the mere interplay of forces, which is nevertheless inanimate, even if it is composed in the most beautiful harmony, in rhythm and proportion, our building is conceived in such a way that one can have the feeling that something alive is quietly passing through its lines, as something highly alive passes through the human form. Life pulses and vibrates through that which is expressed in forms. This is true; but therein lies the progress of architecture.

I would need many hours to discuss the architectural principles of style; how Greek gradually leads to that which brings life into architecture. In the future, the hitherto dead architectural form will truly come to life. We can only make an imperfect very first start. But this start must be made, and something dynamic, something invigorating, something that moves must be introduced into the purely physical-mathematical forms. Here, too, we may refer to Michelangelo's saying: Only he who knows human anatomy is able to form a true conception of the inner necessity on which an architectural plan is based.

But we find that when we look at the human form as it we see in the truly spiritually understood anatomy, that alongside all its movement and life, there is something that already presents itself in life as something dead, as something merely mathematical: the way in which the structure of our bone system relates to each other. The way in which we physically move the various parts of our skeletal system in relation to each other shows that something dead and mathematical is present in the life of a human being, that death is contained in it. And now it is possible to bring just as much life into the dead structure as there is death in the living human being. And that is what has been attempted with our structure. It has been lifted out of the rigidity of the merely mathematical, of merely following lines and adding forces. It has been imbued with life, with organicity, as much as there is dead matter in a living human being. The living element in the human being can only exist because the dead is mixed in with it in a certain way.

Our building takes on the appearance of life because what is merely joined together dead is given the appearance of life, the appearance of the living is lent to it. And at one point, it is shown what underlies it as a basic idea of spiritual science, that this spiritual science should stir up something in the soul that brings the soul into intimate contact with life. Spiritual science should make people life-friendly and devoted to life. In spiritual science, people should find something that introduces them to life, that makes them strong and powerful for life, which is becoming ever more complicated. Therefore, our building must also have something that directly shows how to not just put something together and paint it with the means that are available to us as human beings, but something must be presented here that expresses the tendency for our building to be in close contact with the whole world so that not only we as human beings work on the building but the whole world works on it.

This is attempted by transforming the earlier glass painting into a kind of glass etching (Figs. 102, 103). A special kind of artistic treatment of the windows in the Dornach building will be found. I can only hint at it. The window panes will not be treated in the way that stained glass was treated in the past. Instead, the panes of different colors will be treated in such a way that a special etching technique is used to scrape out the form from the glass, so that the corresponding figures are created by the fact that the light from outside can penetrate through the different thicknesses of the glass and the outer light, by holding the glass against it, works together with us. A glass pane like this is not a work of art in itself; it is only when it is installed and the external light passes through the glass pane that the work of art is created. Glass etching, through which sunlight penetrates directly into the interior of the room through various drawings on the glass. Here we have the whole world working together in the way that light can come in from the outside into the interior, which, during events, usually has to be illuminated with the artificial light of the modern age, with electric light.

And so it must be said that such a building is not intended to to represent something particularly abstract, something quite strange, which a few good-for-nothings of life perceive as a pleasant place to stay, but rather it should be presented in such a way that it is sought out by precisely those who need a boost for their lives, so that they can get to know life in its depths. It was not allowed to put something there that has nothing to do with what today's culture is. Therefore, the most recent material was used quite consciously. In addition to the part that was made of wood, for reasons that cannot be discussed today, the most recent concrete material was used, and an attempt was made, because artistic creation must really shape out of the material, to use this concrete material in such a way as to express, materially, if I may use the paradox, the most spiritual with this most recent, most material product. Not something outlandish should be collected, but that which the time yields should be used for the ideas that are supposed to bring, precisely for the time that works through external materiality, the spiritual, the ideal, the spiritual-soul.

Next to the building, you can see something else that many people today find particularly crazy (Figs. 100, 101). This is something that arose from the question: How should the whole building be heated? For certain reasons, one did not want what is in this annex to be inside the building itself, mainly for artistic reasons. Should one now build a chimney in the current way, should one put all that such a chimney requires with a boiler house in the way it is often put in the world? That was the question, and at the same time, the task of using concrete for such a construction had to be solved. Now this had to be solved: what concrete casing should be given to such a boiler house? How should what is formed in concrete be constructed? Certainly, the forms that have emerged will not be understood by very many people today. But that is how it is with everything that is built as something new. But people will learn to understand.

The boiler house is only completely finished when smoke comes out of it; that belongs to the forms. And people will one day understand that the forms carved out of the concrete material really relate to what happens inside, to the whole idea of the building – artistically speaking – like the nutshell to the nut. Just as we feel that the nutshell is designed for the nut – the nutshell has to be designed for the sake of the nut, and it would be ugly if it were not designed to be a proper shell for the nut – so what is going on in the boiler house must be enveloped in such a shell, like the strange concrete building that stands next to our Dornach building. So you see that artistic considerations have played a part everywhere. They were questions of artistic feeling, questions of feeling, not questions of allegorical or symbolic meaning.

I have taken up a great deal of your time and yet I have only been able to present to you, I might say, the most elementary main ideas of our Dornach building, without going into the actual fundamental artistic aspects. But perhaps it is precisely through what I have taken the liberty of discussing with you that it has become apparent how such a building must be formed, so to speak, out of the needs of modern life. And anyone who visits this building will also be able to find that this beautiful landscape, which lies around the Dornach hill, this beautiful landscape that continues on all sides, has something in the Dornach building that can be said in the same way as for many successful buildings: they really grow out of the earth, it is as if the earth were sending the power upwards for their creation. Those who allow the forms of mountains and hills, the whole of nature out there, to work on their soul, will find in the outer form of the Dornach building, to a certain extent, an architectural continuation of all of nature.

Therefore, those who were able to erect this building in this beautiful country can greet with particular joy that this has become possible, that it has been shaped by the circumstances. And I believe that those for whom this building is so close to their worldview are filled with a deep sense of gratitude that it was possible to erect this building in this part of the country. It may be called a kind fate that those people who are out there in the world, one in this, the other in that profession, one in this, the other in that place in the world, may stop at certain times of the year on the beautiful Dornach hill and get there, for what they have to do in the outside world, strength of life, strengthening of life, through that collection which is to be sought in our building and which is to be expressed through the forms, through the art of building.

In this context, it may perhaps be mentioned that it is perfectly understandable, indeed self-evident, that people who, through their lives, are able to be where they want, to build where they want, will build their houses near the building. It is indeed a great joy to see, from many points of view, that the building will be surrounded by a number of houses, perhaps later a larger number of houses, in which people will live who are in tune with the purpose of the building. But the main thing is not what is called this colony; the main thing is the building, which wants to be neither a church nor a temple, but precisely that which can be called an embrace of the spiritual-scientific world view. And because this building wants to be what has been described, it wants to serve people who are out there in the world, some of whom work here and others there. Our worldview cannot have much time for theosophical or mystical worldviews, or whatever you want to call them, through which people withdraw from the immediate life of the present, gathering in colonies to pursue their whims and fantasies and dreams in idleness. Spiritual science is not intended for idlers, for people who do nothing but sit together dreaming in what they call colonies. Our world view is not intended for them, but for people who want to work diligently on what is being achieved in the present for human labor, for human salvation and human progress; for these people, who are in the prime of life, for people who have something to do in life, this structure is intended. They should only be there during the times that are their life Sundays, their life holidays, when they come together to gain strength for the innermost forces of the soul for the rest of their active lives. We certainly do not want to found a colony for idlers, but we want to create something that serves life as it presents itself to people in our time, in our cultural epoch. We want to serve what is demanded of people in our cultural epoch. Of course, this is not a criticism of people who want to retire or have a summer house and recover, so that something can arise that can be called a colony surrounding the building. From certain points of view, this will have great advantages, but the basic idea requires that I express what I have just expressed.

Anyone who has grasped what has been said about spiritual science in connection with the design of this house in Dornach will no longer need to be told that this spiritual-scientific worldview is not hostile or opposed to this or that religious belief, this or that way of relating to the supersensible world. On the contrary, spiritual science wants to bring to the human soul that which lives behind physical-sensory phenomena, wants to bring this to the human soul in a way that has not been possible through the achievements of human culture to date, but which is demanded by the future. Just as from a certain point in the development of humanity, the Copernican worldview, the worldview of a Galileo, a Kepler, everything that is connected with modern science, was required for the outer space, so in our time something is required for the life of the soul, something that must come in, just as the scientific worldview has come in, something that will serve life in its moral , its spiritual-soul development, just as natural science has served material life.

Just as progress was indispensable and necessary there, so progress in the spiritual-soul sphere is indispensable and necessary, and in the future people will be just as unable to live without what spiritual science has to give as people today are unable to live without the achievements of natural science. Just as true scientific progress cannot in any way hinder religious elevation to the supersensible, the religious connection of the soul with the supersensible, so the spiritual scientific world view will not do this either. On the contrary, this may be particularly emphasized: While the natural-scientific world view easily leads man to what may be called a soul that does not want to concern itself with anything supersensible, that believes that a satisfactory world picture can be formed from what natural science itself provides, spiritual science shows us that man's soul is in contact with supersensible worlds. And by opening up these supersensible worlds to the human soul, it will deepen precisely the religious need.

Just as our building does not want to be a temple or a church, so spiritual science does not want to be anything that replaces any religion. On the contrary, anyone who penetrates into the depths of the world in a spiritual scientific way will be led back to religious life. What the individual then does with his religious belief is his personal business; spiritual science does not concern itself with this. Spiritual science aims to found a spiritual-scientific world view; it does not alienate people from their religious beliefs; it can only lead them more intimately, more deeply, more energetically into their religious life. And if one were to really see through the very core of true spiritual science, then religious beliefs would have very little to object to against this spiritual science. Rather, they would say: “Due to many things that have arisen in the has estranged many a soul, but now a current is coming that brings people together with the supersensible worlds; this will awaken and fertilize religious life in its depths. Once people have gained an understanding for it, they will no longer see spiritual science as something that encroaches on the religious communities, but as something that must necessarily come into the world, but that comes into the world in such a way that a religious person must welcome it as something gratifying.

But here too we see that there is still much remains to be done if our contemporaries are to develop a true and genuine understanding of what spiritual science wants and what it has to do in all areas of life – for example, in relation to the arts, but one could say the same in relation to social issues – in a world in which human conditions are becoming increasingly more complicated and complex as we look towards the future. And for many areas, indeed for all areas of life, it can be shown that spiritual science wants to be there to sow the seeds of renewal of life as it will be needed. This renewal of life, its inner necessity can be recognized by anyone who sees through life. The task of spiritual science is not to replace religion, nor to found another religion. The task of spiritual science is not to appear somehow polemically or critically against what has been artistically created so far. But like every genuine world view, one that takes hold not only of our abstract intellect, our ideas and concepts, but of the whole human being, must express itself artistically, so must spiritual science express itself artistically. And the first step in this direction is the building in Dornach – a primitive beginning, as I said.

It will be understood that spiritual science is able to deepen religious life and to fertilize art. But spiritual science wants to be a science, albeit a science that is close to the most intimate needs of the human soul. And it wants to be such a science, a strong promoter of the life that our time needs. Therefore, for everything artistic, for everything social, for religious and many other special areas of life, we can say what Goethe said in relation to the religious feeling of man:

He who possesses science and art also has religion. Those who do not possess these two, have religion.

Those who truly possess spiritual science and who immerse themselves in the artistic perception that flows from spiritual science in a feeling-based way, for them it can be said, once again summarizing a feeling, this time a Goethean feeling, which is also what every stone, every piece of wood in our building should express: Those who possess science (in the sense of spiritual science) and those who possess art (especially art in the sense of spiritual science) also possess religion. This is what can be said for religion and for many other areas of life from the point of view of spiritual science. Therefore, the feelings that should flow through my reflections today may end with Goethe's words – even if this only refers to the religious current, what applies to religion also applies to the other areas of life:

Those who possess science and art also have religion.
Those who do not possess these two may have religion.

by Hella Wiesberger

In order to properly determine the relationship between Rudolf Steiner's epistemological approach to work, as discussed in the documents presented in this volume, and his overall impact, it is necessary to consider not only the external history of this branch of his work, but also, first of all, his conception of the meaning and significance of the cultic as such.

According to the insights of anthroposophy, in ancient times humanity lived in the instinctive, clairvoyant awareness that all life in the world and in humanity is brought about, shaped and sustained by the creative forces of a divine spiritual world. This awareness grew weaker and weaker over time until it was completely lost in modern times as a result of intellectual thinking that was focused solely on the physical laws of the world. This was necessary because only in this way could the human being become independent of the creative spirituality of the universe in terms of consciousness and thus acquire a sense of freedom. The task of human development now consists in using the free intellect, which is not determined by world spirituality, to gain a new awareness of the connection with world spirituality.

This realization was what led to one of Rudolf Steiner's fundamental concerns: to pave a path for modern intellectual thinking to spiritual knowledge that was appropriate for it. This is how the first anthroposophical guiding principle begins: “Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge that seeks to lead the spiritual in man to the spiritual in the universe.”¹ The concrete means for walking this path are to be found in the complete works, paradigmatically in the fundamental works «The Philosophy of Freedom» and «How to Know Higher Worlds >».

While it was natural for ancient cultures to cultivate in their external life, through symbols and cultic acts, that which could be inwardly experienced from cosmic spirituality, and thereby to shape their social life, the fading of the consciousness of being existentially connected to the divine-spiritual world also meant that the sense of the cultic had to be lost. And so, for modern abstract thinking, which has become the dominant intellectual force in the course of the 20th century, the traditional cultic forms can only be regarded as incomprehensible relics of past times. Existing cultic needs do not come from the intellect, but from other layers of the human soul.

This raises the question of what reasons could have moved Rudolf Steiner, as a thoroughly modern thinker, to cultivate cultic forms in his Esoteric School and later to convey them to other contexts as well. To answer this question fully, the whole wide and deep range of his spiritual scientific representations of the nature and task of the cultic for the development of the human being, humanity and the earth would have to be shown. Since this is not possible here, only a few aspects essential to the present publication can be pointed out.

Understanding cults arises from spiritual vision.

We need harmony between knowledge, art, religion and morality for our complicated social life, which threatens to spread chaos across the earth.²

Rudolf Steiner's fundamental concept of the cultic is rooted in his spiritual vision, trained with modern means of knowledge, to which the spiritual world content reveals itself as “the source and principle of all being” ³ and whose nature evokes an equally cognitive, artistic-feeling and religious-worshipping experience. As long as humanity lived in an instinctive clairvoyance, cultures were sustained by such a unified scientific, artistic and religiously attuned spiritual vision: “What man recognized, he formed into matter; he made his wisdom into creative art. And in that the mystery student, in his liveliness, perceived what he learned as the Divine-Spiritual that permeates the world, he offered his act of worship to it, so to speak, the sacred art re-created for cult.“ ⁴

Human progress demanded that this unified experience be broken down into the three independent currents of religion, art and science. In the further course of development, the three have become more and more distant from each other and lost all connection to their common origin. This has led to cultural and social life becoming increasingly chaotic. In order for orienting, rising forces to become effective again, the three “age-old sacred ideals” – the religious, the artistic and the cognitive ideal – must be reshaped from a modern spiritual-cognitive perspective. Rudolf Steiner regarded this as the most important concern of anthroposophy, and he emphasized it in particular on important occasions in the anthroposophical movement, for example at the opening of the first event at the Goetheanum building.⁵

In the spirit of the words spoken on this occasion: “When nature begins to reveal her manifest secrets to him through spiritual vision, so that he must express them in ideas and shape them artistically, the innermost part of his soul is moved to worship what he has seen and captured in form with a religious sense. For him, religion becomes the consequence of science and art,” ⁶From the very beginning, he had been driven to shape the results of his spiritual vision not only according to science but also according to art: towards a pictorial quality that contains spiritual realities. For “images underlie everything around us; those who have spoken of spiritual sources have meant these images” (Berlin, July 6, 1915). Because it seemed necessary to him, especially with regard to social life, to shape the essence of the spiritual not only scientifically but also visually, everything that characterizes anthroposophy as a worldview should also be present in the image through its representative, the Goetheanum building (Dornach, January 23, 1920). After the fire on New Year's Eve 1922 destroyed this pictorial expression of the view, he expressed what he had wanted to present to the world with the Goetheanum in a somewhat succinct formula:

“The Goetheanum was felt to be a physical sign of the formation that the three main interests of humanity are striving for in the depths of the human soul. These main interests are the religious-moral, the artistic and the cognitive interest.” ⁷

The formulation of the cognitive and artistic interest is clear. But what about its religious interest? If this is not as clearly perceptible, this is partly due to the characterization of religion as the “mood” of the human soul for the spiritual that lies beyond the sensual (Mannheim, January 5, 1911), and partly due to the often-stated belief that the religious and moral essence of anthroposophy cannot could not be confessional in the sense of forming a religion, that spiritual scientific endeavors should not be a “substitute” for religious practice and religious life, that one should not make spiritual science “into a religion”, although it could be “to the highest degree” a “support” and “underpinning” of religious life (Berlin, February 20, 1917). Anthroposophy as a science of the supersensible and the Anthroposophical Society as its community carrier should not be tied to a particular religious confession, since Anthroposophy is by nature interreligious. Even its most central insight, the realization of the importance of the Christ-spirit for the development of humanity and the Earth, is not based on that of the Christian denominations, but on the science of initiation from which all religions once emerged. In this sense, he once characterized it as a “fundamental nerve” of spiritual scientific research tasks to work out the supersensible truth content common to all religions and thereby “bring mutual understanding to the individual religious currents emerging from the initiations religious movements over the earth“ (Berlin, April 23, 1912).⁸ From this it follows logically that, from the point of view of anthroposophy, practical religious observance within a confession must be a private matter for the individual. This has been expressed in the statutes of the Society from the very beginning.⁹

The ideal of the sacralization of one's whole life

Sacramentality is an expression of the fact that human action is aglow with holiness.⁹

What was done only on the church altar must take hold of the whole world.¹⁰

The ability to experience how spiritual beings are manifested in a cultic, sensory way had to fade away because it is a law of development that forces must be lost in order to be conquered anew at a different level. To this end, every development must proceed in a seven-fold rhythm: from the first to the fourth stage it is evolutionary, but from the fifth to the seventh stage it is involutionary, that is, retrogressive. This means that the third, second and first stages must be relived as the fifth, sixth and seventh, but now with what has been gained as new up to the fourth stage. For humanity on earth, the new thing to be attained consists in the special or 'I-ness', which in the phase of evolution develops physically out of birth and death and in the phase of involution is to spiritualize into freedom and love. The latter, however, requires sacrificing the egoism that was necessary for the development of specialness and the sense of freedom.

This fundamental law of micro-macrocosmic development is referred to many times in the complete works. It is expressed particularly vividly, because it is presented in diagrams and meditation, in the following notes:

Handwritten entry in a notebook from 1903 (archive number 427)

Stepping, you move through the power of thought on the floods of specialness and follow seven guiding forces under the truth: desire pulls you down, the guiding forces placing you in the power of disbelief; spirit pulls you up, raising the seven to the sounding sun.

1. In the special being, discover the law: for the law wove the first of the seven into the material.
2. In movement, discover life: for the second of the seven poured life into matter.
3. In desire, discover the person: for the person was imprinted by the third of the seven in the material.
4. In the thought, recognize yourself: for the I gave the fourth of the seven its self.
5. In your desire, discover renunciation: for through renunciation, the fifth of the seven sacrificed itself so that you may be yourself.
6. In your movement, discover blessed calm: for the sixth of the seven sacrificed blessed calm so that you may live moving as yourself.
7. In thy particularity discover thy eternal law: for as eternal law the seventh of the Seven has created thy self in particularity, and as eternal law will lead it out of particularity.

The power of regression was born in humanity when the Christ, the world spirit effecting the cosmic-human evolutionary-involutional process, historically appeared and through the great sacrifice at Golgotha became the leading spirit of the earth:

“... That man can develop back again to an awareness of his spiritual relationship [to the cosmos] is due to the Mystery of Golgotha. But that which one owes to the Mystery of Golgotha must be sought out of one's own free inner motivation. Christianity presupposes freedom.” (Dornach, February 11, 1920)

Now that this retrogression of consciousness has set in from our age, it is necessary that the Christian element of freedom should also be incorporated into the nature of the cult, into sacramentalism. This means that, increasingly, it is no longer the case that one person must make the sacrifice for all others, but that each person must experience, together with all others, becoming equal to the Christ, who descended to earth as a being of the sun (Dornach, December 23, 1922). For spiritual science, freedom and individualism in religion and in sacramentalism do not mean that every person should have their own religion. This would only lead to the complete fragmentation of humanity into separate individuals but that through the assimilation of spiritual-scientific knowledge, a time will come, “however far off it may be,” in which humanity will be increasingly seized by the realization of the inner world of truth. And through this, “in spite of all individuality, in spite of everyone finding the truth individually within themselves, there will be agreement”; while maintaining complete freedom and individuality, people will then join together in free connections (Berlin, June 1, 1908).

In this sense, it was repeatedly pointed out that what had previously been performed only on the church altar must take hold of the whole world, that all human activities should become an expression of the supersensible. Especially since the First World War, it has been emphasized more and more strongly how important it is for the whole of social life to find its way back into harmonious coexistence with the universe, since otherwise humanity is doomed to “develop more and more disharmony in social coexistence and to sow more and more war material across the world”. One will not come back to ascending cultural forces as long as one serves only human egoism, especially in science and technology, alongside a separate religion, as long as one does research and experiments at the laboratory and experimental table without the reverent awareness of the “great law of the world”. “The laboratory table must become an altar“ is a formula that one encounters again and again.¹¹

The fact that there is still a long way to go and that tolerance should therefore be exercised, both by those who have to continue to maintain the old forms and by those who should strive for the future, is clear from the following statements:

"Of course, just as it is true that a completely new era is dawning in relation to the spiritual life, it is also true that the path to the Christ, which was the right one for many centuries, will remain so for many centuries to come. Things are gradually merging. But what was right before will gradually change into something else as people mature for it.” (Karlsruhe, October 13, 1911)

"Just as the one who, because he believes that he has so deeply grasped the spirit of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ, within himself that he can immediately, one might say, ‘dialogue’ with this Christ, must look with understanding at those who need the positive statutes of a confession, who need the Christ-servant who again and again gives them consolation with the words: Your sins are forgiven. On the other hand, those who can see that there are people who are already dealing with themselves should be tolerant. This may all be an ideal in earthly existence, but at least the anthroposophist may look up to such an ideal.” (Norrköping, July 16, 1914)

But the importance of cults was not only emphasized for the individual, but also for the development of the whole of humanity and the Earth. In lectures given at the time when the religious renewal movement “The Christian Community” was founded and in which it was said that the mysteries are contained in the cults and that they will only reveal themselves in their full significance in the future , “the mysteries of the coming age,” it was explained that a time would come when the earth would no longer be; everything that today fills the material of the natural kingdoms and human bodies will have been atomized in the universe. All processes brought about by mechanical technology will also be a thing of the past. But through the fact that, through “right” acts of worship that arise out of a “right grasp of the spiritual world,” elemental spiritual beings that have to do with the further development of the earth can be called into these declining natural and cultural processes, the earth will arise anew out of its destruction (Dornach, September 29, 1922).

Another reason for the saying that the mysteries of the future lie in the cultic, which shines deeply into the overall development of humanity and the cosmos, arises from the spiritual-scientific research result that the divine-spiritual of the cosmos will reveal a different nature in the future than it has done so far through free humanity, which has become self-responsible out of I-consciousness: “Not the same entity that was once there as Cosmos will shine through humanity. In passing through humanity, the spiritual-divine will experience a being that it did not reveal before.“ ¹² For this new mode of revelation of the cosmic spiritual being will only be able to emerge in the future, since the essence of a genuine cult is that “it is the image of what is taking place in the spiritual world” (Dornach, June 27, 1924).

The prerequisite for all this is the spiritualization of thinking. Only on this basis will it be possible to gradually sacralize all life activities. Then, out of the knowledge of spiritual realities, the old ceremonies will also change, because where there are realities, symbols are no longer needed (Karlsruhe, October 13, 1911, and Workers' Lecture Dornach, September 11, 1923).

The change of ceremonies here refers to the Christian sacraments, which, in the traditional Christian view, contain the meaning of Christianity, but whose origin is to be found in the ancient mysteries. It was only in the 16th century, with the translation of the Bible as declared to be the only authentic one by the Council of Trent in 1546, the Vulgate, that the Latin “sacramentum” replaced the Greek “mysterion”. However, the term “sacrament” has been used in ecclesiastical language since the time of the church father Tertullian in the 2nd century. With regard to the number, meaning and effect, the view was, however, fluctuating until the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1439 set the number at seven (baptism, communion, penance, confirmation, marriage , ordination, extreme unction) and proclaimed as dogma that the sacraments are acts instituted by Christ, consisting of a visible element (materia) and ritual words (forma), through which the sanctifying grace is conferred.

If, on the other hand, the Protestant Church recognizes only two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, this, according to Rudolf Steiner's presentation in the lecture Stuttgart, October 2, 1921, is due to the fact that at the time of the Reformation there was already no sense of the inner numerical constitution of the world. For the concept of the seven sacraments originally arose from the ancient insight that the overall development of the human being is brought about by processes of evolution and involution. The seven sacraments were therefore intended to add the corresponding counter-values to the seven stages through which the human being passes in life, including the social, and in which he or she develops values that are partly evolutionary and partly involutionary. The seven stages in human life are: birth, strength (maturity), nourishment, procreation, recovery, speech, transformation. They are characterized as follows. The involution inherent in the birth forces is the dying process that begins with the birth process; it should be sanctified by the sacrament of baptism. The entire maturation process, including sexual maturation, should be sanctified by the sacrament of confirmation. The process referred to as “nourishment” refers to the embodiment of the spiritual-soul in the physical-bodily, that is to say, the right rhythm must be established between the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily so that the soul-spiritual does not sink down into the animalistic, but also does not lose itself in a spirituality foreign to the world. The involution inherent in this process of evolution should be hallowed by the sacrament of Holy Communion. Linked with this rhythmic process of vibration between the soul-spiritual and the physical-corporal is the possibility, through the faculty of memory, of being able to swing back again and again in time. For complete development, it is necessary to remember previous experiences on earth. The involution inherent in the memory capacity evolving from the human being should be sanctified by the sacrament of penance, which includes examination of conscience, repentance and the resolution to correct the mistakes made and to accept appropriate retribution imposed by oneself or by the priest, so that the process of remembrance is Christianized and at the same time elevated to the moral level. These four processes exhaust the evolutionary processes that have taken place since the birth of man. The act of remembering already represents a strong internalization; evolution is already approaching involution. A natural involutionary process is death. The corresponding sacrament is extreme unction. Just as the physical body was stimulated by the corresponding natural processes of life, so now the soul-spiritual life is to be stimulated by the sacrament of extreme unction, which in the old knowledge of nature was seen as a process of ensoulment. “Expressed in rhythm, at death the physical body is to disappear again, while the soul-spiritual life is to take form.” This is what is called “transubstantiation”.

Since the individual life of a human being comes to an end with death, the two remaining stages and sacraments relate to something that is no longer individual in nature. On the one hand, there is the interrelationship between the human being and the heavenly-spiritual, which unconsciously exists in every human being. If this were not the case, one could never find one's way back. But there is an involutionary process hidden deep within the human being, “even more hidden than that which takes place within the human being when he passes through death with his organism,” a process that does not come to consciousness at all in the course of the individual's life. The evolutionary process corresponding to this involutionary process would have been seen in the sacrament of priestly ordination, which corresponds to what is called “speech”.

The seventh, he said, was the image of the spiritual and mental in the physical and bodily, as expressed in man and woman: “One should say that a certain boundary marks the descent into earthly life. Woman does not reach this boundary completely, but man crosses it. This is actually the physical-bodily contrast.” Because both carry a certain imperfection within them, there is a natural state of tension between them. ‘If the sacramental evolutionary value is sought, we have it in the sacrament of marriage.’

This fundamental idea of Christian esotericism in relation to sacramentalism – that man enters life as an imperfect being, develops partly evolutive and partly involutive values, and that in order to make him a fully developing being, the countervalues are to be added to them in a sacramental way – has no longer been understood since one began – “of course, again rightly” – to discuss the sacramental. Today, however, we urgently need to arrive at involutional values.

Spiritual thinking as spiritual communion, as the beginning of a cosmic cult appropriate for humanity in the present day.

That all that is our relationship to the world first recognizes itself as cosmic cultus in the human being is the first beginning of what must happen if anthroposophy is to fulfill its mission in the world.¹³

When Rudolf Steiner speaks of the spiritualization of the forms of the sacraments, this is in turn conditioned by the law of development in that the sacrament of communion contains the involutionary counterpart to the incorporation of the soul and spirit into the physical body. Since the last stage of the process of incarnation was the binding of thinking to the physical brain, the reverse development, the re-spiritualization, must also begin with this physical thinking, this intellectuality.

Already in his first book publication, in the writing “Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung” (1886), he started at this point by explained how pure, that is, unadulterated thinking unites with world spirituality. This is also referred to a year later with the sacramental term “communion”, when it is stated:

"He who grants thought its ability to perceive beyond the sense perception must also, of necessity, grant it objects that lie beyond mere sensory reality. But the objects of thought are those. By seizing the idea, thought fuses with the source of the world's existence; that which operates externally enters into the mind of man; he becomes one with objective reality at its highest potency. The realization of the idea in reality is man's true communion. Thinking has the same significance for ideas as the eye has for light and the ear for sound. It is an organ of perception.“ ¹⁴

Since the content of anthroposophy is nothing other than what can be researched in this way from the world of ideal, spiritual reality and what is, by its very nature, of a moral and religious character, it goes without saying that even in its early days was proclaimed that through their teachings it should be effected to sanctify and sacralize all of life, even into its most mundane activities, and that therein even lies one of the deeper reasons for their appearance (Berlin, July 8, 1904). It also becomes clear why it is said in the lectures on 'The Spiritual Communion of Humanity', which are so important for the context under consideration here, that the spiritual communion to be experienced in spiritual thinking is the 'first beginning' of what must happen if anthroposophy is to fulfil 'its mission in the world' (Dornach, December 31, 1922).

How this can become a reality through the spiritual communion performed in the symbol of the Lord's Supper is characterized in the lecture Kassel, 7 July 1909: Humanity is only at the beginning of Christian development. Its future lies in the fact that the earth is recognized as the body of Christ. For through the Mystery of Golgotha, a new center of light was created in the Earth; it was filled with new life down to its atoms. That is why Christ, at the Last Supper, when He broke the bread that comes from the grain of the Earth, could say, “This is my body,” and by giving the juice of the vine, which comes from the sap of plants, He could say, “This is my blood!” The literal translation continues: “Because he has become the soul of the earth, he was able to say to that which is solid: This is my flesh - and to the sap: This is my blood! Just as you say of your flesh: This is my flesh - and of your blood: This is my blood! And those people who are able to grasp the true meaning of these words of Christ, they visualize and attract the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine, and the Christ-Spirit within them. And they unite with the Christ-Spirit. Thus the symbol of the Lord's Supper becomes a reality.

However, it continues: “Without the thought of the Christ in the human heart, no power of attraction can be developed to the Christ-Spirit at the Lord's Supper. But through this form of thought such attraction is developed. And so for all those who need the outer symbol to perform a spiritual act, namely the union with Christ, Holy Communion will be the way, the way to the point where their inner strength is so strong, where they are so filled with Christ that they can unite with Christ without the outer physical mediation. The preliminary school for mystical union with Christ is the sacrament – the preliminary school. We must understand these things in this way. And just as everything develops from the physical to the spiritual under the Christian influence, so under the influence of Christ, those things that were there first as a bridge must first develop: the sacrament must develop from the physical to the spiritual in order to lead to real union with Christ. One can only speak of these things in the most general terms, for only when they are taken up in their full sacred dignity will they be understood in the right sense."

In the same sense, it is said in the lecture Karlsruhe, October 13, 1911, that when man, through becoming acquainted with the knowledge of the higher worlds, through concentration and meditation exercises in scinem, is able to penetrate completely with the element of spirit, the meditative thoughts living in him 'will be exactly the same, only from within, as the sign of the Lord's Supper - the consecrated bread - was from without'. In his memoir, 'My Life-long Encounter with Rudolf Steiner', Friedrich Rittelmeyer reports that when he asked, 'Is it not also possible to receive the body and blood of Christ without bread and wine, just in meditation?' he received the answer, 'That is possible. From the back of the tongue, it is the same.

In the lecture Dornach, December 31, 1922, it is indicated that spiritual knowledge can be further deepened by uniting with the world spirit, with the words that spiritual knowledge is “the beginning of a cosmic cultus appropriate for humanity today,” which “can then grow.” In other contexts, it is pointed out that this requires a certain sacrifice, through which one can go beyond the general experience of spiritual communion to truly concrete cosmic knowledge. What has to be sacrificed in this process is referred to by the technical term “sacrifice of the intellect”. This is not to be understood as renouncing thinking as such, but rather as renouncing egoism, the will of one's own mind in thinking, which consists in arbitrarily connecting thoughts. Two lectures from 1904 and two lectures from 1923 and 1924 contain explanations of this.

The two lectures from 1904 have only survived in an inadequate transcript and therefore remain unpublished to this day. Therefore, the relevant text is quoted here verbatim. The lecture of June 1, 1904 states that certain prerequisites are needed to be able to read the Akasha Chronicle, to explore cosmic evolution, one of which consists in

“that one makes one's own thoughts available to that principle, that power and those entities which, in the theosophical language, we call the Masters.”¹⁶ Ultimately, the Master must give us the necessary instructions to be able to read the Akashic Records. It is written in symbols and signs, not in words of any language that exists or has existed. As long as one only uses the power that man habitually uses when thinking – and every man, who has not expressly learned to do so, uses this power – one cannot read in the Akasha Chronicle.

If you ask yourself, “Who is thinking?” you will have to say to yourself, “I am thinking.” You connect object and predicate when you form a sentence. As long as it is you yourself who connects the individual concepts, you are not able to read in the Akasha Chronicle. You are unable to read because you connect your thoughts with your own ego. But you have to eliminate your ego. You must renounce all your own sense. You must merely present the ideas in order to have the connection of the individual ideas established by forces outside of you, by the spirit.

So to read in the Akasha Chronicle, it is necessary to renounce not thinking, but to renounce connecting the individual thoughts on your own initiative. Then the Master can come and teach you to let the spirit from outside join your thoughts into what the universal world spirit is able to show you about what has taken place in history. Then you no longer judge the facts, but the universal world spirit itself speaks to you. And you provide it with your thought material.

Now I must say something that may perhaps give rise to some prejudice. I must say what is necessary today in preparation for eliminating the ego in order to be able to read in the Akasha Chronicle. You know how it is today a thing held in contempt, what the monks in the Middle Ages cultivated. They cultivated the “sacrifice of the intellect.” The monk did not think as today's researcher thinks. The monk had a certain sacred science, sacred theology. One did not have to decide on the content. Therefore, it was said that in the Middle Ages the theologian had to use his reason to explain and defend the given revelations.¹⁷ That was, however one may judge it today, a strict schooling in the sacrifice of the intellect to a given content. Whether this is something admirable or reprehensible in modern terms is not our concern.

This sacrifice of the intellect, which the medieval monk made, led to the elimination of judgment based on the personal ego; it led him to learn how to place the intellect at the service of something higher. In the process of reincarnation, the fruits of that sacrifice come to fruition and make him a genius of insight. When higher insight comes, he can apply his abilities to the facts that can be read in the Akashic Records.” (Berlin, June 1, 1904)

In the lecture held a few weeks later, it says:

”... The further one advances on the path of knowledge, the more one must cultivate devotion; one becomes ever more and more devoted. From this devotion flows the strength for the highest realizations. He who can refrain from connecting his thoughts attains to the reading of the writing in the Akasha-Chronicle. But one thing is necessary: the personal ego must be eliminated to such an extent that it makes no claim to connecting the thoughts itself.

It is not at all easy to understand this, because man claims the right to connect the predicate with the subject. But as long as he does this, it is impossible for him to really study occult history. When he allows thoughts to arise in selflessness, but also in awareness and clarity, an event occurs which, from a certain point of view, every occultist knows, namely the event that the ideas, the thoughts, which he previously formed into sentences and insights from his personal point of view, are now formed by the spiritual world itself, so that it is not he who judges, but is judged in him. It is then the case that he has sacrificed himself so that a higher self speaks spiritually through his ideas. This is - understood occultly - what was called in the Middle Ages the “sacrifice of the intellect”. It means giving up my own opinion, my own conviction. As long as I myself associate my thoughts, and do not make my thoughts available to higher powers, which then, as it were, write on the tablet of the intellect, I cannot study occult history.” (Berlin, July 25, 1904)

In the two lectures Penmaenmawr, August 31, 1923, and Prague, April 5, 1924, the term “victim of the intellect” occurs again, in connection with the research result of a lost epic-dramatic poetry from the first four Christian centuries. This poetry was created by the mystery teachers of that time because they foresaw that in the future people would develop their intellect more and more, which would indeed bring them freedom but also take away their clairvoyance, a grave crisis must overtake them because they will no longer be able to comprehend the regions from which the actual deeper foundations of the development of the earth and of humanity and the cosmic significance of Christianity can be understood. This foresight had caused the mystery teachers great concern as to whether humanity would really be able to mature for that which came into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha. And so they clothed the teaching that the sacrifice of the intellect is needed to understand the Christ in his cosmic significance cosmic significance in a “mystery drama”.¹⁸ In this lost epic drama, In a moving way, it is said to have depicted how a young hero acquired the clairvoyance for the cosmic significance of Christianity through his willingness to make the sacrifice of the intellect. And with this poetry - it is said to have been the greatest that the New Testament produced - those mystery teachers wanted to put before humanity, like a kind of testament, the challenge to make the “Sacrificium intellectus”. For if the connection with that which has entered into humanity through the mystery of Golgotha is to be found, then this Sacrificium should basically be practiced by all who strive for spiritual life, for erudition: “Every man who is taught and wants to become wise should have a cultic attitude, an attitude of sacrifice.” (Penmaenmawr, August 31, 1923, and Prague, April 5, 1924). For “sacrifice is the law of the spiritual world” (Berlin, February 16, 1905); “Sacrifice must be, without sacrifice there is no becoming, no progress,” it says in notes from an instruction session in Basel on June 1, 1914.

Artistically formulated, the “sacrifice of the intellect” is found in the third mystery drama, “The Guardian of the Threshold”. In a moment of spiritual drama, the spiritual student Maria, supported by her spiritual teacher Benediktus, who characteristically appears in this picture, set in the spiritual realm, makes a vow before Lucifer, the representative of the egoistic forces, to always keep her love for self away from all knowledge in the future:

Never again will I
let myself be found by that bliss
Which people feel when thoughts mature.
I will prepare my heart for the service of sacrifice,
That my spirit may always think, and, thinking,
to offer the fruits of knowledge to the gods.
Then knowledge becomes my sacred duty.

From the lectures from 1904, it is clear that the sacrifice that the spiritual disciple Maria vows to make is equivalent to what is characterized there as the “sacrifice of the intellect”.

In addition to the references to the spiritualization of the sacrament of communion in spiritualized thinking, there are also references to the spiritualization of the sacrament of baptism. In contrast to spiritual communion as an individual event within the human being, this points to the spiritualization of external work. The beginnings of this could already be made today in education and teaching, if each human child is seen from the point of view that it brings the power of the Christ-spirit into the world in its own personal way.¹⁹ In another context, we find the remark: “That which was formerly performed in the mysteries as the symbolum of the sacrament of baptism should today be introduced into external events, into external deeds. Spiritualization of human work, sacralization in external action, that is the true baptism.^{20In notes from an esoteric lecture, Hamburg, November 28, 1910.}

The Forms of Worship Created for Various Communities

Cult unites the people who come together in it.²¹

The question of how ritual can build community was discussed in detail in 1923, when a fundamental reorganization of the Anthroposophical Society had become necessary due to various subsidiary movements that had emerged since the end of the First World War and the fire at the Goetheanum. The problem of “community building” had become particularly pressing at that time, on the one hand due to the youth streaming into the Society, most of whom came from the youth movement (the “Wandervogel” movement) that was struggling with the ideal of community at the time, and on the other hand due to the religious renewal movement “The Community of Christ”, which was founded in the fall of 1922, shortly before the building burnt down. This movement had formed after young theologians, mostly still students, approached Rudolf Steiner around 1920/21 with the question of whether he could advise and help them in their need for a spiritual renewal of the religious profession. His answer was that he himself had spiritual science to offer and could not in any way found a religion; however, if they, together with a group of 30 to 40 like-minded people, carried out their plans, it would mean something very great for humanity.²² For he was convinced that for those people who want to seek the path to the spiritual through religious practice, the renewal of Christian religious life is a deep necessity. And so he provided the most energetic support for this young movement, admittedly not as its founder, but, as he said, as a “private individual”. He gave lectures on the foundations of “what a future theology needs” and, above all, he gave “a valid and spiritually powerful, spiritually fulfilling cultus”, because a recovery of religious life must come about through healthy community building, which in turn is only possible through a cultus (Dornach, December 31, 1922, and March 3, 1923).

After the establishment of the “Christian Community” in the Anthroposophical Society had created a certain uncertainty regarding the relationship between the two movements, he felt compelled to address the issue of community building and worship. Starting from the question of whether the community formed by the “Christian Community” is the only one possible in the present, or whether another possibility could be found within the Anthroposophical Society, he presented the two poles of community formation made possible by worship. While the well-known pole in religious worship lies in the fact that through word and action, entities of the supersensible worlds are brought down to the physical plane, the other pole is a “reverse” cultus, which can arise when one rises up to the supersensible worlds in anthroposophical working groups through a common effort of knowledge. When a group of people come together to experience what can be revealed from the supersensible world through anthroposophy, “then this experience in a group of people is something different from the lonely experience”. If this is experienced in the right spirit, it means a process of awakening in the other person's soul and a rising to spiritual community: “If this consciousness is present and such groups arise in the Anthroposophical Society, then in this, if I may may say, at the other pole of the cultus, there is something community-building in the most eminent sense present” and from this, this ‘specifically anthroposophical community-building’ could arise (Dornach, March 3, 1923).

This form of cultic experience, which is possible without external ceremony, obviously lies in the line of the cosmic cult that can be experienced through spiritual knowledge. Nevertheless, if he had been able to work for a longer period of time, Rudolf Steiner would also have created a cult that could be performed externally, so to speak, as an effective aid on the difficult path to the cosmic cult to be sought in the purely spiritual. For the experience of cosmic cult as a spiritual-mystical union of the human spirit with world spirituality should always be striven for, but, at least today, it can certainly only rarely be truly experienced. Rudolf Steiner once hinted at this when he said: “I recall that a great mystic of the Alexandrian school confessed in his old age that he had only experienced that great moment a few times in his life, when the soul feels ripe to immerse itself so that the spirit of the infinite awakens and that mystical moment occurs when the God in the breast is experienced by the human being himself. These are moments at midday, when the sun of life is at its highest, when something like this can be experienced, and for those who always want to be ready with their abstract ideas, who say: once you have the right thoughts, they must lead you to the highest - for them such midday hours of life, which must be seen as a grace of earthly life, are not time when they would willingly travel. ²⁴ For such abstract minds, the moment must always be there to solve the riddles of the world. (Heidelberg, January 21, 1909).

That Rudolf Steiner considered the possibility of creating a new form of anthroposophical worship in 1923, the year of the reorganization of the Anthroposophical Society, is clear from two of his statements in the spring of 1923. One of these was made in the context of describing the “reverse” cult as a specifically anthroposophical form of community building. In this context, he added the following remark to the statement that many people come to the Anthroposophical Society and not only seek anthroposophical knowledge in abstracto, but also, out of the urge of our consciousness soul age, corresponding community formations: “One could now say: the Anthroposophical Society could also cultivate a cult. Of course it could; but that belongs to a different sphere now” (Dornach, March 3, 1923). The other statement was the answer to a question posed in a personal conversation about a cult for the anthroposophical movement. The questioner, Rene Maikowski, recorded this conversation as follows and made it available for reproduction:

However, this new form of the anthroposophical cult of knowledge was never realized. After Steiner's death, Marie Steiner tried to create a kind of substitute by giving the celebrations held at the Goetheanum, especially the annual festivals, an artistic-cultic character.

In retrospect, it is clear that the needs of various walks of life, as expressed to Rudolf Steiner, have given rise to a wealth of ritual texts.

The first to be written were the texts for the rituals of the interreligious cult of knowledge, as it had been practised within the Esoteric School from 1906 until the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914.

Shortly before or immediately after the end of the war (end of 1918), he had been asked to redesign church rituals. This request came from a Swiss anthroposophical friend, Hugo Schuster, who had been so deeply moved by Rudolf Steiner's descriptions of Christ that it had led him to become a priest. And after he had been ordained within the Old Catholic Church in the summer of 1918 – in which the rituals were already being read in German – he received a ritual for burials and, in the spring of 1919, a new translation of the “Mass”.²⁵

Other friends of anthroposophy who were or had been priests also received ritual texts upon request. Pastor Wilhelm Ruhtenberg, who had become a teacher at the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart, founded in 1919, received a baptismal and a marriage ritual in 1921. The following account of how this came about was handed down:

"As early as 1921, Pastor Ruhtenberg was often asked by anthroposophical friends to marry them and baptize their children. He then asked Rudolf Steiner for a baptismal ritual. After he had received it, he no longer felt that the black robe with the white bib was appropriate and asked for a new robe. Rudolf Steiner drew what he wanted and indicated the colors. According to Ruhtenberg's report, the marriage ritual was as follows: “Once a bridegroom came to me and said that Dr. Steiner, whom he had asked to perform the wedding, had sent him to me. I didn't want to let the man go away empty-handed, so I married him. But after that I went to Dr. Steiner and said to him: “Doctor, if you send me someone to marry, then please give me a ritual for it.” A few weeks later, as I was sitting with my class in the eurythmy lesson, the door opened; Dr. Steiner came up to me, handed me some sheets of paper and said: “Here is the marriage ritual for you.” I sat down immediately to immerse myself in the ritual with burning curiosity. After the lesson, in the office, I asked about the garment for this act. I still had the sketch of the baptismal garment with me, and Dr. Steiner wrote the colors for the marriage ceremony next to it; the shape of the garment remained the same.” ²⁶

Before that, another teacher, Johannes Geyer, who had also been a pastor, had received a baptismal ritual for the baptism of a child for whom he had been asked by an anthroposophical friend.

Rituals were also designed for the free Christian religious education at the Waldorf School after Rudolf Steiner was asked whether a religious celebration could be arranged for the students of the free religious education on Sundays. The answer was that this would have to be a cult. So the first ritual, the “Sunday Act,” was created before New Year's Day 1920. In response to further questions, he developed the three other rituals: the “Christmas Ritual” during the Christmas season of 1920; the “Youth Ritual” in 1921, standing for church confirmation; and the “Sacrifice Ritual” in spring 1923 for the two upper classes, standing for the sacrifice of the Mass.

The “sacrifice ceremony” came about after Rudolf Steiner was told in a meeting with the religion teachers on December 9, 1922 that a student in the upper classes had asked if they could receive a Sunday act that would take them further than the youth celebration. He had taken this suggestion particularly thoughtfully and described it as having far-reaching significance; he wanted to consider it further. He did not want to include a mass in the activities associated with free religious education, but “something similar to a mass” could be done. A few months later, in March 1923, the text of the ceremony was handed over and on Palm Sunday, March 25, 1923, the “sacrificial ceremony” could be held for the first time for the teachers and the students of the eleventh grade.²⁷

However, he never returned to the request expressed at the teachers' conference on November 16, 1921 for a special Sunday event just for the teachers.

When the work of the “Christian Community”, founded in the fall of 1922, raised the question of whether free religious education and the “acts” were still justified, Rudolf Steiner spoke unequivocally to the effect that both types of religious education, the free Christian and the “Christian Community”, had their own character, their own goals and full justification for the future. If some parents wished their children to participate in both types of instruction, he also allowed this, provided it did not become a health burden. (At that time, religious education for the Christian Community was not taught in schools, but in their own rooms). The unchanging basic attitude of the greatest possible tolerance in religious matters is also evident from the way he characterized the difference in the objectives of the two types of religious education: “The inner meaning of our youth celebration is that the human being is placed in humanity in a very general way, not in a particular religious community; but the ‘Christengemeinschaft’ places him in a particular religious community.” But - and he emphasized this several times - “there can't really be a discrepancy between the two in terms of content”.²⁸ And when the “Christian Community”, to which the “Youth Celebration” ritual had also been made available for their area of responsibility (confirmation), asked him whether this ritual might not require some changes for their sacramental context he developed in a “spirited” way that it was precisely “instructive” to know that the same ritual was used “as the expression of different life contexts”.²⁹

He expressed similar views regarding the “sacrifice ceremony”. Maria Lehrs-Röschl reports, as quoted above, how, after the first performance of this act, teacher colleagues requested that the ceremony be repeated for the teachers alone. Since the people performing the act were inclined to the opinion that the act should only take place for students with the participation of teachers and parents, she was asked to ask Rudolf Steiner about it: “I asked him in a way that already showed that I thought it was unacceptable to consider the sacrifice ceremony differently than for students. But Rudolf Steiner looked at me with wide-open eyes (I knew this gesture as his expression of surprised, slightly disapproving astonishment) and said: “Why not? This act can be performed anywhere there are people who desire it!”

For the purposes of the “Christian Community”, the missing rituals were gradually created, in addition to the completely redesigned “Human Consecration” Mass and the rituals handed over to it that had been created earlier. The last ritual to be created was that for the appointment of the Chief Executive. It was created shortly before Rudolf Steiner's death.

The abundance of rituals that came into being in this way is all the more astonishing given that Rudolf Steiner himself once said that it is difficult to design a ritual: “You can see from the fact that for a long time everything ritual-like has been limited to taking over the traditional that it is difficult to design a ritual. ... All cultic forms that exist today are actually very old, only slightly transformed in one way or another.” (Stuttgart, June 14, 1921).

It follows that anyone who undertakes to shape cults, if they are to become a true reflection of processes in the spiritual world, must have a sovereign relationship with the spiritual world. However, they must also have artistic creativity at their disposal. For cult forms as reflections of spiritual processes are by no means to be equated with photographs, but are independent creations based on physical means. A supplementary explanation for this seems to be given in the following statement: “As man rises to the next level of existence, images arise for him, but we no longer apply them in the same way as our thoughts, so that we ask: how do these images correspond to reality? but things show themselves in images consisting of colors and shapes; and through imagination, man himself must unravel the entities that show themselves to him in such symbolic form.” (Berlin, October 26, 1908). This is illustrated in concrete terms by the example of the cult of the dead, and the comment concludes: “It could be even more complicated, but in its simplicity, as it is now, what is to be conquered through it can already be conquered for humanity.” (Dornach, June 27, 1924). The term “conquer” again suggests how difficult it must be to shape ritual.

He once justified simplicity – a striking feature of all his rituals – by saying that a complicated cult would not satisfy people today and that it would therefore have to be made “extremely simple” (Stuttgart, June 14, 1921). But it is precisely this simplicity that in turn testifies to a strong artistic ability to create. Now art and cultus are also closely related in their origin, since they both originated in the same spiritual region: “With the evolution of humanity, the rite, a living image of the spiritual world, develops into the spheres of artistic production. For art likewise emerges from the astral world - and the rite becomes beauty.” (Paris, June 6, 1906). An incident related by Emil Bock is of interest in this context: “When I received the Children's Burial Ritual from him in the spring of 1923, he himself beamed with delight at this special kind of creativity, which was at the same time the highest art of receiving. On that day, during a conference, he approached me twice with the words, “Isn't the text beautiful!” ²⁹

Another characteristic arises from the esoteric principle of continuity, one of his most important leitmotifs:

“The future rests on the past / the past endures the future / to the vigorous presence”.³⁰

Wherever possible, he linked the newly explored to the traditional old for the sake of the continuous progress of development. This was also the case with his ritual designs. The necessity of taking into account the stream of the past is formulated as follows: “In order to maintain the continuity of human development, it is still necessary today to take up ritual and symbolism, as it were” (Dornach, December 20, 1918). In this, something is something is preserved that can and will be resurrected once we have found the way to bring the power that emanates from the Mystery of Golgotha into all human activity (Dornach, September 29, 1922). And the words point to the future trend that is only now beginning to reveal itself in the present: “In our time it is only possible to arrive at symbols if one delves lovingly into the secrets of the world; and only out of anthroposophy can a cult or a symbolism arise today.” (Stuttgart, June 14, 1921). In the same sense, it is said in a lecture on various cults that today, in a cult, what can be perceived through modern spiritual scientific schooling in the laws of world spirituality must be brought in, and that one can “at most stand at the beginning again” with the construction of such a cult (Dornach, September 11, 1923, lecture for the workers on the Goetheanumbau).

The connection between elements of the past and the future in the formation of the “Human Consecration Ritual” for the “Christian Community” was once pointed out as follows: “This cult takes full account of the historical development of humanity, and therefore carries in many its details and also in much of what occurs in its totality, a continuation of the historical; but it also bears everywhere the impact of that which can only now reveal itself to the supersensible consciousness from the spiritual world. (Dornach, March 3, 1923).³² He expressed himself similarly regarding the translation of the mass text for Pastor Schuster, who had had asked him to “bring some of the viable Catholic rituals not in the strange translation in which one often enjoys it today, but to bring it into a form that was actually originally in it”; and then, although it was only a translation, it actually became “something new” from it. In the same context, he also said of the funeral ritual: “Of course one had to tie in with the usual funeral rituals. But by not translating the usual ritual lexicographically, but rather correctly, something different emerged.” (Stuttgart, June 14, 1921)

The following saying also points to a characteristic of rituals: “Only one cult at a time can be legitimately brought down from the spiritual world.” ³³ The question of how the various cult forms correspond to this one possible cult can be answered to the effect that the cults given for different walks of life – the cult of knowledge of the esoteric school, acts for the free religious education of the Waldorf school, ecclesiastical cult for the “Christian Community” – must be essentially the same in the depths with this “one” cult for the various walks of life. This seems to be confirmed by another statement handed down by Emil Bock, according to which the “sacrifice ceremony” was an attempt to give the “Act of Consecration of Man” of the “Christian Community” something corresponding to it, insofar as it could be performed by lay people, that is, by those not ordained as priests. Maria Lehrs-Röschl comments on this: “What arose again and again in the development of Christianity as a longing and striving for lay priesthood - albeit also repeatedly persecuted and ultimately made to disappear - has here [with the sacrifice celebration] experienced a new germination through Rudolf Steiner.” From all this it can be seen that for Rudolf Steiner there was no contradiction between esoteric cult of knowledge, free religious cult and church cult. On the one hand, because, as everywhere, the freedom of the individual was his highest commandment in religious matters and only that which makes “absolute religious freedom” possible (Zurich, October 9, 1918) is considered true Christianity. On the other hand, because only by extending the cultic into all branches of life can the path to the high ideal of sacralizing the whole of life be followed. The necessary prerequisite for this, however, is that spiritual thoughts and feelings “equally permeate and spiritualize the inner being with just as much consecration as in the best sense of inner Christian development, the sacrament spiritualizes and Christifies the human soul.” If this becomes possible, and according to Rudolf Steiner it will become possible, then we will have advanced another step in our development and “real proof will be provided” that Christianity is greater than its outer form (Karlsruhe, October 13, 1911).

• 1. See “Anthroposophical ic Leading Thoughts», GA 26
• 2. Ilkley, August 5, 1923
• 3. “The world of ideas is the source and principle of all being,” beginning of “Credo. The Individual and the Universe», printed in «Words of Truth», CW 40.
• 4. Berlin, 5 March 1922
• 5. Dornach, September 26, 1920
• 6. Autoreferat der Ansprache vom 26. September 1920 zur Eröffnung des ersten Hochschulkurses am Goetheanum, geschrieben für die «Waldorf-Nachrichten», IH. Vol. March 1921.
• 7. In a draft for an article about the burnt-down Goetheanum.
• 8. This was already one of the goals of the Theosophical Society. (Point 2 of the three principles reads: “to lead man to a higher knowledge by research into the kernel of truth of religions, sciences and world-views of all times and peoples.”)
• 9. Right from the start, the statutes of the Theosophical and then also of the Anthroposophical Society state that membership is not tied to a religious confession.
• 9. Cologne, December 27, 1907
• 10. Dornach, November 27, 1916
• 11. Heidenheim, April 29, 1918. See also ”The Spiritual Leadership of the Human Being and Mankind” (1911) GA 15; Dornach, November 27, 1916; Zurich, October 9, 1918; Dornach, December 30, 1922.
• 12. See ‘Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts’ (essay ”The Future of Humanity and the Activity of Michael), GA 26.
• 13. Dornach, December 31, 1922
• 14. See ‘Goethes naturwissenschaftliche Schriften’, edited and commented by Rudolf Steiner, preface to volume II, S.IV (1887), GA 1.
• 16. About the Masters, see the volume ” History and the Content of the First Section of the Esoteric School 1904 to 1914», GA 264.
• 17. On the two types of truth - the truths of knowledge and the truths of revelation - in modern spiritual science, see the lecture Liestal, October 16, 1 916 in “Philosophy and Anthroposophy”, GA 35, as well as the study by Hans Erhard Lauer “Erkenntnis und Offenbarung in der Anthroposophie”, Basel 1958.
• 18. The term “mystery drama” was noted by Rudolf Steiner in his notebook for the lecture Prague, April 5, 1924. Notebook archive number 336.
• 19. Dornach, November 27, 1916.
• 21. Dornach, 3 March 1923.
• 22. Emil Bock in «Wir erlebten Rudolf Steiner. Erinnerungen seiner Schüler», herausgegeben von M.]. Krück von Porturzyn, 1. Auflage Stuttgart 1956.
• 24. Refers to a saying of the will-o'-the-wisps in Goethe's “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,” which was the subject of this lecture.
• 25. Schuster, Hugo (1876-1925)
  Swiss. As a young merchant in St. Gallen in 1903/04, he took an active part in the development of anthroposophical work in Switzerland, e.g. in the founding of branches in St. Gallen, Bern and Basel. He felt drawn to the priesthood by Rudolf Steiner's descriptions of Christ. He was ordained as a priest of the Old Catholic Church in 1918 and took up his first post in Basel. At the beginning of 1919, he received the burial ritual from Rudolf Steiner. Although Rudolf Steiner had often spoken words of remembrance at the funerals of members of the Anthroposophical Society, he had never performed a ritual, because, as Marie Steiner once put it, he wanted to practice the profession of priest no more than he wanted to practice that of a doctor. But when a member of the Society took on the role of a priest, a collaboration arose. On the occasion of such a death, Pastor Schuster performed the funeral ritual given by Rudolf Steiner for the first time on January 14, 1919 in Arlesheim, and Rudolf Steiner spoke the words of remembrance afterwards. From a handwritten telegram transcript of Rudolf Steiner in the archive of the Rudolf Steiner estate administration, it can be seen that when a member died in May 1920, he asked Pastor Schuster himself if he could perform the funeral ceremony. There is also evidence of such a jointly conducted ceremony in October 1920. According to a letter written by Marie Steiner, Rudolf Steiner spoke at the funerals and cremations of members “when the relatives asked him to. In the beginning, there were only a few isolated cases. Since they gradually became more numerous and the cult was given to the priests who had turned to him (the Christian Community), he wished the matter to be handled in this way, since he did not want to practice the profession of a priest any more than he did that of a doctor.” Since Schuster had to give up his job as a result of illness as early as 1921, the funeral ritual passed to the Christian Community. Rudolf Steiner had conferred the ritual of the Mass upon him in 1919. On April 20, 1919, immediately before leaving for Stuttgart, where the next day a meeting of the signatories of the Appeal to the German People and the Cultural World marked the beginning of the people's movement for a threefold social organism, Rudolf Steiner sent Schuster the first parts - the gospel and offertory of the mass. The accompanying letter reads: “Dornach, April 20, 1919. My dear Reverend Schuster! Please find enclosed everything from the Mass that is ready to be handed over. But I also want to take the matter with me on the journey, and it is my opinion that now that my book (“The Key Points of the Social Question...”) is finished, everything will soon be in your hands. Please do not be angry that you are receiving so little for the time being; the matter is progressing. Sincerely, Rudolf Steiner.” The other parts followed a little later. The exact date is not known.
• 26. From the biographical sketch “Wilhelm Ruhtenberg” in “Der Lehrerkreis um Rudolf Steiner in der ersten Waldorfschule”, Stuttgart 1977, p. 210f.
• 27. Maria Lehrs-Röschl in “On religious education. Rudolf Steiner's words for Waldorf teachers, Stuttgart 1985.
• 28. See “Conferences with the teachers of the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart 1919 to 1924”, Volume 1 (Introduction by Erich Gabert), GA 300, 5. 41.
• 29. In response to the question that was asked again later, he then made the desired changes. Emil Bock handed them down to the priests of the “Christian Community.
• 29. Emil Bock in “We experienced Rudolf Steiner. Memories of his students”, edited by M.J.Krück von Porturzyn, 1st edition Stuttgart 1956.
• 30. From “Twelve Moods” in “Truth Sayings”, GA 40.
• 32. This reference to historical development obviously refers to the four parts of the Christian mass sacrifice - gospel, sacrifice, consecration, communion - which “represent the path of the initiate from the old pagan mysteries” (Dornach, January 11, 1919; Munich, November 4, 1906).
• 33. Carl Unger, “On the Question of the Relationship between the Christian Community and the Anthroposophical Society” in “Schriften II”, Stuttgart 1964.

Allow me today to take up some of the material that I could only hint at yesterday and which will then lead us to our reflection today. Yesterday I had to take up a sentence that emerged from the worldview of the 19th century, insofar as it prevailed in Central Europe, to the sentence that the tongue draws the word, that is, the power to speak, from the teeth just as it draws in air from the environment. And I drew your attention to how the 19th-century scholar has only to add to this sentence that he can laugh at it. But I have also characterized the distance that lies between the time in which such an instinctive view as the one quoted yesterday falls, and the age in which this philistine-ironic criticism then asserted itself, the age that begins with the first third of the 15th century. That saying falls into the previous age and is, for that age, in a certain way extraordinarily characteristic, for the reasons that I gave you yesterday.

But it must also be felt as characteristic in terms of its content. For I explained to you yesterday how, in order to understand the ability to speak and language in general, one must first familiarize oneself with what spiritual science has to say in the sense of what I have explained in my small writing “The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science”. There I have shown what significant process takes place at the change of teeth, how that which later still fulfils the human being as a rhythmic human being and a human being with limb metabolism, but which had previously fulfilled him completely, withdraws from the nerve-sense organization and therefore brings about precisely this process, which is formulated there in my writing “The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science” as the birth of the etheric body. I then showed you how, in a similar way, we must grasp the process that occurs around the fourteenth or fifteenth year, namely sexual maturation, and I explained how what is involved here can be expressed in the formula: birth of the astral body. But I have said that the events that occur in this way in the life of a human being at any stage of life also take place in metamorphosis at other times — but then in metamorphosis — and that what takes place externally between the human being and the external world at the time of sexual maturity must be sought internally as a process that occurs between the soul and spirit and the physical body within the human being as the process that is essentially the physiological correlate of the child learning to speak, and that we must therefore also seek the clues to a truly rational linguistics by starting from a penetrating intuitive knowledge of this process.

I then said that through the establishment and development of abstract logic and abstract logical thinking, the sphere of experience in which what takes place between the spiritual-mental and the physical-corporeal , is, as it were, displaced, pushed down into the subconscious, and that precisely by leading consciousness into abstraction, Aristotle has cut off the possibility of looking towards the prenatal. For if one had had a vivid picture of the workings of the astral in sexual maturation and in speech, as one instinctively could in early antiquity, as we must now strive to achieve again, then one could also have gradually gained a visual understanding of what the connection is between the I itself and the whole physical-etheric-astral human being. That is to say, one could have advanced in this field through the knowledge of learning to speak to the knowledge of the integration of the human spiritual-soul I into its bodily-physical. And Aristotle established his dogma precisely for the reason that with every single human being born here, the soul-spiritual also comes into being. With that, he removed from the world of knowledge the concept of the pre-existing human soul.

Only the concept of this pre-existing human soul provides real knowledge of the eternity of the human soul. This knowledge is not provided by any kind of philosophical speculation, but solely and exclusively by an intuitive judgment in the direction that I have just indicated. This dogma of the non-existence of pre-existence was then adopted into the church doctrine of Christianity. And it must be emphasized that the denial of pre-existence, in that it was then confirmed by councils, is not Christian in the true sense of the word, but is Aristotelian, and with the penetration of Aristotelianism into Christian doctrine, it became a Christian dogma. The moment that Christianity is able to free itself from this element of Aristotelianism, the way will also be clear for an acknowledgment of pre-existence.

It must be said that this pre-existence, which was not doubted by Western Christian doctrine until Origen, disappeared from Western Christian doctrine as a result of the state decree of Justinian, who helped to have Origen condemned as a heretic. That is why the followers of this non-Christian Christian doctrine of the West are so uncomfortable when someone points out the historical facts in the first centuries of Christianity. They then conjure up all the untruths they can muster about the connections between anthroposophy and gnosis and so on.

Now, I cannot go into these things in more detail here. But what I want to say is this: if one bases the spiritual and soul life in man solely on what lives for the contemplation of consciousness since birth, then one gradually comes to what makes the teaching of immortality a mere article of faith.

It can be said that what was prenatal, what was pre-existent in man, comes through the process of birth into a completely unconscious state. This can only be looked at again when one rises up to imagination and inspiration. But at the other pole of the human being, it appears in his will and emotional nature. In the threefold human being, we have on the one hand the nerve-sense human being, who is connected with the imaginative human being, and on the other hand the limb-metabolic human being, who is connected with the will nature of the human being and with his emotional nature. Because the life of imagination is dampened, subdued to the point of objective observation, pre-existence is initially closed to this objective imagination in knowledge. But what is present with it lives in the sphere of the human being that emerges at the other pole. The nature of the will and the emotions comes to the fore. Initially, no knowledge can be gained from this, only mere belief. And if what is prenatal can become knowledge through the expansion of knowledge, then without this expansion of knowledge, what lives in will and emotion can become nothing more than an article of faith for the human being. Therefore, with the dawning of supersensible knowledge, there also comes the dawning of knowledge of the eternity of the human soul, even in language. It should be striking that we have a word for immortality in the more well-known languages of civilization, that is, for life in the afterlife, but that we do not have a word that would express the eternity of the human soul at the other pole of the human being, its being unborn. But modern humanity will have to reclaim this for itself in language: that the eternity of the human being can be expressed in a word like “unborn-ness” — which, of course, will become more sophisticated with increasing civilization — just as it is expressed on the one hand, on the side of death, in the word “immortality”. But then what can be said about the eternity of the human soul will no longer be a mere article of faith, but a content of knowledge. As long as one remains merely with the afterlife, the question of immortality must be a question of faith. As soon as one passes over to a real knowledge of the supersensible, the question of immortality becomes a question of real knowledge.

This is a connection that must be recognized, this is a Rubicon that must be crossed by modern civilization. For what follows from this crossing will not only have a theoretical effect, but will have an effect in a completely different way. We can say: if we learn to ascend appropriately from something like the understanding of the change of teeth, the understanding of language, to what we then come to, we thereby acquire a knowledge of the immortal nature of the human soul.

Those who in the 18th century thought and spoke of the tongue drawing language out of the teeth, they did not believe, as Wilhelm Scherer strangely enough assumes, that there are only dental sounds, but in their instinctive knowledge they were imbued with the fact that in order to understand language one must penetrate down into the human being, just as one must penetrate down in order to understand the change of teeth. Just as the forces arise there, so must one penetrate down to the origins of the path that, with the change of teeth, points to what appeared at a previous step in the development of man: the emergence of language. These insights were instinctive, subconscious. But anyone who brings the corresponding thing out of consciousness today will find what depth they breathe in a certain respect, and what philistinism such objections breathe, like those I discussed yesterday. But we also gain, by soaring to such insights as those about language, at the same time, I would say, access to the way to recognize immortality. Therefore, the recognition of this supersensible world is at the same time connected with the attainment of a sound judgment about that which surrounds us in life, such as language. And we cannot, without becoming inwardly dishonest, pretend to penetrate into something in our environment, such as language, if we do not at the same time admit: here there are limits that are not merely to be recognized as limits of ordinary knowledge, but which make it necessary to transcend them through a different kind of knowledge.

Thus, true knowledge of the external sense world is already connected with the ascent to supersensible knowledge. In truly healthy knowledge, supersensible and sensory perception must work together, with one supporting the other. Therefore, we may believe that with the attainment of sound judgments about the supersensible, sound judgments can also be obtained in relation to what surrounds us in another sphere as human beings, with which we are connected as human beings and with which we must enter into intimate relationships: social life.

In the style of my previous lectures, I have tried as much as possible to adhere to what could be called a completely scientific style. Today, as we move on to what follows from such an inner state of mind as a social science and social practice, as it must arise from spiritual science as it is meant here, we find ourselves in the midst of practice in the present day. For what is to be said in a social context cannot today be considered in the same way as what has gone before.

It is necessary to take the following into account. By rising to imagination, inspiration and so on, what would otherwise be conceptual and cannot directly motivate the will is pushed into the will. Therefore, supersensible knowledge motivates the will, and there is no moral or religious ideal that is not rooted at least unconsciously in the supersensible. What is gained through imagination only from the sense world can never be socially or morally motivating because it remains ineffective for the will. Therefore, one must say that it could perhaps be conspicuous that the people who got hold of my writing on the social life of the threefold order, when they read it, found nothing in it of what they were accustomed to finding as the basic tone, for example, in my anthroposophical writings. Perhaps some people expected that when someone who professes to be an anthroposophist writes on a subject such as the one contained in my Threefolding of Man, then all kinds of familiar “anthroposophical” judgments must flow into all the details that are discussed there; one must very much mystel to all sorts of admonitions and so on.

Even if such a judgment has been heard many times from the anthroposophical side, it is no different in quality from the judgments of those who wanted to find in my Theosophy, as I was writing it, a literal transcription of what was in my arguments with Haeckelianism, for example. People just cannot understand how real anthroposophy, when it passes over into the will, leads to the environment, that is, to the objective observation of every field that it undertakes, so that one does not simply need to carry the formulas that are found in one field into another. It is easy to believe that those who have been accustomed to hearing this or that word for word over long periods of time will then find it unusual and uncomfortable to hear the same thing in another language. However, the different areas of life require different languages. And the point is that when they are spoken about, they should be spoken about in the same spirit, but not that the same concepts and ideas should be expressed in the same words everywhere. And in anthroposophy it is important that it is not only taken in according to its wording, but that it is taken in according to its spirit. But then one will recognize, when it wants to be active in an eminently practical area, such as the social question: which activity is called for by the need of the time, by all the forces of decline that are coming to light in our time. Inwardly, this treatment of the social question is entirely connected with what flows from other aspects of knowledge, but not from other practical aspects, even through the more theoretical sides of anthroposophy. Therefore, I must ask you today to bear in mind that I will have to depart from the style of my previous lectures, which were kept within the bounds of objective science. For it is necessary that what must live in direct life as impulses of the will, and what must still fight for its position, be grasped in a different form, so that it approaches our souls in a different way from that which one can say: That is how it is! Please refer to what is given in my book 'The Core Points of the Social Question' about threefolding. And today I want to speak more from the point of view of great social practice. Not theoretically, but from the point of view of social practice, I want to speak of what must be done first in the broadest sense. What must be done is connected with what has been done in recent years with regard to the threefold social order, despite the fact that it has aroused such tramping disapproval from fellow students, as it did, for example, in Stuttgart the day before yesterday in such a repulsive form. Therefore, I would like to give you a characterization that is very much of our time, which is based on the content that you can read about in my book 'The Core Points of the Social Question', in my book 'In Practice: Threefolding', and which you will then find characterizing various aspects of the lectures that are still to be given here today. I just wanted to give a kind of introduction to the general tone that will be struck. But I would like to say that precisely because, in the course of more recent times, humanity, for the reasons that have already been developed, has increasingly — despite believing that it is so very practical, believing that it has to an abstraction that can never bear favorable fruit anywhere else than in the scientific consideration of the inorganic, that humanity thereby became utterly impractical. Humanity had settled into this abstraction and had gradually begun to speak out of this abstraction even about what directly surrounds us as socially concrete life. If you read through all the theoretical discussions that modern, learned economists usually precede their system, you will find how the question figures everywhere: To what extent can the scientific observer of the national economy see into what is happening around us in practical terms? And how should the political economist, in order to do justice to the scientific claim – but that means nothing other than the scientific claim that one has acquired out of habit from the scientific point of view – how should he, this political economist, act in order to meet these scientific demands?

The confusion surrounding this question, and the fact that this confusion expresses a lack of contact with real social life, was something I first had to show in my book “The Key Points of the Social Question”. I had to show how, in this more recent period, hurrying on to abstraction, the leading human personalities have indeed found the way to live in the technical and social workings of the capitalist system, but how, precisely because their sense for what is human has been lost, nothing has come from these leading personalities for that which is so closely connected with man and his knowledge as the social question. For the connection between theoretical knowledge and so-called practical knowledge had been lost philosophically, too; in spite of Schopenhauer's saying, or perhaps because of the meaning of it, which was so much alive in modern humanity. In spite of the saying, “It is easy to preach morals, but difficult to found them,” word, one could not see how necessary it is to search for those foundations of life that not only preach morality, as Schopenhauer says, and thus want to provide a theoretical proof for it, but that want to establish morality through facts, by pointing to what really lives in the world of facts.

In Kantian philosophy, the confusion in this area is expressed by the fact that a sharp distinction is drawn between what is theoretical reflection, what is criticized in the “Critique of Pure Reason,” and what is the content of a mere imperative and therefore of a mere belief, and what is criticized in the “Critique of Practical Reason.” No attempt should be made to bridge the gap, although, as you have heard from this platform in recent days, Goethe objected to this with his concept of “contemplative judgment,” of “intellectus archetypus,” and then tried to approach what is really practical in the justification of human action from a different angle. Schopenhauer could not find it because he regarded everything that lives in the world of ideas from the outset as something merely pictorial, as something that cannot be imbued with the content of being. He also only referred to the will, which, however, cannot be brought into consciousness for objective knowledge without higher supersensible knowledge. Thus he felt the inadequacy of the theoretical basis of practical action. Through mere theoretical reason he was incapable of pointing out the basis of practical action itself, because in the will he saw only a blind thing, never one to be penetrated by the light of knowledge. For this light can only be the supersensible. And to that Schopenhauer did not want to rise either.

Then came other attempts, such as that of Herbarts. In Herbart we find the attempt to find a kind of basis in practical life for what practical action is. But the characteristic feature of Herbart is that in his practical philosophy he seeks what is basically an aesthetic judgment, that he tries to found practical philosophy as a part of aesthetics. In this way — by implicitly going beyond what he has theoretically in his consciousness — the five well-known practical ideas of perfection, goodwill, inner freedom, right and equity emerge. But man's relationship to them is one of consent, which in turn also requires the motivating force. Here, too, I can only hint at how an attempt was made, I would like to say, to break through what was given with the merely abstracting intellect, but how this attempt, because it did not want to penetrate to real spiritual science, failed in all possible respects.

Therefore, I must point out that the reason why the leading personalities could not find what appeals to people lies in this development of modern historical life. And so they found the way to the machine, so they found the way into technology, so they found the way to capitalism. They did not find the way to the human being, whom they left standing beside the machine, just as the natural scientist leaves the real human being standing beside what he is investigating theoretically through his natural science.

What is being lived out in natural science is rooted in a deep habit of life and expresses itself in all areas. Therefore, the first chapter of my “Key Points” could only be such that it illuminates this effect of a life-alien spiritual life in modern times. It had to be pointed out sharply to me, not by a theoretical consideration, but by the life experience described in my book, that the personalities who were the leaders in all traditions in the artistic, religious and scientific fields, in addition to what mere conception in the imagination in modern times, they created a religious content of feeling that could not arise in the class that was removed from the life of tradition and placed at the machine, which, of what emerged in this modern time, only took on the theoretical abstraction, so that in addition to the life of toil and labor, this class was also confronted with what comes from the emptiness of the soul, which can theoretically be filled with what a theoretical scientific way of thinking can provide, but which cannot live with it.

Thus what was to live through my “Key Points of the Social Question”, and already in the “Call” that preceded it, was conceived in the most eminent sense in practical terms, conceived as something that must pass directly into life, that should not merely take hold of the intellects, but should take hold of the will. And it had emerged from what should take hold of the will.

When it became clear to a larger number of personalities in the outside world how the terrible catastrophic events of the second decade of the 20th century would unfold, something intervened in the events - I will only hint at the direction today, as I said, you can find more details in my books -– that was the most bloodless abstraction, something born entirely out of abstract spirituality. With this abstract type of spirituality, the man who had become President of the United States of America from a scholar had emerged, Woodrow Wilson. In his Fourteen Points, he presented to the world as an impulse for practical action something that emerged only from an abstraction that was alien to life. The practical proof of this was provided by the situation – you can read about it in Maynard Keynes – in which Woodrow Wilson found himself during the negotiations in Versailles, where what lived in his theory was increasingly eroded in the face of what had been worked out in Versailles from the most outdated traditional views. Historical development itself has provided the proof of the lack of life in Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. When they were drawn up, however, they testified that with such abstraction one can also introduce something into reality: one introduces something into it, but one introduces only error! It is not that abstractions, when they pass through human beings, cannot conjure up realities; but it is the case that they will always cause confusion or inadequacies in these realities, because they have not been taken from life. Thus the Fourteen Points were able to transport ships and armies across the sea, but these Fourteen Points could not send a vital impulse into modern civilization.

I fear that what is at stake within modern civilization has still not been grasped by a sufficiently large number of people. For in the post-war period in America, Woodrow Wilson was followed by Harding – and we were recently able to read this Harding's inaugural address: the same abstract phrases, the same talk of “human brotherhood” that cannot be motivating because it lives in abstractions, the continuation of Wilson's policy under a different name. I cannot find that there is sufficient understanding in a sufficiently large number of people for the inadequacies that are perpetuated here. It is as if modern man has lost all connection with any enthusiasm for truth, for living truth, and would pass by asleep even such a lack of contact with life as was again heard in the inaugural address of the American president.

At the time when the Fourteen Points first entered modern life, what was contained in these Fourteen Points in the way of alienation from life should be countered by a real practice of life, something that emanated from life, emanated at the same time from the most important components of modern public life, from real social practice, from an understanding of what pulsates through contemporary humanity as a social question.

In a Stuttgart lecture a short time ago, I pointed out such things in a way that was true to life, after Lloyd George wanted to prevent the then impending outbreak of strikes and smoothed over the circumstances. After this gluing of social conditions, I said in Stuttgart: You can use such things, which, despite coming from Lloyd George, are only theoretical, to glue conditions, but you cannot direct realities, and people will see that only theory has been gluing, but that nothing has been achieved in practical life, and that this will soon become apparent. — Now you have it! Now you can see for yourself, from what has actually happened, whether in that Stuttgart lecture the knowledge of social forces was spoken of or whether it was only spoken of in theory, whereas today one not only speaks in theory but also acts in theory in public and especially in social life, where it is truly out of place.

And so at that time, when, I might say, in a classical way, the political fruit of modern abstractism appeared in Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, an attempt was made to awaken understanding in those who listened to it at the time, discouraged and reluctant to act , but who were curious about it in a certain way, to try to awaken understanding for the fact that from Europe - at first only Central Europe was accessible - in the form of the threefold social order, something concrete and practical was being opposed to the impractical Fourteen Points. And one could have been convinced if one had had a sense of realities, not just of beloved theories that had then become “practical”. One could have been convinced that just as the impractical abstractions in reality have set armies and ships in motion, that which would have been spoken out of a reality, if only it had been conveyed from the right place, would also have conjured up realities.

But those who had a say at the time did not want to listen. Social practice was far from their minds. They were accustomed to what had emerged in the course of modern times: to go the way to the machine, to the machinery of the social order, but not to go the way to the human being who stands at the machine, who lives as a human being within the machinery of the social order, and who, as a human being, is an active being.

Since people at that time did not understand what the necessities of life demanded, it was a necessary consequence that, immediately after the bloody catastrophe of war had ended, at the instigation of friends in Stuttgart, what is contained in my “Appeal to the German People and the World of Culture” and what is contained in my “Key Points of the Social Question” came about. And in the period when the old powers had disappeared in certain areas of modern civilized life, an attempt was made to speak to the broad masses of the people, to those who had suffered most from all the conditions that I have now indicated and otherwise described again and again. The beginning was basically a good one. It was possible to reach the broad masses of the people. They gradually understood the significance of the impulse of the threefold social order. For it is nonsense to say that it is difficult to understand in itself. The difficulty in understanding it lies only in the fact that one cannot escape from old habits of thinking, that one cannot refrain from imposing one's own habitual, rigid way of thinking on something that presents itself as something quite different. That is the reason, not the difficulty of the matter itself. Therefore, there was also the possibility of finding understanding precisely within those who, out of their own needs, were striving for a relative solution to the social question, and who had already seen that they could not arrive at a satisfactory organization of social life in modern times from the old dogmatic Marxism.

A spanner was put in the works by the fact that on the one hand, not the workers, but the leaders of these workers, and on the other hand, leading figures of the old bourgeoisie, reacted negatively. From all sides, one was, so to speak, left in the lurch with regard to the impulse of threefolding.

At first, in the spring of 1919, those in leading positions were gripped by a terrible fear and grasped at anything that had anything to do with the social question. As a result, some found themselves in the first stirrings of threefolding, as it came to them, but they did not have the strength or the courage to persevere with it. One of the celebrated leaders of the bourgeoisie of a Central European region said to me at the time, when we were in the midst of what was to happen: Yes, in the way you understand and speak to the broad masses of the people, one could indeed have high hopes; but such a thing, you will admit to a party leader of the old parties, must not be left to two people; others are not yet not yet – I am just quoting – that would be effective in this direction; therefore, we do not rely on this whole broad movement, but we want to hold the old order, despite the fact that it may only last for another fifteen or twenty years at most, with the cannons and rifles.

That was the response from one side. But let me also speak of the response from the other side, because I have to characterize practically what it is about. The working population, insofar as I was able to speak to them, tried to get involved in the threefolding movement with relative ease and with inner understanding. Then the labor leaders came, and they became, I might say, green with envy, because now they could be addressed from a different side than from the side of their instilled Marxism. And they, like the others, invented all kinds of slander and dirty tricks to prevent the workers, who are so credulous in their faith in authority in their relations with their leaders, from finding the right way to understanding. But the workers have not yet reached the point where they can find their way in the right way in their faith in authority, which has been handed down from past decades. The moment the workers realize what the lower and higher-ranking labor leaders are really after, much of the well-intentioned belief that still exists in this area will evaporate. They will realize that those at the top, of the Lenin and Trotsky, Lunach arskij, are at the head of the movement, they do not have the happiness and well-being of the masses at heart. They say to themselves and to each other: The broad masses of the people are stupid and will always be racked by passions; there is nothing to be done with them but to tyrannize them; therefore it must not be conspicuous that we also tyrannize, whether we are called Czar Nicholas or Lenin; for us, it is only a matter of those who used to sit on the curule chairs falling down and us now sitting on them; for us, it is a matter of conquering the seats of government!

The moment this realization dawns on the broadest sections of society, many things will change. But then the time will also have come when social practice can really be introduced into social life. Then people will look with practical understanding at what I have said in the second and third chapters of my “Key Points of the Social Question”, which I would like to say exemplifies what can be achieved from such a spirit. Then it will be seen that nothing here has been invented out of thin air, but that everything has been gained out of a hard-won practical life experience, just as in the past, after Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points had become known, this idea of the threefold social organism first appeared.

I speak as someone who spent half of his life, thirty years, in Austria, in this experimental country for social impossibilities. I speak as someone who knows well how people spoke in this Austrian experimental country in a ministry, a liberal ministry. At the height of Austrian liberalism, when the social question was already looming behind liberalism, the liberal Giskra said: In Austria we have nothing to do with the social question, because the social question stops at Bodenbach! — This was proclaimed in the parliament of liberalism in Austria by the responsible Minister of the Interior, in the last third of the 19th century.

Anyone who wants to study how the impossible mixing of the three parts of the social organism worked in this Austrian parliament – I would like to say in its purest form, which I have already expressed in my “key points” by stating that the composition of parliament was based on four economic curiae – can see how things gradually developed.

But what must emerge from every such consideration is that it is a matter of finding impulses for practical social life that speak from this life itself. Then we may come to the time when there will be a sufficiently large number of people who, uninfluenced by the old designations of direction, “right” and “left”, turn their attention to the factual and practical, which, because it flows from reality, may believe it has a right to have a say in the most important matters of life. And these are the social matters.

Today, many people take the view that the world will be put in order if only they can continue the old impulses, and for a long time now they have been trying again to see how it can work by letting the old continue. They turn their eyes away from the fact that under this unobjective, unrealistic approach, more and more comes about that must have a demoralizing effect on the whole of modern civilization.

But a possibility to move forward will not arise until people realize that, without looking to the left or right, they must look objectively at direct life. For only in this way can we develop an understanding of such practical and social ideas that can not only preach an ethical and social life, but also found it. For it is the foundation of this life that should be emphasized in the threefold social organism. Theorists have long repeated from their theoretical point of view that today we must look at what also lives in ethics in a “social” way. Since the division of labor, man has been placed entirely in the social sphere, and one must understand “from the social” what motivates man when he is to act.

As long as this judgment remains bloodless, as long as it remains an abstraction, it will achieve nothing. For as an abstraction it is just as true as it is false. That it is false I have shown in my Philosophy of Freedom. The other, truly alarming aspect is that man hands himself over more and more with his freedom to the objective economic process and the like, as is even theoretically expounded in Marxism. And in that man hands himself over to the economic process or the state process or the other social institutions that we have now, naturally more and more his motivation for action becomes a social one. This can and may be understood. For modern civilization aims at people learning to live with people in a division of labor. But if the social order is to motivate appropriate social action in the individual, then it must be a social organism that is capable of motivating the will through its own inner laws. In a living social organism, one must not only preach morals, but establish social morals. In this field, morals must be established not through words and ideas, but through the realities of the situation. These realities should be stimulated by the impulse of the threefold social organism.

The matter was so little understood that the abstract thinkers even mocked me because I kept using the word “impulse” instead of “idea” to suggest that there should be power in this tendency of the threefold social organism, not just talk. That should already be in the life of this work for threefolding: that there is reality in it, not just talk. Otherwise, one can also go around as an ethical traveling speaker, as there are so many of them now, trying to persuade people: Just become ethical again, just become good again, and social harmony will arise! I have always said to those who wanted to hear it, when speaking to the stove in the room: You stove, according to your nature, it is your categorical imperative to warm the room – it will not warm the room. But you don't need to preach if you put wood in and light it. You don't need to moralize in theory, mystify, aestheticize. What is needed is not just a “practical” mixture of ideas, but real impulses to stimulate social forces that are filled with ideas, if it is to be a social practice. And only when we have developed an understanding for this fact will we learn to think correctly about what threefolding actually wants.

But because this reaches down into the soul and will, an enthusiasm and commitment to the truth is required for this understanding of threefolding, not just a theoretical interest in the truth and in a theoretical discussion. As long as we are unable to take truth into our will, to extract it from theory and permeate our whole being with it, there can be no beginning to a fruitful treatment of the social question and social practice.

That is what it is about: that those who seek understanding for what threefolding wants to achieve may seek it with their whole being. Then enthusiasm will not come from blind instincts, but will be stimulated by light-filled knowledge. Then it will not remain blind itself, but will shine itself. When the impulses of the will do not come from instincts and drives, but from an overview of social life, then they do not remain blind and dark, but become themselves seeing and luminous. And the path of the impulse of the threefold social order depends on the will and enthusiasm for the truth becoming ever more luminous and radiant in this sense. And I would like to express the hope that what can be said here in this direction will contribute to inspiring not a blind and dark enthusiasm and will, but a light-filled, willed shaping of life.

Final Word on the Fourth Evening of the Disputation

In the course of the very lively disputation on the topic “Social Science and Social Practice”, a Dutch member of the Society came back to the “World School Association” (see p. 92 ff.). He called for “immediate action”, namely to proceed with the founding immediately (following a Dutch initiative that was supported by iso names). In doing so, it referred to the fact that in April 1912, members of the “German Section” of the “Theosophical Society”, at the suggestion of a member who had travelled from England, had founded a “bund” through such an “act”, from which “what is known today as the Anthroposophical Society originated”.

I do not wish to detain you much longer, but would just like to make a few comments, firstly in connection with what our friend v.L. has proposed here, which is certainly quite commendable, or will be if it leads to the promised goal. I would just like to note that it would be a questionable basis if the matter were built on the same foundation as the “bund”, to which reference has been made. At that time, work was indeed carried out with a certain zeal, in the way Mr. v.L. has roughly outlined it today: people sat down in small committees, discussed all sorts of things, what should be done and so on. But then Mr. v.L. made a statement which, of course, is a small mistake at first, but which, if it were to continue to have an effect, could lead to a big mistake. It was said that the Anthroposophical Society emerged from the work that was so tirelessly carried out that night. No, that is not the case at all: nothing emerged from that night and from that founding of the society! I would like to protect the intended “restless work of this night” from this fate. There was a lot of talk back then about what needed to be done, but nothing came of it. And the mistake that could arise is based on the fact that one might think that something should now be done in the direction indicated by that “covenant”. What actually happened was that those who had been involved in our anthroposophical work, who were already very much with us, founded the Anthroposophical Society quite separately from this federation, and this then developed further, while the “federation” gradually passed from a gentle slumber into social death, let us say.

So, it would be a small mistake! And this must be emphasized, so that the mistakes of that night committee are not repeated in its second edition. That is one thing.

The other point I would like to make is that the aim of a world school association should be based on something really broad and should be tackled from the outset with a certain courage and a comprehensive vision.

Our friend v.L. has quite rightly emphasized that what is to be advocated in relation to a free spiritual life in connection with the threefold social organism must be treated in different ways for the most diverse fields. But this must then also really

so that the way it is treated is appropriate for the territories concerned. I myself will always point out that, for example, in England it will be necessary to present things in a way that is appropriate to the English civilization. |

One must thoroughly understand what is imagination in the face of the great human questions of the present, and what is reality. So one must not present the matter in such a way as to create the belief that English intellectual life is freer than other intellectual lives. And you will see, if you really go through the “key points”, that less emphasis is placed on the negative aspect – the liberation of intellectual life from the state – and much less emphasis is placed on the establishment of a free intellectual life in general. And there it will always remain a good word: that it depends on the human being, that it really depends on the spiritual foundations from which the human being emerges, which spiritual foundations are created for his education. It is not so much a matter of emphasizing the negative aspect, but rather the positive. And I need only say this: if, let us say, spiritual life were formally freed from state control, and everything else remained the same, then liberation from the state would not be of much use.

The point is that positive spirit, as it has been represented here this week, as it has been tried to represent it, that this free spirit be brought into intellectual life internationally. And then things will happen as they should happen.

For example, the Waldorf School is not only a truly independent school, it does not even have a director, but the teaching staff is a truly representative community. It is not a matter of all measures being taken in such a way that 'nothing else' speaks except what comes from the teaching staff themselves, so that here we really have 'an independent spiritual community', but it is also a matter of the fact that in all countries there is a lack of the spiritual life that has been talked about here all week. And when one hears it emphasized somewhere that “intellectual life is free in this country” – I am not talking about Switzerland now, I am talking about England – that is another matter. And it is this positive aspect, above all, that matters. It must then be emphasized: Of course, this will only exist if one tries to actually respond to the specific circumstances in the individual countries and territories.

But one must have a heart and mind for what unfree intellectual life has ultimately done in our time. Not in order to respond to what was said here yesterday, but to show the blossoms of human thinking, both intellectually and morally, that our current intellectual life brings to light, I would like to read you a sentence. I do not wish to detain you for long, and I do not wish to speak from the standpoint from which there was such virulent opposition to anthroposophy and the threefold social order here yesterday; but I would like to read out a sentence from the brochure that had to be discussed here yesterday. General von Gleich writes about me: “At the turn of the century, which also marks a turning point in the supersensible world of Anthroposophy, Mr. Steiner, then almost forty years old, was gradually led to Theosophy through Winter's lectures on mysticism.”

Now you may ask who this Mr. Winter is, whom Mr. v. Gleich cites here as the person through whose lectures I was converted to Anthroposophy in Berlin. One can only put forward the following hypothesis: in the preface to those lectures that I gave in Berlin in the winter of 1901/1902, there is a sentence in which I say: the movement I want to talk about began with my lectures in the winter of 1901/1902. — From this winter, during which I gave my lectures, that Mr. 'Winter' was born, who converted me to theosophy in 1901/1902.

You see, I do not want to use the expression that applies to the intellectual disposition of a person who, because of it, is now called to lead the opponents of the anthroposophical movement; I do not want to use the expression; but you will certainly be able to use it sufficiently. This is the kind of intellectual product of the spiritual life that one could pass through in the present day to the extent of becoming a major general.

So one must look at the matter from a somewhat greater depth. Only then will one develop a heart and a mind for what is necessary. And just because the spiritual life must be tackled first and foremost through the school system, it is so desirable that this World School Association could be established, which would not be so difficult to establish if the will for it exists. But it must not be a smaller or larger committee, but must be established in such a way that its membership is unmanageable. Only then will it have value. It must not — I do not want to give any advice on this, because I have said enough about it — it must not, of course, impose any special sacrifices on an individual. It must be there to create the mood for what urgently needs a mood today! — That is something of what I still had to tie in with what has come to light today.

Finally, I must say something that I would rather not say, but which I must say, since otherwise it would not have been touched upon this evening and it might be too late for the next few days, when the pain of departure will probably set in. I must point this out myself. The point is that it is taken for granted that everything that has been said today will be worked for. But this work only makes sense if we can maintain the Goetheanum as it stands here, and above all, if we can complete it.

Now, however well things are going with “Futurum A.-G.” and however well things are going with “Kommenden Tag”, they will not be any economic support for this Goetheanum for a long time to come. Certainly not. And the greatest concern that weighs on me today, despite all my other concerns, is this: that in the not too distant future we may find ourselves with no economic support for this Goetheanum. Therefore, it is necessary above all to emphasize that each of us should work towards this, that each of us who can contribute something towards this, that this building can find its completion, may do so! That is what is needed above all: that we are put in a position by the friends of our cause to be able to maintain this Goetheanum, to be able to finish this Goetheanum above all. And that, as I said, is my great concern. I must say so here. Because ultimately, what would it help if we could do as much propaganda as we want and we might have to close the Goetheanum in three months from now? This is also one of the social concerns that, in my opinion, are connected with the general social life of the present day. And I had to emphasize this concern because the facts on which it is based should not really be forgotten: this makes it possible to strengthen the movement that emanates from this Goetheanum.

We can see the intellectual foundations on which those who are now taking up their posts against us are fighting. That will be a beginning. We must be vigilant, very vigilant, because these people are clever. They know how to organize themselves. What happened in Stuttgart is a beginning, it is intended as a beginning. And only then will we be able to stand up to them if we spark such idealism – I would like to say it again this time – that does not say: Oh, ideals are so terribly high, they are so exalted, and my pocket is something so small that I do not reach into it when it comes to exalted ideals. – It must be said: Only idealism is true that also digs into its pockets for the ideals!

Closing Remarks at a Student Assembly

At the suggestion of German students, a meeting was held on the afternoon of 9 April 1921 to discuss how anthroposophical work could be established at universities. Dr. Steiner spoke at the end.

Dr. S. has, however, pointed out the three most important issues at stake here: whether to organize or not, as desired. But above all, I would like to emphasize one thing: if you are involved in a movement like ours, it is necessary to learn from the past and to lead further stages of the movement in such a way that certain earlier mistakes are avoided.

What it will depend on in the first place is this: that anthroposophy, to the extent that it can already be accepted by the student body in terms of understanding and to the extent that it is at all possible through the available forces or opportunities, that anthroposophy in its various branches be spread among the student body as positive spiritual content. Our experience has basically shown that something real can only be achieved if one can really build on the basis of the positive.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to point out that years ago an attempt was made to establish a kind of world federation for spiritual science, and that nothing came of this world federation, which actually only wanted to proceed according to the rules of formal external organization. It ended, so to speak, in what the Germans call “das Hornberger Schießen” – a shooting match in Hornberg. But because a sense of cohesion and collaboration were needed at the time, the existing adherents of anthroposophy had to be brought together in the “Anthroposophical Society”. These were now more or less all people who had simply been involved with anthroposophy. It is only with such an organization, where there is already something in it, that one can then do something.

Of course it will be especially necessary for the student body not only to work in the sense of spreading the given anthroposophical problems in the narrower sense, but also to work out general problems and the like in the sense that Dr. S. just meant. Of course, at first it will not be so necessary to work towards dissertations with such things. It has often, really quite often, happened recently that I have been asked by younger students along the following lines: Yes, we actually want to combine anthroposophy with our particular science. How can one approach this in such a way that one works towards one's goal in the right way after the doctorate, after the state examination? What should one do? How should one set up one's work? — I have always given the following advice: Try to get through the official studies as quickly as possible, to get through them as quickly as possible – and I am always very happy to help with any advice – then choose any scientific topic that seems to emerge from the course of your studies, as a dissertation or state examination or the like. Whichever topic you choose, one of them is of course diametrically opposed to the other approaches in anthroposophical terms, there can be no doubt about that. Each is diametrically opposed. But now I advise you to write your dissertation in such a way that you first write down what the professor can censor, what he will understand; and take a second notebook, and write down everything that comes to you in the course of your studies and that you believe should actually be worked in from anthroposophy. You then keep that for yourself. Then you make your two sheets, that's how long a dissertation must be. You submit these. And try to finish them. Then you can really help anthroposophy with what you have acquired in addition to this one in the second issue, bit by bit. Because you actually only really notice what significant problems — special and specialist problems — arise when you are faced with the necessity of really working scientifically on a certain topic and the like. But there is a danger of, I would say, unclear cooperation with the professorship. And submitting dissertations to the professors that are written “in the anthroposophical sense” – these usually do not suit professors – I do not consider this to be a good idea because it actually slows us down at the pace that the anthroposophical movement should be taking.

We need as many academically trained co-workers as possible. If there is anything we lack in the anthroposophical movement today, it is a sufficient number of academically trained co-workers. I do not mean the externality of needing, say, people with degrees. That is not what I mean. But first of all, we need people who have learned to work scientifically from within. This inner scientific work is best learned in one's own work. Secondly, however, we need staff who come from the student body as soon as possible, and who are no longer held back by considerations for their later specialized studies. (You see, it is not at all wonderful that it is as difficult as it is in Switzerland, for example.) As a student, you naturally have the opportunity to join such a group in the first few semesters, if you are free-minded enough to do so. Then come the last semesters. You are busy with other things, and it becomes more difficult. And so the threads that you have pulled are constantly being torn away. This has just been emphasized.

So I would like to say, especially for scientific collaboration: the topics must be processed twice during such a transition period: one that the professor understands, and the other that is saved for later.

Of course, I am not saying that very special opportunities that arise are not seized, and that these opportunities, which arise, are not vigilantly observed by the student body in the most eminent sense and also really exploited in the sense and service of the movement: On the one hand, I hope, and on the other hand, I fear almost silently, that our dear friend, Professor Römer in Leipzig, will now be inundated with a huge number of anthroposophical dissertations! But I think that would also be one of the things he would probably prefer. And such a document of student trust would show that he is not one of the professors just mentioned. That would come from the foundation.

Now, however, we need an expansion of what has already been discussed here in Dornach, namely a kind of collaboration after all. You will work out among yourselves later how best to do this technically. It would be good if, with the help of the Waldorf teachers, who would be joined by other personalities from our ranks – Professor Römer, Dr. Unger and others – a certain exchange could take place, especially regarding the choice of topics for dissertations or scientific papers, without in any way compromising the free initiative of the individual. It can only be in the form of advice. It is precisely for this scientific work that a closer union should be sought – it doesn't have to be an organization, but an exchange of ideas – between you.

The economic aspect is, of course, a very, very important one. It is a fact that the university system in particular, but actually more or less the entire higher education system, will suffer greatly from our economic difficulties. Now it is a matter of really seeing clearly that it is only possible to help if it is possible to advance such institutions, as it is for example for Germany the “Kommende Tag”, as it is here the “Futurum”. So that a reorganization of the economic situation of the student body can also emanate from these organizations. I can assure you that all the things we are tackling in this direction are actually calculated on rapid growth. We do not have time to take our time; instead, we actually have to make rapid progress with such economic organizations. And here I must say that the members of the student body, perhaps with very few exceptions, can help us above all by spreading understanding for such things. It has indeed already happened in relation to other things that a student could achieve something for this or that with his father, or could achieve something with his relatives. Not everyone has only destitute friends. And then there really is something that works like an avalanche. Just think about how powerfully something like an avalanche works, based on experience: when you start somewhere, it continues. Something like this continues to have an effect when you act out of the positive: try to study these brochures that have been published by “Kommender Tag” and “Futurum”, and try to create understanding for something like this.

It is this understanding that the oldest people in particular find extremely difficult to work their way up to. I have seen how older people, I would say, have chewed on the desire to understand what “Tomorrow” or “Futurum” want, how they have repeatedly fallen back on their old economic prejudices, like a cat on its paws, with which they have rushed into economic decline, and how they cannot find their way out. I believe that there really is a bright understanding among our fellow students that could also have some effect on the older generations. We cannot make any progress in any other way. Because I can tell you: when we have come so far in relation to these economic institutions that we can effectively do something, that we first of all have enough funds to do something on a large scale – because only then does it help – and on the other hand can overcome the resistance of the proletariat, which is particularly hostile to an economic improvement in the situation of students, then it must indeed be the first concern of our economic organizations to work economically in relation to the student body.

The 'battle problems'! Yes, you see, that's the problem: the Anthroposophical Society, even if it wasn't called that before, has existed since the beginning of the century, and it has always actually only worked positively, at least as far as I myself am concerned. It let the opponents rant and do all sorts of things. But naturally then the opponents come with certain objections. They say, there it has been said, there that has been said, yes that, that has not even been refuted. It is already so that one finds understanding for it that actually the one who asserts something has the burden of proof, not the one to whom it is attributed. And we could really experience it again and again, that strange views emerged precisely among academics, I now mean lecturers, professors, pastors and those who had emerged from the ranks of academics. Just think, that from, I would like to say, for the outside world honorable - but I say it only between quotation marks: “honorable” - professors, things are put forward against Anthroposoph , and so on, that if one follows these proofs with reasons, it is a mockery, a bloody mockery of all possible methods of asserting something in science. Therefore, with someone like Professor Fuchs, I simply had to say: It is impossible that this person is anything other than a quite impossible anatomist! Am I supposed to believe that he examines things conscientiously when, after everything that has been presented, he examines my baptismal certificate in the way he has examined it? You have to draw conclusions about the way one area is treated from the way another is treated. Such things simply show – through the fact that people step forward and show their particular habits – the symptoms of how science is done today. Even the things that are presented at universities and technical colleges today are basically no better founded than the things that are asserted in this way; it is just that the generally loosened habits in scientific life are revealed in this way. And that is what is needed: to take the fight to a higher level, so to speak.

And there it is not necessary, as my fellow student wished, for example, which I understand very well, to play as a “fighting organization.” That is not necessary. Rather, only one thing: to avoid what has occurred so frequently in the Anthroposophical Society. In the Anthroposophical Society, this always came to the fore, as incredible as it is – not in everyone, of course, but very often: one was obliged to defend oneself against a wild accusation, and then to use harsh words, for example, we say in the case when a Mr. v. Gleich invents the term “Winter” for a lecturer by reading that I myself have given winter lectures, then invents a personality “Winter” and introduces it into the fight in a very nasty way. Yes, you see, I don't think that in this case one would say too harsh words if one spoke of Trottelisis! Because here, even if it occurs with a general, one is dealing with a genuine Trottelisis in its purest form. And in the Anthroposophical Society it was usually the case that it was not the person who was at fault who acted like Mr. von Gleich, but the person who defended himself. Until today! We have learned a few times that it was said: You must not become aggressive in this way. In the eyes of many people, becoming aggressive means defending oneself in this way. It is necessary that you, without emphasizing that you are a fighting organization or the like, still follow things with a watchful eye and reject them. You have to act positively in this regard; and then the others have to stand behind you, behind the one who is forced to defend himself. It is not a matter of our becoming fighting cocks ourselves; but it is a matter of the others standing behind him when it becomes necessary to defend himself. And it is a matter of really following the symptoms of the world-descriptive, scientific, religious, and so on, in this respect in our time, taking an interest in them.

Take this single phenomenon: I was obliged to characterize philosophical, or whatever you want to call it, scribblings by Count Keyserling in the appropriate way, because in his incredible superficiality he mixed in the madness that I started from Haeckel's views. This is not only an objective untruth, but in this case a subjective untruth, that is, a lie, because one must demand that anyone who makes such an assertion should search for the sources; and he could have seen that the chapter I wrote in the earliest years of my writing career is in my arguments with Haeckel, in the introduction to Goethe's scientific writings. You can all read it very well. Now Count Keyserling has had a small pamphlet published by his publisher: “The Way to Perfection”. I will not characterize this writing further, but I recommend that one or two of you buy this writing and pass it around; because if everyone wanted to buy it, it would be a waste of money; but I still recommend that you read it so that you get an idea of what, so to speak, goes against all wisdom in this writing “The Way to Perfection” by Keyserling. There is the following sentence, which he put together, more or less as I remember it: Yes, if I said something incorrect, that Dr. Steiner started from Haeckel, then Dr. Steiner could simply have corrected that; he could have set me right, because I have - and now I ask you to pay close attention to this sentence - because I have no time for a special Steiner source research.

So now, you see, we have already brought scientific morality to such a pass that someone who founds a “school of wisdom” considers it justified to send things out into the world that he admittedly has no time to research, that he has therefore not researched! Here one catches a seemingly noble thinker - because Count Keyserling always cited omnipotence in his writing - that is what is so impressive about Count Keyserling, that he always cites omnipotence. All present-day writing has reached a point where it is most mired and ragged. And despite the omnipotence, there is a complete moral decline of views here. And so people have to be told: Of course, nobody expects you to do Steiner source research either; but then, if you don't do any Steiner source research, if you don't have time, then – with regard to all these things about which you should know something: Shut up!

You see, it is necessary that we have no illusions, that we simply discard every conventional principle of authority and the like, that we face ourselves freely, really and truly examining what is present in our time. Then we will be able to notice quite a lot of it today.

I would certainly advise you to take a look at some of the sentences that the great Germanist Roethe in Berlin occasionally and repeatedly coins, purely in terms of form – I will completely disregard the view, which can certainly be respected. Then you will find it instructive. We do not need to be a fighting organization. But we must be ready and alert to take action when the things that are leading us so horribly into decline actually materialize. Do we need to be an organization of anthroposophical students to do that? We simply need to be alert, decent, and scientifically conscientious people, then we can always take a stand against such harm from our most absolute private point of view. And if we are also organized for positive work, then the number of those who are organized for it can stand behind us and support us. We need the latter. But it would not be very clever of us to present ourselves as a fighting organization. On the other hand, it is important that we really work seriously on improving our current conditions. And to do that, we first have to take note of the terrible damage that is coming to light in one field or another – and which really cannot be overlooked, because it involves enormous sums of money – and have the courage to take a stand against it in whatever way we can.

You have already done something if you can do just that: simply set the record straight for a small number of your fellow students with regard to such things, even if it happens only in the smallest of circles. Yesterday, I said to one of our members here with regard to the World School Association: I think it is particularly valuable, especially with regard to such things, to start by talking to one or two or three others, that is, to very small groups, even if there are only two of them; and, to put it quite radically, if someone cannot find anyone else, then at least say it to yourself! So these things are quite tangible in terms of what the individual is able to do. Some will be able to do much more, as has actually already happened with a doctor who was a member and whose fellow students proved to be very enthusiastic. The point is not to make enemies by appearing as fighting cocks in a wild form, but also not to shy away from the fight when others start it. That's it: we must always let the other start; and then the necessary help must stand behind us, which does not allow the tactic to arise, because it has arisen: that we would have started. If they start from the other side, then one is forced to defend oneself; and then you can always read that the anthroposophical side has used this or that in the fight as an attack and so on. They always turn the tables. That is the method of the opponents. We must not let that happen.

As for the World School Association, I would just like to say this: in my opinion, it would be best if the World School Association could be established independently of each other in Entente and neutral countries, but also in the German-speaking area of Central Europe. If it could happen at the same time, so that things could develop independently of each other, so to speak, it would be best. Of course, a certain amount of vigilance is required to see what happens. I believe that Switzerland, in particular, should mediate here. It would be good if we could do it right now. I can assure you: things are on a knife edge – and if the same possibilities for war existed today as existed in 1914, then we would have had war again long ago. Things are on a knife edge in terms of sentiment and so on. And we won't get something like this Weltschulverein (World School Association) off the ground if, for example, it is founded in Germany now, and then the others, for example, if only for a week, had to follow suit. It would simply not come about, it would be impractical to do so.

On the other hand, we must not allow any possibility of our in the least denying our position on these matters. This School of Spiritual Science is called the Goetheanum. We gave it this name during the World War, here and now. The other nations, insofar as they have participated in anthroposophy, have adopted the name and accepted it. We have never denied that we have reasons to call the School of Spiritual Science 'Goetheanum', and it would therefore not be good if in Germany things were allowed to appear as some kind of imitation from the other side.

So it would be a matter of proceeding in this regard — forgive the harsh word — a little less clumsily, of doing it a little more skillfully in the larger world cultural sense! Switzerland would now have to work with full understanding here. So it would actually have to be taken up simultaneously by Central Europe, by the Entente and by the neutral countries.

For the time being, I don't know whether it will take off in just one or two places. This morning I received the news that the committee, which was convened yesterday and which wanted to work so hard, went to bed a few minutes after yesterday's meeting left the hall; it was postponed until tonight. Whether they will meet tonight, we will wait and see. We have already had very strange experiences; and based on this knowledge, that we have already had the most diverse experiences, I have taken the liberty of speaking to you here about the fact that in the further course of the movement, the experiences made should be taken into account.

On the other hand, I am convinced that if the necessary strong impulse and proper enthusiasm can be found among our fellow students, especially for what I myself and other friends of mine have mentioned in the course of this lecture: enthusiasm for the truth – then things will work out.

I would like to say one more thing: I recently read an article from a feature page and I can assure you that what recently took place in Stuttgart is not the slightest bit an end, but only a beginning, and I can assure you that things will get much, much worse. I have often said this to our friends here – a very, very long time ago – and I recently read a piece from a feature page in which it says: “There are enough intellectual sparks that flash like lightning after the wooden mousetrap, there are plenty of sparks of intellectual fire, and it will take no little cleverness on Steiner's part to reconcile people and prevent a real spark of fire one day bringing the Dornach glory to an inglorious end.

I really do think that whatever must occur as a reaction against such action, which will grow ever stronger and stronger, will have to be better shaped and, above all, more energetically carried out. And I believe that you, my dear fellow students, need to let all your youthful enthusiasm flow in this direction, in what we have often mentioned here during this course: enthusiasm for the truth. Youthful enthusiasm for the truth has always been a very good impulse in the further development of humanity. May it be so in the near future through you in a matter that you recognize as good.

I would like to take the liberty of outlining tomorrow a world view from the perspective of spiritual science. Today, as an introduction, so to speak, I would like to precede it with a description of the world view of German idealism.

It is possible to speak of such a world view of German idealism if one attempts to extract from the innermost being of the German national soul, so to speak, what has been attempted by this national soul in the greatest period — in terms of intellectual life — to get closer to the riddles and secrets of the world. If we consider the impulses and forces assimilated by the national soul in those days as still active in the second half of the nineteenth century and continuing into our own time, when the world picture of German idealism has receded in the face of other endeavors, where it has lived hidden, as it were, as an urging force in the development of the national spirit, then one can also speak of such an effective world view in the present. However, we must bear in mind that, due to many things that have arisen in our intellectual life and have become dominant for the generality of this intellectual life, this – I would say – most “original German” intellectual construct of German idealism has receded. But especially in these days we may express our hopes that this world picture of German idealism will again come to the surface and incorporate its strength into the general process of human development.

In my lectures this winter, but also earlier, I have often mentioned a name that was borne by one of the most German minds of the second half of the nineteenth century; I have mentioned the name Herman Grimm, the great art historian. And it may be said that what I have ventured to suggest here about Herman Grimm can, especially when one considers what Herman Grimm achieved as an art historian, as an art observer and in other ways through his entire literary work, be proof that it is born directly out of German feeling, out of German thinking, in short, out of the innermost impulses of the German national soul. When Herman Grimm tried to lift up his soul to that which presented itself to him—more from his feelings than from philosophical reflection—as the world view of the Goethean worldview, he had to place this world view alongside the other which in modern times has found the widest dissemination and the widest interest; that world view, of which its adherents, its believers, repeatedly claim that it is based on the genuine and correct assumptions of science. This world-picture, which in a certain sense now holds sway in the minds of many, Herman Grimm, moved by his intuitive perceptions, desired to set beside the other, which presented itself to his imaginative fancy as the world-picture on which all Goethe's work and activity was based. I have already mentioned the conclusion which Herman Grimm arrived at when he made this attempt. He said:

“Long ago, in his” — Goethe's — “youth, the great Laplace-Kantian fantasy of the origin and the former destruction of the globe had taken hold.” Herman Grimm wanted to suggest the idea that if Goethe had wanted to profess this Laplace-Kantian world view, he would have had plenty of opportunities to do so because it had already taken hold in his youth. And now Herman Grimm continues:

"From the rotating nebula – which children already learn about at school – the central drop of gas forms, which later becomes the Earth, and, as a solidifying sphere, goes through all phases, including the episode of habitation by the human race, over inconceivable periods of time , and finally to plunge back into the sun as burnt-out slag: a long process, but one that is completely comprehensible to today's audience, and one that no longer requires any external intervention to come about, except for the effort of some external force to keep the sun at the same temperature."

Herman Grimm alludes to the world view that is so widespread today: that once upon a time there was nothing but extraordinarily thin matter, that this thin matter clumped together, began to rotate, to move in circles, that from this the world building gradually formed, the planets split, that then on the earth – the one of the planets split off from the central gas drop – in the course of time the mineral, the vegetable and the animal kingdom developed from the gas, and that then the whole course of evolution took on that form which presents itself to us as human 'history'. But then, later on, there would come a time when all living things would have to wither and dry up, when everything would fall back into the sun, and with it all life would sink back into inanimate matter. Many people believe that this world view is the only one that can be achieved on the solid ground of natural science. And, as I have already indicated, it is easy to make this world view comprehensible. Herman Grimm says of it: children already learn it at school. You just have to carefully slide a cut-out card through a drop of oil floating in a liquid, stick a needle through it from above and turn the needle to set the whole thing in motion; then smaller drops separate from the larger oil ball and move around the larger one. And so, there you have, quite “evidently,” the origin of a small world system, and from that you draw the conclusion that the origin of the great world system must have occurred in just the same way. However, I have always pointed out how obvious it is, even to a child, that the world could not have come into being any other way; but in this experiment, people usually forget one thing – and one should maintain perfection when demonstrating something. For it is usually not taken into account that the “Mr. Teacher” or the “Mr. Professor” is standing there, turning the needle and setting the whole thing in rotation, and one must not forget oneself in an experiment that one does. Therefore, if one wanted to accept the experiment cited as proof, one would have to place a giant Mr. Teacher or Mr. Professor into outer space.

Herman Grimm continues:

So said Herman Grimm. In contrast to this, it may be pointed out that the entire period of German Weltanschauungsidealismus in its striving for a Weltanschauungsbilde was basically a protest against the fact that the culture of the time incorporated precisely this world view with the most fruitless perspective; and it may be further pointed out how it actually came about that such a world view could take hold. But to do this, it is necessary to point out a little of the way in which, so to speak, popular thinking, the world-view thinking of the present day, has come about. And since it can be noted again and again how little account is taken of all the circumstances that are drawn upon in these arguments, I would like to point out that what I have to say in this regard is really not only of this war and is not said merely because we are living in these fateful times; rather, as many of the listeners here present know, it has been said and advocated again and again, not only in Germany but also outside of Germany. I would like to emphasize this in particular because it could very easily be thought that these discussions lack objectivity precisely because, in our fateful times, they draw attention to what can help to guide the German soul to what is rooted in the deepest depths of the German national spirit.

If we want to grasp the development of our newer world view, we have to go back – to not go further back – at least to the point in time when, under the impression of powerful external discoveries about the world building of space and also about the world building of time, humanity began to work on the renewal of the world view as well, as it must present itself to the human mind. In this context, it must be pointed out time and again how the work of Copernicus and what was achieved by minds such as Kepler, Giordano Bruno and Galileo in the wake of this work, basically provided the first impetus for the world view under the influence of which present-day education still stands. Today, I would like to focus on the extent to which Europe's individual nations and peoples have worked towards this world view, which now surrounds us in the consciousness of most thinking people; and how, on the other hand, the world view of German idealism has been incorporated into what Europe's peoples have contributed to the common world view.

The spirit that can appear to us as particularly characteristic in the — I would like to say — reshaping of the world view of modern times is that of Giordano Bruno, who was burned in 1600. By pointing to Giordano Bruno, we must point out the contribution that Italian culture, Italian thinking, and Italian striving for a world view has made to general world culture. In earlier lectures I pointed out that the life and striving of the human soul can be seen in three forms of expression by a true spiritual science: as sentient soul, as mind or emotional soul, and as consciousness soul. and that in this surge of inner experience, which comes about under the influence of the forces of the sentient soul, the forces of the mind or emotional soul and the forces of the consciousness soul, the actual self of the human being acts as the all-uniting element. I have also said that today one can certainly scoff at this classification as an arbitrary one, but that in the future spiritual science will make it clear that the division of the human soul into a part of feeling, a part of understanding and a part of consciousness is just as 'scientific' as the division undertaken by physics in order to divide light into seven colors or — we could also say — into three color groups: into the yellowish-reddish part, into the greenish part and into the blue-violet part. Just as one will study the colors of light in this threefold division, not out of arbitrariness but out of an inner nature of the thing, if one wants to come to a result at all, so the human soul in its wholeness must be studied in the three “color nuances” . The reason why the same mental operation that is accepted in physics is regarded as mere speculation in spiritual science is that today we are not accustomed to approaching the soul in the same way that we approach the nature of light in physics. I have also pointed out that the essential thing about the national impulses, in so far as they take hold of the human soul, consists, for example, in the case of the Italian people, in the fact that the impulses which play from the Italian folk soul into the soul of the individual Italian ripen the soul of feeling in the latter , but not in the sense that he is considered as an individual, but as a member of his people; so that a person who strives for a world view within Italian culture will do so as a person pulsating with the power that works through his sentient soul. And if we look at Campanella, at Vanini, and at other spirits in the newer age of Italian culture, we see that it was Giordano Bruno who most vividly expressed this aspect. Bruno, in the dawn of modern times, seizes with the powers, which we say are the powers of the sentient soul, that which Copernicus has brought up as a spatial world view?

Let us take the medieval world view. Man could see no further than the sky, which was bounded by the vault of heaven, in which the stars were set. Then there were the spheres of the individual planets, with the spheres of the sun and moon. Such a world view corresponded to the senses. But it was only compatible with the view of the world of space that preceded Copernicanism. As Copernicanism — I might say — descended into the infinite capacity for enthusiasm of the soul of Giordano Bruno, who with all the depths of his sensibility recognized the world, this view arose in him: What was called the vault of heaven up there is not up there at all; it is not a real boundary, but only a boundary up to which the human view of space comes. The world extends into infinity! And embedded in infinity are innumerable worlds, and dominating these innumerable worlds is the world soul, which, for Giordano Bruno, permeates this perceived universe in the same way that the individual human soul permeates the individual human elements that make up our organism. One needs only to read a page of any of Giordano Bruno's writings to realize that the enthusiasm kindled in his soul by Copernicanism led him to direct his hymns – for that is what his writings on revelation are – to the infinite world building permeated by the soul of the world. And so will others who, like him, have been inspired in their quest by his folk culture. Thus we see how in Giordano Bruno we are confronted with a world picture which everywhere sees not only the material and spatial in the world, but sees everything material and spatial at the same time spiritualized, ensouled; how the individual human soul is for him only an image of the entire world organism, which is permeated by the world soul just as our individual organism is permeated by our soul.

This world view of Giordano Bruno stands before us — I would like to say — formed from the same basis of feeling as the older world view of Dante; only that Dante's world view took up in its poetic creation what had also been handed down from earlier times and led into the infinite, but into the infinite supersensible. I have already pointed out how Giordano Bruno can teach us lessons that are so necessary to learn in the face of the newer spiritual science. For, in the first place, this newer spiritual science is always objected to on the ground that it asserts something that contradicts the “five senses” of man. Now, nothing contradicted the five senses of man more than the world-picture of Copernicus, which made on Giordano Bruno the impression just characterized; nevertheless, the world-picture of Copernicus has entered, if gradually, into the thought-habits of mankind. But other things have also become part of people's thinking. Just as Giordano Bruno called out to his contemporaries: “You imagine space as being limited by the blue vault of heaven; but this blue vault of heaven does not exist, because it is only the limit of your perception,” so the newer spiritual science must speak in the face of what the older world view sees in birth and death as the limitation of the world view. For what appears in birth and death as the limits of the temporal is just as little really there outside of human perception as the blue vault of heaven is really there for the spatial perception outside of human perception. It is only assumed as the boundary of the spatial because the human spatial view only extends as far as the blue vault of heaven. And because in relation to the temporal, human perception only extends to birth and death, birth and death are assumed to be the limits of the temporal; and today, with spiritual science, we stand at the same point in relation to birth and death as Giordano Bruno did in his time.

I would like to say: in order to effectively impress what emerged as his world view on the culture of the time, the stirrings arising from the sentient soul that Giordano Bruno gave to this world view were needed. It is as if what he has to say about the world does not in the least engage his intellect, does not in any way trouble his reason – one has only to read a page of his work to find confirmation of this – but as if everything emerges for him from the most direct intuition, that is how Giordano Bruno speaks. Thus, at the end of the Middle Ages, the Copernican world picture was accepted, which was bound to be accepted because it was so deeply significant for human progress. And so we can say: the “nuance of feeling” of the soul's life is clearly pronounced in the world picture of Giordano Bruno and also in that of those who, with him, received their most significant impulses from the Italian soul. For that is the significant thing that has come from this side to the present day: that all philosophizing, all the gathering of thoughts into a world-view, has flowed out of this most direct life of feeling. What warms the worldview with inner strength comes from this source. Therefore, we may say: insofar as the individual Italian places himself in his nationality, the enthusiastic soul speaks out of him when he wants to work out a worldview.

If we now turn to another current – one of those currents that then led to the modern world view: to the French current, we also find an excellent spirit at the starting point of the newer world view current; but if we look closely, we see him facing the origin of the world view under completely different conditions than Giordano Bruno: Descartes (Cartesius). He is also a spirit who, like Giordano Bruno, belongs to the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but he starts from completely different premises. Let us take a look at these premises as they present themselves in this outstanding mind. What is it that he starts from, in contrast to Giordano Bruno? In Giordano Bruno, we see how he is seized by an ever-increasing enthusiasm for what gives him the foundations of the modern world view. With Descartes, we see the opposite: we see how he starts from doubt, how he realizes that everything that arises from the external world or from within the soul as knowledge, as insight, as experience, can be doubted as to whether it is a reality, whether it is justified, whether it has more justification than a passing dream image. Descartes comes to doubt everything; but he seeks knowledge, to know with inner powers. First of all, he looks for the characteristics that knowledge must have in order for the soul to accept it; and for him, clarity and distinctness are these characteristics. What can present itself most clearly and distinctly to the soul bears the mark of certainty. I would like to say: in the sea of doubt in which he initially finds himself, he realizes that he must seek something that presents itself to him with clarity and distinctness, with transparency; for only that can count as a certainty for him. So it is not the original enthusiasm that drives him, but the striving for clarity, for distinctness and transparency. From this it then follows that he says to himself: And even if I doubt everything, even if everything I could perceive in the external and internal world were only a dream image: I cannot doubt that – whether it be a dream or not, I am thinking this; and if everything that takes place in the sea of experiences and that I can doubt is not, and this is established with clarity above everything: I think – then I am too! And from this clarity and distinctness, the thought arises in him: everything that presents itself to the soul as clearly and distinctly as this model of clarity and distinctness has legitimacy; one may think about the world as one must survey it: I think, therefore I am. And now let us see from this starting-point with Descartes and his followers how a world-picture comes into being that thirsts for clarity and distinctness. This clarity and distinctness was prefigured in Descartes' soul in that he was a great mathematician, and above all a special thinker on the basis of geometry. He demands mathematical clarity for everything that should belong to this world-picture. He and his successors then went on to say: About the world of space and about everything that moves in space, one can gain clarity and distinctness, one can form an image that is inwardly as clear and distinct as only mathematics itself is clear and distinct. But I would like to say that the soul-life actually escaped this world-picture. Not that Descartes denied the soul, but by taking certainty: I think, therefore I am —, he did not take it in such a way that one would get the impression that he delved into the soul as he delved into the external world of space, into what happens externally. What happens externally in space gives him the opportunity to survey the details, and also to survey the context of the details; but the interior remains more or less obscure. He said to himself: “Certain ideas that arise in the soul are clear and distinct; these are ‘innate’ ideas; by arising clearly and distinctly, they structure and organize the soul internally. But a connection between the inner-spiritual and the outer-spatial did not arise for him; they stood side by side like two worlds. Therefore, he could not — like Giordano Bruno, who thought of everything as inspired by the world soul and of this world soul pouring its spiritual impulses into everything — come to think of the soul in everything spatial as well. He said to himself: When I look at an animal, a spatial structure presents itself to me; I can look at it like another spatial structure; but it does not show anything other than spatial structures; therefore it appears like a moving automaton. He did not find in animals that which moves the animal. He found it only in himself. Therefore, he ascribed a soul only to human beings, not to animals. He called animals “living machines” — and with that we have the beginning of a mechanical world view. They were not so bold – neither Descartes nor his disciples – to deny what was present from the old religious tradition, this inner soul, but they sought to consider it as belonging only to humans; and in animals, they considered it as presenting its creations to the soul in the way that mathematical creations present themselves to the soul.

Do we not see clearly and distinctly the working of the intellectual or mind soul, the middle soul, in the striving for clarity and distinctness, which has increasingly become the characteristic of all work on a worldview in France? Until recently, this remained the basic feature of the current that worked from this perspective on the construction of a general world view. One might say that everything in a worldview that is mathematically transparent, that can be expressed in mathematically clear thoughts, that can be presented in such a way that one thing mathematically follows from another, came from this worldview – up to the world view created by Auguste Comte, where everything – from the simplest phenomena of nature to human social coexistence – is to be presented as in a large, powerful painting, with one sentence always following another in mathematics. It would be interesting to show how this nuance of the mind or soul, this systematizing soul, permeates this entire culture, how it forms the innermost nerve of this culture.

And if we now turn to a third current that also had an enormous influence on our intellectual culture, on our intellectual world view of the second half of the last century, if we turn to British culture, we find Bacon, Baco von Verulam, as the dominant spirit, in whose footsteps all of England's other leading spirits still follow. And how does he assert what he has to say? He said to himself: Mankind has lived for too long on mere ideals, has busied itself for too long with mere ideals and mere words, and it should now turn its attention to external things, to the things themselves, that is, to those things that present themselves to external observation ; one could only arrive at a true picture of the world by directing one's eyes and other senses to what is taking place in the external world, and only allowing “thoughts” to be valid insofar as they bring what is happening outside into a context. Bacon became the philosopher of experience, of the world view of experience, the world view that serves to summarize what is happening externally. Hence we see how, in the course of this school of thought, an outstanding mind such as Locke denies the possibility that the soul can gain any knowledge from itself; all it can do is to stand and observe the course of the world; then what it can observe will be written on the soul's blank slate. In this sense, the soul itself is a blank slate, a tabula rasa; not as with Descartes, innate ideas arise that are connected with the essence of the soul. Locke crosses out all innate ideas. For him, the world view arises only from the fact that the human soul focuses on its surroundings, that it analyzes, synthesizes and reflects on what is going on outside. This current extends right up to more recent times. People like John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and others are influenced by an impulse such as that just mentioned. One would like to say: with such a world view, everything that the soul could achieve by developing inwardly and bringing up what it does not yet have when it is placed in the world in a natural way, is rejected, so that it must stop at everything that presents itself externally and apply all the soul's strength to summarizing what presents itself from the outside.

When I first tried to find a concept, an idea for this kind of English philosophy, especially for John Stuart Mill, about fifteen years ago – this is presented in my “World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century” – I struggled to find a suitable expression to characterize John Stuart Mill's world struggled to find a fitting expression to characterize John Stuart Mill's world view; and even then I had to characterize this world view in such a way that I said: This point of view is that of the 'spectator of the world', it is not the point of view of a soul that works inwardly on itself with the belief that it can advance in the knowledge of the inner connections of things through this inner work. John Stuart Mill also takes this standpoint as a spectator, for Mill was also one of the followers of Locke and Bacon, and he faces the world in such a way that he stands before what is presented to the senses externally and what can be joined together in thoughts, just as thoughts are joined and dissolved in everyday life.

Now we see how, in yet another way, Giordano Bruno, Descartes and Bacon in the way they are characterized work on the creation of a world view, in German, Central European intellectual culture on the emergence of a world view; we see how, in solitude, a profound German mind seeks to gain a world view from the depths of the national soul. It is easy to misunderstand this thinker, who strives for the highest possible insights for a human being, and to ridicule him; but when we speak of German intellectual life, we must draw attention to this one man: Jakob Böhme, who lived at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is certainly easy to misjudge this simple shoemaker from Görlitz, for he did not speak as did Copernicus or Giordano Bruno, who drafted a world picture out of his elementary intuitive perception; nor did he speak out of a striving for clarity and distinctness, as we find in Descartes, and he spoke even less like Bacon, who wanted to summarize what presents itself outwardly to the senses. Rather, he spoke in such a way that when he delved into his soul or was with nature, something was there that had not been there before; he spoke of how an inward path is traversed that leads to the innermost secrets of existence. He spoke of what ignited within him when, as a shepherd boy, he once looked into a hole in the ground at the top of a mountain and saw a metal vessel full of gold in the recess. He said that this experience ignited something within him, and he wanted to say: A spark has been kindled in my soul, which has been ignited by the spirit that is weaving in the world; I felt connected to the spirit living in the world. And he goes on to tell us how he pursued this experience in his soul and also lived in a state of soul alienated from everyday life for seven days, how he had gone through a “paradise and realm of joy,” how he did not feel connected to reality through his senses, nor to what the senses presented through his mind, but how he felt connected through his soul to what invisibly and supersensibly reigns in things. But when he told this to his master, with whom he was then apprenticed, the latter told him to get out of there, because he could not use any young house prophets! And many still speak like this master today; in this respect, people have not become more understanding.

But if we delve into Jakob Böhme, we see how he wants to tie his soul to what pulses through the soul spiritually and emotionally. While Giordano Bruno directed his soul outwards, in order to see the 'soul of the world' everywhere, which he assumed, it is the case with Jakob Böhme that he only wants to form and shape his soul inwardly, that he does not want to look at the soul of the world outwardly, but rather immerses himself in it, so that he participates in the life of this soul of the world. Participates, I said. This is the starting point for world views that arise from a dark urge, for Jakob Böhme works without external scholarship, only from his soul. It is the beginning of the striving of a soul that draws its impulses from the impulses of the German national soul: this immersion in what is otherwise only observed or what is presented in clarity and distinctness. Jakob Böhme would not have understood what Cartesius strove for; for him it was not a matter of clarity and distinctness, but of allowing the soul to live the life of the great world soul. And if he could do that, then it did not matter to him whether it was clear and distinct, because “it is simply experienced!” And this “it is experienced” has remained like an impact, like a ferment within the striving of the German national spirit. Those spirits whom I mentioned in my lecture of eight days ago are the continuers of that first germ which was in Jakob Böhme; one can still see in them how they only want to strive clearly for what was already in Jakob Böhme's striving, which can be expressed by saying that he wanted to experience the secrets of the world — not just look at them!

Now, however, we must look at a second starting point for the more recent striving for a worldview if we want to recognize all the forces that are inherent in this newer striving for a worldview. This other starting point is often more admired today by people who are striving for a worldview than the starting point of Jacob Boehme; it is the one that is also found in a German mind, and again in an eminently cosmopolitan mind, namely in Leibniz. His world view is similar to that of Giordano Bruno, but expressed in a German world view nuance. If we want to characterize the Italian world view, we have to say: it is born out of the sentient soul. In the same sense, the French world view is born out of the mind or mind soul; especially when studying Cartesius, one notices this to a very special degree. The British world view is born entirely out of the consciousness soul, out of that consciousness soul which, especially in the stage of observation, is able to focus on what is external and what the mind can bring to consciousness from it. The German view of the world emerges from the I itself, from the most intimate inner workings of the soul. And just as light is present in both the red-yellow and the green-blue-violet, so the I is present in the sentient soul, in the mind or emotional soul and also in the consciousness soul, , but is therefore also a continuous back-and-forth striving, sometimes striving for the sentient soul, as with Jakob Böhme, sometimes more inclined towards the intellectual soul, as with Leibniz. What Jakob Böhme strives for inwardly as a way of living in the soul of the world, Leibniz strives for through the intellect, but not, as is the case with Descartes, not as a mathematical mind, but as a soul that has a clear awareness that man in his essence is a part of the whole world. And so Leibniz said to himself: What I am as a soul, a conceiving being, is basically everywhere, underlying the whole world. What we see in space is not a mere spatial construction, but the reality is that everything that is reality outside is of the same kind as that which is within me; only my soul comes to an alert consciousness, as it were. In the beings outside, which are not human, there are also such basic components as are present in humans. Leibniz calls them “monads.” What is “really” in them is consciousness. Only the monads of the mineral and plant kingdoms have something like a sleeping consciousness; then they become more and more aware and aware, to finally come to self-awareness in the human kingdom.

For Leibniz, the world is composed entirely of monads, and if you do not see the world as monads, it is because you see it indistinctly – as it is with a swarm of mosquitoes, which, seen from a distance, appears indistinct and looks like a cloud, but as soon as you get closer, it dissolves into the individual mosquitoes. So, for example, the table in front of me consists of monads, but these monads are seen pushed together like the individual midges in a swarm. Thus, for Leibniz, the entire world consists of individual monads, and just as the individual monads are mirrored in the whole world, so they are a microcosm in the macrocosm. One must imagine that the entire world is mirrored in every single monad, and a harmony implanted by the original monad spreads throughout the whole.

If one wants to characterize the salient feature of this Leibnizian world view, one must say: the salient feature is its abstractness, its thoughtfulness; and this abstract-thoughtfulness is indeed immediately apparent when one looks at it more closely. For what would be the use of it if, as Leibniz does with regard to the individual monads, one were to dwell only on a clock and say: the individual link, the individual cogwheel would be effective with the whole clock, would thus be a “little clock,” and all the effects of the clock would find expression in it? Certainly, anyone who has knowledge of the composition of the clock can say how its individual parts are connected. But what would it matter if one were to say that the real characteristic of the clock is its harmony? One encompasses it with an abstract concept. Today, however, people are usually glad when they can put an abstract concept for something; but one cannot grasp a clock through the mere concept of harmony. In this we can feel the contrast between a rational, abstract world view, as offered to us by Leibniz, and an ever-increasing immersion in the workings and weaving of the world spirit, as first presented to us by Jakob Böhme, albeit more in the form of a hunch.

In a similar way to Descartes, who sought the possibility of mathematically subordinating thoughts to the world view, Spinoza also strove for a world view that is comprehensible like a mathematical system; but at the same time, he wanted to shape it in such a way that, as one ascends from concept to concept, an ever higher and higher experience of the human soul results. He characteristically calls his mathematical world picture 'ethics' because, as he strings concept to concept, each successive one leads the soul ever deeper into the secrets of existence, until the soul, by becoming ever more absorbed in the concepts that lead from mathematics to mathematics, can feel at one with the unified substance of the world, with the unified spirit of the universe. It is an inward progression, a self-development in Spinoza. Therefore Spinoza stands alone in his striving for a world view. He has the impact that he was able to get from Descartes; but he has brought it into his world view in a deeper way through what he himself was able to get.

All the elements that have now been mentioned have influenced, in a certain way, what the world view of the nineteenth century has now become. But one can say: the blossoming and development of what was called “German Idealism” here eight days ago was a protest — which only never came to full effectiveness — against the fact that the world view developed into what Herman Grimm said: “A carrion bone that a hungry dog would avoid would be a refreshing, appetizing piece compared to this excrement of creation.” And it was always the case with the most outstanding minds, who stood with their natures within the development of the German people, that they endeavored to take up all the impulses that necessarily entered into the spiritual development of humanity in the construction of their world view, but to shape this world view in such a way that the striving for a worldview is not merely looking, not merely “watching”, but inner experience. Thus we see that in the characteristic spirit of German striving — in Goethe — the individual members, the various parts of the currents of world-view, are absorbed. In Goethe's 'Faust', which in this respect is a reflection of his own striving, we can see how his Faust develops out of the details of external observation, how he wants to arrive at an overall feeling for what permeates and animates the world. This is truly the spirit of Giordano Bruno. In this, and in the other, how later Goethe did not rest until he could fully immerse himself in Italian art, we see everywhere something of that nuance of feeling of the soul that seeks to expand one's own self into the world's self. And this already flows through the first parts that Goethe wrote down of his Faust.

On the other hand, we can see how the second world-view current, which in Descartes took the form of the pursuit of clarity and distinctness, has taken on a characteristically materialistic expression in Europe. Goethe was already aware of this as a young man when he was in Strasbourg, in Holbach's “Systeme de la nature”. I have already indicated how Descartes, in his world view, presents animals as animated automatons that are not ensouled. From what this Cartesian world view and, later, the British world view, which spread to the continent through Voltaire and fully embraced the aforementioned rejection of what the soul can inwardly achieve in inward striving, in order to accept only that which can be space can be systematized: from this arose the world view that Goethe opposed in Holbach's “Systeme de la nature,” which knows only the moving atoms that group themselves into molecules, and through whose agglomerations everything that can be seen in the world is said to arise. That world picture, which seeks to resolve everything into the effect of moving atoms and molecules, has clarity, the greatest clarity, and distinctness, a clarity, a distinctness that cannot be increased in such a world picture. But everything of a spiritual-soul nature must fall away from such a world picture. There is no room in it for anything of a spiritual-soul nature.

Goethe was already confronted with such a world view in his youth. He rejected it by saying:

Goethe finds this world view “cold and barren”.

And now we see how Goethe, summarizing everything that is in his soul, wants to combine clarity and distinctness with direct experience, in a way that was not present in Descartes. This is the characteristic that enters into the German world view during Goethe's time. How do we see the striving for clarity and distinctness in Descartes? In such a way that what one looks at, what one thinks about, must show itself clearly and distinctly. It must show itself clearly and distinctly to the observer. Goethe is clear about the fact that one does not gain any knowledge at all by merely seeing things clearly and distinctly placed before one; but he is clear about it, even if he does not want to stop at the mere inkling of Jakob Böhme: If one wants to gain a real world view that corresponds to reality, one must immerse oneself in things, to witness the forming of the crystal by placing oneself in the position of the forces that form the crystal; and in the same way, one must enter into the plant, witness the forces that make the plant a plant, and immerse oneself in all beings. Goethe does not want an abstract world view, cobbled together out of monads and harmonies, but a world view that is experienced. But not, as with Jakob Böhme, only intuitively, but by immersing oneself in all the things of the world, and through this immersion, the human being undergoes the path by which he or she approaches more and more the innermost sources of existence. That is why the world view that presented itself to him in Spinoza's work was able to have such an effect on Goethe. Spinoza never had the impulse to immerse his soul in the real external world. He sought to string together the impressions of the world in front of him, one after the other, but in such a way that the soul would undergo something in the process. Not that Goethe was ever a devout follower of Spinoza's world view; only those who know nothing about Goethe can say that. Rather, it is the case that Goethe felt the way he wanted to find his way into a world view with Spinoza, found it with him. The only difference is that what Spinoza strove for in an abstract way, Goethe wanted to seek in a concrete way. Just as Spinoza moves from concept to concept, Goethe wanted to move from plant to plant in order to experience what the plant experiences. Goethe called the soul's attainment by immersing itself in the plant world the “Utrpflanze”; and what the soul experienced by immersing itself in the animal world in the same way, he called the “Urtier”. Thus for Goethe the striving for a world-picture became a participation, but not a dark one as in Jakob Böhme; but the experience itself was to proceed in clarity and distinctness. This is witnessed to by Goethe's little essay on the “Metamorphosis of Plants”, in which he describes how the plant develops from root to leaf and to flower, with constant transformations taking place. But we must always bear in mind that Goethe sought to achieve his goal by immersing himself in the essence of things. While Cartesius, in his world view, threw everything of a spiritual nature out of the essence, for example out of animals, and turned them into living automatons, Goethe allowed his own soul to flow into plants, into animals, into the whole world, in order to connect with it in his soul and to recognize it clearly. Clarity and distinctness of experience is what entered the world-view striving of German idealism in Goethe's time. What Cartesius makes an external characteristic of knowledge, which he presents and behaves as a spectator, Goethe connects with the inner experience. And what is wrested with dark, elemental power from the soul of Jakob Böhme and expressed in his words, is also present in Goethe; but in that it shows itself in him, we find it in clarity and distinctness.

Now, however, we see in Goethe what the three great minds also strove for, which were cited as characteristic of German idealism.

Let us look at Fichte. Eight days ago, we characterized how he strives to gain a world view by seeking certainty entirely from the impulses of the innermost part of man, the I. And if we want to see through Fichte completely, what then dominates in his world view? We might put it this way: what dominates in his world view is everything that a person can develop within themselves, without directing any kind of gaze to the outside world, by gaining self-awareness. This is a welling up and flowing up from the innermost depths of the soul. I have often characterized it here: every external thing can be named by everyone in the same way as the name expresses it; but we can only name the I in such a way, if it is to express our being, by letting it resound within ourselves. Fichte did not express this; but it underlies his entire world view as an impulse, and he starts from the assumption that the I is only there when it places itself in the world. A volitional decision, then, is what Fichte seeks as the center of the development of his worldview. And he asserts of the ego — and this already characterizes Fichte's worldview — that it can find out of itself what the mission of itself is. For Fichte, this is the moral worldview. And the national world exists only to engage in moral activity. Thus, for Fichte, everything is permeated by the divine within man. Everything else is only appearance, is only created so that the moral world order can be active. The will, which is grasped in the consciousness of self, in the point of self-awareness, and radiates from the consciousness of self, is grasped as part of the soul of the world.

The way in which Fichte presents this shows us that, in a sense, he starts from full self-consciousness. Just as the light appears in every single color nuance – to return to this comparison – he starts from the self that appears in all three soul members; but he lets it prevail in such a way that it works through the consciousness soul. And in this respect, I would say that in Fichte we have the thinker who is the antipode, the opposite pole, of the British spirit. While the British spirit essentially brings to bear that which can prevail in the soul impulses in the consciousness soul, Fichte radiates everything that lives in the I into the consciousness soul. Hence the British spirit in Spencer's more recent work has come to expect the blessing of the world above all from the establishment of such an outer order, whereby the whole outer world is so arranged that the greatest possible benefit for outer human needs arises. What industrialization can offer humanity stands as an ideal in Spencer's world view; and to him, every link in a social order that is incompatible with the industrialization of society appears to be a curse, because the industrialization of society, of the state, brings eternal peace, according to Spencer, and works to eradicate everything that endangers peace. Thus the ultimate principle of utility has been incorporated into the world view.

With Fichte, we see that he is no less a practical mind. We have been able to emphasize how he directly influenced the development of his time, for example through his “Speeches to the German Nation,” how he stirred hearts, how he awakened enthusiasm, how his entire work is aimed at , but to take hold of what is not from the point of view of the external world of the highest benefit to mankind, but what is to be placed as the deepest ideals of the soul in the moral world order. So we see how Fichte works out of the nuance of the consciousness soul and, as it were, brings about the counter-image of the British spirit.

A spirit that places at the center of his world view what the soul can experience within itself, but which, through the way in which he processes this, is infinitely close to the French spirit, is Flegel. Hegel is one of the most German thinkers because he accomplishes from the opposite side what is peculiar to the French mind. Clarity and distinctness, systematic order in the spectator's point of view, in the point of view that is gained when one only confronts the world: that is what has emerged from Cartesius to Bergson as the characteristic of the French world view. Hegel wants to have the world picture as an experience; but he can only absorb from this world picture that which is as clear and distinct as a mathematical concept. That is why Hegel's world picture seems as clear as a mathematical concept. That is why one has the “cold feeling” towards it, as I have explained. But it is not a system of mathematical concepts that has been picked up, but it is conceived in such a way that it touches the soul in its deepest innermost being. And by touching the soul in its deepest innermost being, it finds itself elevated above all that is unclear and indistinct in the external view. But what remains for it, after all that is vague and indistinct has fallen away from it, is the clarity of the full being — to the point of the Gnostic and philosophical concept. What characterizes Hegel's world picture is this: even if it contains only external abstractions, these abstractions are experienced, directly experienced. That makes a great deal, to be sure. First of all, it makes it unthinkable for someone to become a “true Hegelian.” Basically, one cannot become a true Hegelian; it is an impossibility. Because thinking, continuing these external abstractions, really has no appeal for anyone else, and one always has the feeling that once someone has done this, that is enough in the world. What matters is the endeavor to see how the human soul can be experienced if one only experiences concepts, if one only feels as inner direct experience that which is a clear but also completely abstract concept. The pursuit of such a world view is what is admirable about Hegel; looking at him as he pursues it is what matters. Particularly when one is absorbed in a work such as his Phenomenology of Spirit (though admittedly very few people will be able to immerse themselves in it), one has a web of nothing but abstractions, of the most terrible abstractions; but it has life, it has soul. It is a characteristic sign that the German mind has once gone so far in its experience of a world picture that it said to itself: I find no clarity and distinctness anywhere; I will see what happens when I let one concept arise from the other. While Fichte allows the divine essence of the world to merge into “God as moral world order,” for Hegel God is the “world thinker”; and the individual soul can immerse itself through the most abstract logic by reflecting on the divine thoughts. That is certainly the tremendously sobering and cold thing about Hegel's philosophy, that if you get involved with it, you must get the thought: the divine order of the world was only concerned with “thinking,” and in order to represent thinking, everything else was represented. A moral worldview warms us; a moral worldview also, so to speak, places us in everyday life. Thinking only allows us to “behold” the world, and in this respect, beholding is also an experience with Hegel. And because it is the experience that is important in forming the world view of German idealism, we see how it is made fruitful by Hegel in such a way that he does not lose himself in the most external abstractions, but adheres to the thoughts that the divine order of the world allows the human race to experience by letting it go through history. The human soul is, as it were, directed to go through history in order thereby to take part in the course of the divine world-order. This “taking part” in the world, which I indicated in a much more universal sense in Goethe, is what we encounter in Hegel in relation to history. The way in which the thoughts run in relation to history, so they contribute to a world-picture of history. But in this experience of the logic of the world, history becomes for him what it must become: a twofold one. The whole ancient history up to the appearance of Christ on earth is the one part; and the appearance of Christ is a mighty impact, is the most powerful impact on earth-history, in order to bring something completely new into human evolution, which was not previously connected with the earth, and which now guides earthly evolution. The Christ-idea connects in the characterized way with the historical world picture, which the German evolution has brought forth. For Hegel, the whole of history is a progression conceived by the divine world government, so that it presents itself as an education of humanity to freedom. And the greatest educator, but one who divides the entire progress of earthly evolution into two parts, is the Christ-Being, which has come into earthly evolution from without — also in Hegel's sense. And the characteristic feature is this: with the clarity and distinctness that Cartesius demands, but with which all experience is also connected in Hegel, the soul can live itself into the whole course of history; there it immerses itself in the stage in which in which the event of Golgotha took place, and experiences in microcosm what the whole development of the earth has gone through, in that the Christ has incorporated Himself into the development of the earth.

Thus Hegel anchors his world picture in the soul of the intellect, and thereby becomes the opposite pole to Descartes' world view, just as Fichte is the opposite pole to the British world view.

The case is different when we come to the third of the thinkers mentioned, Schelling. One could say of him that his outer thinking already expresses how he can be brought into a relationship with the southern world view, the Italian one. I have already mentioned how he seeks to shape what underlies all natural and historical becoming out of a heightened imagination. In this regard, Schelling's outward appearance is physiognomically significant: his eyes, which sparkled throughout his life, bore witness to inner fire; the powerful forehead, his sardonic laughter and the inner fire made him a spirit similar to Giordano Bruno. Whereas in Fichte we have the point where the German mind tends towards the same nuance of soul as the British mind, but in complete contrast to it, and wants to grasp world events from within—whereas the German mind produces in Hegel something that is still opposed to the French mind , but which is more similar to it, the German spirit produces something in Schelling that is completely similar to Giordano Bruno, because Schelling works in just the same way as Giordano Bruno according to the nuances of the soul. It is only that Schelling builds his world view in a slightly different way than Giordano Bruno in all of nature and history. And while in Fichte the world-spirit pervading the world is the moral order of the world, while in Hegel we see this world-spirit as the clear and distinct logical thinker of the world, in Schelling — similarly to Giordano Bruno — we have before us the highest artist, art itself, the artist who creates everything in the world according to artistic principles. But if we compare Schelling's unique quest with Giordano Bruno's, we see again the difference between the work of the Italian national soul, which comes from the soul of feeling, and the work of the German national soul, which comes from the ego. In Giordano Bruno, everything is, as it were, of a piece, everything bears a common character. I would like to say: Giordano's world view is as clear as a shot. In Schelling, we see how he starts from the world view of his youth, how he laboriously searches to feel some of it, how one can experience a spark of world life in nature. And he arrives at the view that whatever lives in my spirit as feeling also lives in matter; matter is enchanted feeling, I must release it from the enchantment, must disenchant it; the experiencing of everything that is in nature is an experiencing of feeling. While Giordano Bruno attempts to gain his world-picture as if in a single bound, Schelling sets out on a journey. And I might say that from year to year we can follow how he seeks to penetrate deeper and deeper into the secrets of the existence of the world. He is passing through the path of evolution. He had to go through it in such a way that in his youth he was still understood in the way the inwardness of the I had opened up to him; later, when he still wanted to show the I in the moral world, he was no longer understood, and in the end he was laughed at and ridiculed.

The world view of German idealism is above all a path into the deeper foundations of world existence. If I may use an image, I would say: the British world view is like a person who is in a house and looks out of a window. What he sees there, he takes as the description of the world; and so he takes what he sees through the tools of the house as the world itself. German idealism is pointed in the direction of seeking to experience the world-spirit together with it. If we follow the path, however, we see how he, also living in a house, grasps himself inwardly. In Schelling, Hegel, Fichte, we see that German idealism seeks to make itself at home in the house; it sees meaningful images everywhere in the house, and the “images” already express the external entities; and because it wants to decipher the images, it seeks a world picture. Fichte seeks it in the moral soul: a world picture, sketched in the house, not created through the windows. Hegel explains the pictures in the house that represent nature and humanity. Schelling, in turn, deciphers another part, or rather, Schelling makes “house music,” and in it he sees an imprint of what is going on outside. Hegel sees what has been painted about what is outside. All these minds have a world picture ; but they have created a home in order to decipher what is in the house. What they have not come to, however, is, I might say, the door of the house – that they might go out, so that when they had come through the gate they might fuse the image with reality, might experience it directly.

It is true that Goethe took this path – through the gate. But he also went through all the difficulties of this path. He showed us how we must struggle endlessly to find an expression for what we experience when we really set out on the path of experience. Thus he went through the experience with its struggles and difficulties, which such an experience must go through, just as one who seeks development must go through life. We see how Goethe defined a certain stage of his life in Faust of 1797, which he characteristically calls a “barbaric composition” and of which he is convinced that something completely new must come in at a new stage of his life. That is one of the characteristics of the German view of the world: it can never be “finished”. That superficial judgment, which finds the great only “great” when it is “flawless,” is not a judgment suited to the hero of human endeavor. Anyone who might entertain the opinion that we can have a work of art in the Faust that is just as perfect as that given us by Dante in his Divine Comedy would be mistaken. In Dante's work, everything is magnificently complete, as if cast from a single mold; in Goethe's, the individual parts are written piece by piece, one after the other, with each one left lying around for years, then taken up again, and so on. It really is, as he himself says, a “barbaric composition.” Goethe's Faust is certainly incomplete as a work of art, for the reason that it could not become a unified composition from a single mold, because it always went along with life. But the point is not that we say: Faust of 1797 is a barbaric composition, a “Tragelaph”, as Goethe put it, but that we take Goethe's point of view and try to understand how it can be a barbaric composition; only in this way do we escape blindness, while one can only speak of recognition with the abstract word.

Thus Goethe goes the way through the gate, knowing that one can go out through the gate, and differs from the philosophers in that he tries to get ahead. But at the same time he knows: whatever man can imagine of himself, whatever picture he can make of himself, it cannot be what Fichte presents in his philosophy, nor what Schelling or Hegel present; otherwise one arrives at nothing but abstractions, at an abstract moral world order and the like.

What then is it in the Goethean sense that man can only gain as an idea of himself? It is Homunculus, as he presents him in the second part of Faust, the little man Homunculus, an artificial product of what man can know of himself. This must now first be submerged into living nature. And how that which man bears of himself must merge with living nature, that Goethe presents in turn. In the lowest becoming you must begin, Homunculus is told.

Thus Goethe presents the process of development in its entire becoming. For example, when he speaks of the passage through the plant stage, where he uses the words: “It grunet so.” He admonishes the homunculus to immerse himself in the entire process of development; he even admonishes him: “Do not strive for higher places” - it must be “places”, not “orders”, as it because Goethe spoke in an unclear Frankfurt dialect, the transcriber wrote a “d” instead of a “t”; and the Goethe commentators have thought a lot about how the homunculus should come to all kinds of medals. And then it is further explained how, by becoming part of the world, he can come to appear as Helen; for what appears in Helen is the human reproduction of what passes through the secrets of the world.

Thus, in Goethe we see the setting out for a world picture. The German spirit is aware: I must go out through the gate to what is present in living nature; then, in the continuous development of my soul, a world picture will come about. This world picture, however, demands what it means to experience the world. Patience for this was not yet present in the second half of the nineteenth century. Therefore, the striving for a world view, as it was inaugurated by Goethe, is being held back. So it could come about that in the second half of the nineteenth century — characteristically in Karl Vogt, Büchner and Moleschott, who are referred to as the “materialists,” Haeckel himself could be mentioned in this context — that which the British world view has brought has been resurrected. One can say that the British world view was absorbed by the German spirit in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is Haeckel's tragedy that he must now turn against the British world view, even though it has entered into the German striving through the characterized development.

But in this respect, too, the German conception of the world differs from the British one: the British conception is satisfied with the pursuit of ideas that merely synthesize the external sense world, and it allows “faith” in some spiritual world to coexist with the external conception of the world in which it believes, as a “scientific” conception of the world. Thus, for Darwin, faith can arise as he expressed it in his main scientific work, saying: “Thus we have traced the life of organisms back to a few to whom – as he puts it – the Creator has breathed life!” Yes, the remarkable thing happened that the German translator even left this sentence out at first! For the German mind everything must be capable of furnishing the basis for a Weltanschhauung; for the British mind this demand need not be satisfied, because it does not have the consistency to build up its Weltbild to such an extent that everything becomes material for its Weltanschhauung. It can afford a “double entry”: the scientific world provides it with the building blocks for what it considers to be scientifically correct; for the rest, there is faith. For the German mind, no double-entry bookkeeping is good enough. That is why German idealism was overwhelmed by English empiricism. That is why we see strange phenomena in the German pursuit of a world view. I will cite only Du Bois-Reymond: in him lives the admiration for the Descartes-Laplacean spirit, which thinks the world as a great mathematician might have put it together from atoms and forces. But: Ignorabimus! We can never know anything about the soul and spirit. Cartesius and Giordano Bruno did not need to go so far as this. But Du Bois-Reymond goes so far as to say: “[...] that where supernaturalism begins, science ends.” Descartes does not say this, but Du Bois-Reymond does, where we find the German spirit overwhelmed by Descartes. And so one can show further how the Italian spirit, that of Giordano Bruno, has flowed into numerous endeavors of the German striving for a world view. Thus today we already find many who show how the plant has a “soul” and how everything is ensouled. We need only think of Raoul France. But we could also mention many of his contemporaries, even Fechner himself, who says that everything has a soul: a revival of the spirit of Giordano Bruno. But something is missing. What is missing is precisely what lived in Giordano Bruno. That is why I have often been able to point out: when someone like Raoul France comes and says: there are plants – when certain animals come near them, they attract them, lure them; once the animal has crept into them, they close up a gap and suck it dry... don't we see a soul life in the plant? We have to say: if you read the same thing in Giordano Bruno, you would fully understand it because it is imbued with the impulse of the sentient soul. But when it occurs, as it has done through the clarity and distinctness of German idealism, then what I have often stated applies: there is something that, by the very nature of its being, attracts small animals, absorbs them – very much like the Venus flytrap – and then even kills them. It is the mousetrap. And just as one can explain the ensoulment of plants in the sense of Giordano Bruno, so one can also want to explain the ensoulment of a mousetrap.

The fact that certain ideological impulses poured into the worldview of German idealism, which is the protest against all externalization of the worldview, means that something has taken place that can be said of: German idealism has retreated for a while into German souls and minds. And today we see it only as an ideal of struggle, of inner discipline; we see it as transformed into outer action, again filling souls with hope and confidence and with strength. But we must realize that this power is the same power that once sought an inward world-view through an inward struggle on the road to the world-picture of idealism. And this world-picture of German idealism is in reality that which the German spirit must seek as lying on its own predetermined road. And our fateful time contains many, many admonitions, but undoubtedly also the admonition that the German spirit must struggle to bring forth again that which is in its deepest depths, so that it may be an obvious part of all its striving, of all its work.

I do not believe that this could lead to a lesser understanding of the peculiarities of other nations, that the German spirit will become aware that it must become the bearer of the world view of inwardly experienced idealism. On the contrary: the more the German brings to the world that which lives in his soul as his deepest being, the more he will be valued in the world. We shall be all the more understood if we bear in mind the words of Goethe:

“The German runs no greater danger than that of rising with and by his neighbors; perhaps no nation is better suited to develop out of itself, because it has been to its great advantage that the outside world took notice of it so late.”

And indeed, it has taken so little notice to this day that it was possible to make such judgments about the German character as were heard.

This is what German idealism calls to us as a warning in our fateful time: may the self-confidence of the German national soul awaken in our souls! This German idealism had to produce a moral, logical, artistic world view in the house, since it already reigned, I might say, in the house; it had the gift of recognizing the world – in paintings in the house. And it must find the way through the gate into the surrounding area. And he must recognize what this path looks like, in contrast to others, which leads not only to looking at the surroundings through the windows, as is the case with the British world view, but to reaching these surroundings through the gate, to lovingly reach everything in the world by becoming one with it. If German idealism practised itself by contemplating the world pictures of the microcosm, the human body, it will also find the gate out of the body to the path already indicated by Goethe, and which leads to seeking the world view experienced with things instead of the merely conceived, devised, inwardly fought world view. is contained in the first ominous lines of Jakob Böhme, which in Goethe's work have taken on clear contours and shine forth as an ideal for the future, and which does not remain limited to the ideas suggested by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, who were looking at the paintings in the house, but which can also find its way through the gate to connect the living human soul with the living soul of the world.

Allow me today to make a few suggestions, perhaps in a somewhat aphoristic form, about the interrelationship between body, soul and spirit in humans and then, based on this, to make a few comments about the relationship of humans to birth and death and to the universe in general. It goes without saying that all of this can only be hinted at. But those of the honored audience who have heard some or all of this year's winter lectures will find much of what can only be presented in aphorisms today more or less substantiated in the previous reflections, which, after all, dealt in detail with important questions of the life of the mind and soul. Especially during this winter and last winter, I often allowed myself to make the observation that spiritual science, as it is intended in the considerations presented in these lectures, is not something that wants to enter the spiritual cultural development of humanity today as if by the arbitrariness of an individual, but that it is deeply rooted in the spiritual life as it has gradually developed over time to our days. So that one can say: Especially when one looks through the nineteenth century, in many places there is a kind of approach to such a spiritual science. But due to very understandable circumstances, it has been brought about that in the course of the nineteenth century, and especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, the extraordinarily successful and, in its successes, by the spiritual science absolutely not to be doubted by spiritual science, has occupied the minds, and that as a result the beginnings of an actual spiritual-scientific world view have been more subdued than might otherwise have been the case.

In particular, it seems to me that Goethe's world view contains the most significant first steps towards a spiritual science and that basically, if Goethe's world view is really penetrated, one cannot doubt that in this Goethean view of the world there really is something like a germ from which spiritual science can develop. Certainly, in the course of the nineteenth century, people believed that they understood Goethe very deeply. They also honestly tried. But what is present in him as the most significant seeds of a spiritual-scientific view of the world can only be gained if one not only tries to turn one's soul's gaze directly to what Goethe himself , but when one tries to put oneself completely into the way he thought, how he looked at things, when one, so to speak, not only wants to be his observer, but his successor. It is well known, and I have also pointed this out several times in these lectures, how Goethe raised himself to a meaningful view of nature, let us say first in his observation of the metamorphosis of plants. What did he want to achieve with this metamorphosis of plants? Well, he wanted to show, first of all, that the plant being that expresses itself in roots, leaves, petals and fruit consists of individual members, but in such a way that these individual members arise from each other, are transformations of each other. He wanted to gain a comprehensive view of the plant being, for example, by trying to show that What we see as a colored petal is, from a certain point of view, essentially the same as the green leaf of the plant, only a metamorphosed, transformed leaf. And the fine organs that we find in the blossom, which we recognize as stamens, and so on, are in turn transformed petals, right up to the fruit. For Goethe, everything in the plant comes into being through the leaf transforming itself backwards and forwards, as it were. For him, the whole plant becomes a leaf, but a leaf that takes on different forms. In this way, spiritual contemplation in Goethe's sense, I would like to say, the intense focus on the individual part of the plant, rises to a whole of the plant, but to a whole that is spiritual, and that he now calls the type of the plant. It is remarkable that during his journey in Italy, Goethe believed that he was able to awaken more and more thoroughly in his mind what cannot be perceived with the outer senses in the plant, but what lives in the plant sensually - Goethe calls it a sensual-supersensible form - and what is expressed in different forms as a leaf, as a flower petal, as a stamen and so on. He also calls this type, which is sensual and supersensory, the idea of the plant. And I have already spoken here in earlier times about what was said after a botanical lecture given by the Jena professor Batsch, between Schiller and Goethe, who had both listened to the lecture. Schiller had found that it was all very nice and good, but that it did not form a whole, that it all crumbled away into mere details, that there was no overview. Goethe took a sheet of paper and sketched an ideal plant in front of Schiller's eyes, a plant that cannot be found anywhere in the physical world, but which he believed he could grasp as a sensual and supersensual form and that lives in every plant, so that every plant is only a particular manifestation of this, as he said, primal plant. So Goethe drew something that can never be found here or there with the naked eye. Schiller, who was not yet completely at home with such things at the beginning of the 1790s, could not find his way at all in what Goethe wanted with this primal plant. He said, “Yes, that's an idea, it's not a view; you can't see it anywhere!” Goethe became annoyed at this objection and said, “If what I have drawn here is an idea, then I perceive my ideas with my eyes!” Now, that was certainly a somewhat extreme way of expressing it, a slight exaggeration. But Goethe felt that he had not merely recorded an abstract idea, but something that arose in his soul with such inner necessity as arises for the eye in the individual plant life when the eye focuses on the individual plant. This life, with the sensual and the supersensual, as he called it, was a reality for Goethe; it was a reality for him.

Now Goethe pursued such observations with zeal and real effort. Those who have studied Goethe's endeavors know that he made all possible observations with real scientific effort, together with the Jena professors, especially with Loder. Goethe pursued the endeavors with zeal in order to arrive at something that could justify a similar approach for the whole realm of living beings. And it is well known – one need only read Goethe's scientific writings – how he then tried to find out for the human and animal forms as well how the various organs are basically only transformations of a basic form of the organ. And as I said, you can read about it in Goethe's scientific writings, how he, as it were, through a flash of inspiration, but one that was prepared for by his careful anatomical studies, found a happily burst animal skull on his second Italian journey and how the bones of the head, in their shell-like form, are only transformed and how their original form is that which we find superimposed on each other in the spine as vertebrae. One such vertebra, of which there are 30 to 33 stacked on top of each other, is transformed in a corresponding way, so to speak, puffed up by its inner driving forces – forgive the trivial expression – and internally shaped to match certain parts of the cranium, so that for Goethe the cranium is a transformed vertebra.

I am well aware of how this Goethean way of looking at things has been transformed by modern views. That is not what matters now, but the way of thinking, not the details. Now, one can assume that perhaps at the very moment when it dawned on him that the cranial bones are transformed vertebral bones, something is at work and driving in the vertebral bone, which, while remaining hidden in the vertebral bone, remained hidden in the vertebra, rises up, —- the idea occurred to him that the entire human brain is also transformed nervous substance, a transformed nerve link, just as such nerve links are now organized in the spinal cord. This means that not only the outer covering of the spinal cord and the skull present themselves as transformation forms of each other, but that the brain shows itself at a higher level as a transformation of what is found inside the spinal cord bone column as nerve organs, ganglia, if you will call them, superimposed on each other. This thought suggested itself at the time when Goethe had formulated the other thought with what he considered absolute certainty. But he did not elaborate on this thought, so that it cannot be found in his writings for the time being.

Perhaps I may mention that I have been intensively involved with Goethe's scientific studies for more than thirty years now and that it was clear to me from the beginning that the last thought must have been added to the first one by Goethe. But of course it would be something special if one could prove that Goethe really conceived this thought in connection with the first one. And when I was allowed to work in the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar from 1890 to 1897, it was natural for me to pursue such things. And already in the early 1890s, in about 1891, I was able to open a notebook that Goethe kept during the same period in which he made his discovery about the whirling nature of the skull bones. And in this notebook, written in Goethe's distinctive pencil letters, we find the following entry: “The brain itself is only a large main ganglion. The organization of the brain is repeated in every ganglion, so that each ganglion can be seen as a small subordinate brain.”

Thus the brain, the whole brain, is only that which we find in every link of the nervous system, at a different stage of development! Today I would like to draw your attention not so much to this fact as such, but to how Goethe's mind must have been predisposed in order to recognize such things and to assert such connections in what surrounds us sensually and physically in the animal, plant and human organization. What was Goethe actually striving for? Well, we saw it. He strove to find a sense-supersensible to what mere sensory observation can give, something that can only be grasped in the spirit, but which is just as much a reality as what can be seen with the eyes. So that Goethe came to the extreme saying: “Then I see my idea with my eyes!” Of course, he could only mean the eyes of the soul, because you cannot see ideas with your outer eyes.

In order to show how what Goethe thought about external connections contains the germ of what spiritual science has to say today, I now have to take a leap, so to speak. But this leap will appear natural to anyone who tries to gradually penetrate the spirit of Goethe's way of looking at things. If one wants to make progress in this way of looking at things, which Goethe, out of what I would call his instinctive genius, initially applied to the outer form of life, it is necessary for the human soul to undergo those inner developments that I have been talking about for years and particularly again this winter. As I mentioned last time, mentioned last time, you will find a brief indication of it in a few pages in the essay I wrote for the recently published journal 'Das Reich', which summarizes some of the material that you will find described in detail in my books 'Occult Science', 'Theosophy' or 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. I would like to say: that which makes the soul capable of looking at the world through the instrument of the physical organism must be elevated through special soul exercises, which I cannot describe again today, but which I have often described here. Through these inner exercises, through these inner soul-searchings, the soul must be enabled to see the soul-spiritual as such, to perceive it as such. To make that which appears more instinctively in Goethe the subject of conscious observation is the ascent from one spiritual science to another.

Now I have described — and as I said, you can read about it in the writings and essays mentioned — how the soul, through certain inner soul activities that it undertakes with itself, really brings about experiences that are of a completely different nature than the experiences one has in ordinary life through the instrument of the body; how the soul, by giving itself inner impulses that it would otherwise not give itself in outer life, can truly detach an inner element from the physical, just as - to repeat what was said the day before yesterday - oxygen is detached from hydrogen in the well-known chemical experiment. Through such soul exercises, the soul comes to experience itself purely in the soul element, to contemplate the soul aspect separate from the bodily. Since one cannot prove everything again and again, I would just like to point out that today I will present this only as the result of previous lectures, but that I have said a great deal about this detachment of the soul from the body.

When the human being comes to perceive the soul and spiritual as such, detached from the physical, the physical becomes something different and the soul-spiritual also something different. Just as there is no longer water, but oxygen and hydrogen, when you decompose the water in a chemical experiment, so the physical becomes another, the spiritual becomes another, of course only before the inner contemplation. But then, when the soul is fertilized by such real, now inner spirit-soul contemplations, then one gradually comes to look at the outer world quite differently than before. For this outer world is, after all, permeated by the spiritual everywhere. And then, I would say, the whole of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis becomes much more intense, much more saturated. He who, through the instrument of the outer body, first looks only at the outer sense world and its course, sees only that which is expressed in material existence. He can sense that the spirit reveals itself through material existence. But the spirit itself, how it rules and weaves in the material, can only be seen when the soul forces I spoke of in the earlier lectures are developed. But then the organs that one sees with physical eyes in humans and other living beings also appear in a completely different light. And then what is contained in Goethe's natural science is greatly expanded. Then, only by a straightforward continuation of what is contained in Goethe's ideas, one learns to recognize how the whole human head comes to us as the expression of what the human being actually is in the world from within. This whole human head appears to us as a complicated transformation product of something else. We know – this can be best understood by looking at the skeleton – that the human being visibly consists of two parts: the head and the rest of the organism, which is connected to the head in the skeleton only by small connecting links. So that we can really divide the human being into the head part and the rest of the physical organism when we look at it purely from an external, bodily point of view. And now, if, as I said, one fertilizes one's views through inner vision, one comes to the conclusion that the whole head is a complex transformation of the rest of the organism. On another level of development, the rest of the organism is, in a corresponding way, something similar to the head, just as the vertebra of the spinal column is something similar to the skull. The entire human head is transformed from the rest of the human organism. And one clearly gets the idea that this human head is, so to speak, like the rest of the organism, which has furthered the formative forces within it. The rest of the organism has remained at a certain stage; the laws of formation are held at a certain stage. In the head they have been further developed, further processed into form, further poured out into sculpture, I would say. The whole human head – the rest of the human being transformed, taken externally, bodily!

I would have to speak at length if I were to go into the details in this regard. But if one were to be able to hold an anatomical-physiological course here for weeks and go into the individual organs found in the head and in the other human organism, one would be able to prove in the strictest scientific sense, down to the last detail, how the basic idea, which I can only hint at now, can be absolutely proven. But now, in order to approach, as it were, an understanding of the whole, complete human being, one must consider the whole significance of what has been recognized, the whole, complete significance. In the human being as he stands before us, we have, in fact, two things before us: we have his head before us at a very different stage of development and formation than the rest of the organism, and we have the rest of the organism before us, of which we can say: In it lie formative forces that are only fixed at an earlier stage; if they were developed, they could become the head. Likewise, we can say: if the head had not fully developed its formative forces today, but had left them at an earlier stage, it would not have become the head, but would have presented itself in an external form as the rest of the organism.

We gain further insight into these conditions when we now consider the soul of man. And this soul of man can only be considered if one really rises from ordinary human knowledge to what I meant earlier and can only hint at today, with higher knowledge, with inner, supersensible vision. As you know, there is also a so-called psychology, a science of the soul. And especially in our time, this science of the soul wants to arise through exactly the same approach that is used in external natural science. People who still had something of the earlier approach to the soul in them and yet wanted to take full account of the entirely justified demands of modern natural science, tried to understand the soul life of the human being as it unfolds. Franz Brentano is a truly significant psychologist who still had something of an older science of the soul, which now seems to have been overcome, in him and wanted to take full account of modern science. However, in his “Psychology”, which was published in 1874, he could not rise to anything other than to classify what lives in the soul. This soul life is usually divided into thinking, feeling and willing. Brentano divides it somewhat differently. Franz Brentano is just such an observer of the soul who cannot rise to spiritual insight, but who wants to apply the way of looking at things, which one otherwise has only for external nature, for sensory perception, to the life of the soul. He only comes to a classification. Even in outer nature, Goethe does not seek to arrive at a mere classification, at what is called a system, but he seeks to arrive at a metamorphosis, he tries to present the transformation, and thereby, as it were, to follow that which lives supernaturally in its various transformations of form and to have an overall unity in the whole. Brentano, the psychologist, also breaks down the life of the soul and again cannot cope with the individual phenomena of the soul. It must truly be said that it is a hard nut to crack when one looks at the psychology of the present day, as it has developed in the nineteenth century in particular, with the eye of a psychologist of the soul who is trained in the way I have often described here. There you find this inability to get anywhere other than mere classifications: thinking, feeling and willing.

That which Goethe wants to have illuminated through all material, that which lives, this transformation and transmutation, this life, now not in an immobile contemplation that places thing beside thing and divides, but in a mobile, in a living, this life in such a contemplation must be applied in particular to the life of the soul if one really wants to grasp the life of the soul. You cannot just look at thinking, feeling and willing. That is quite impossible, one can only come to the division into thinking, feeling and willing. But when one examines soul life with the sharpened gaze of spiritual research for thinking, feeling and willing, then one finds in it a much more intense kind of metamorphosis, transformation than in what shines through the outer form of living nature. One grasps, so to speak, the transformation itself.

Can we recognize the essence of a thought if we grasp it only as a thought? No, we cannot! This is shown by spiritual insight. The thought transforms itself in the soul itself into feeling, and feeling in turn into will. And one must be able to grasp the metamorphosis of thinking, feeling and willing in one's inner mobility, then one grasps the soul. This can only be done by separating the soul from the physical body. And then one notices in direct inner experience what happens when we have a thought and compare it with a feeling, and compare feelings again with the will. We come to look inwardly at every thought that arises from the transformation of feeling. Every thought is a transformed feeling, and if we want to look at it inwardly, we must always perceive in the thought the incomplete, but half-dying of feeling. The life of thought is a dead emotional life. In thought lives, I might say, the rest of the emotional life. The life of feeling is transformed, but in such a way that the life of feeling passes, as it were, from a living state, of which one can be inwardly aware, into a more dead state.

When you say it like that, it sounds abstract. But when you experience it inwardly through soul-vision, when you really experience everything that makes your feelings turn into thoughts, for example when you have felt something vividly in the present and later you visualize this feeling only through a memory and then follows the path of how the feeling became a thought, then one experiences something so intensely inwardly, as one experiences, for example, 'when one sees a family member pass from life to death with an original, healthy family feeling. In the inner life of the soul, this very soul life, if one wants to recognize it, is permeated with intense inner liveliness, with intense inner participation. And no one should believe that the ascent from the external observation of nature to what is called the observation of the soul life is only something abstract or only that which is often addressed as confused mysticism, which mostly consists only of building a world view out of a dark feeling; but true soul science arises from the inner experience of the metamorphosis of soul facts,

But thought, too, can be awakened again into feeling, and it can transform itself into will. When, as has been indicated here several times, one watches how a thought seizes us as an ideal and then throbs through us, permeating the soul with enthusiasm until it becomes will, then one experiences, I might say, a birth, when one has raised the experience in question to the level of soul observation. This inner soul experience is what results from the exercises described, for example, in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. But through this, as you can see, an inner soul life is opened up that lies behind the ordinary soul life. The ordinary soul life proceeds in thinking, feeling and willing separately. But this soul life, which I have just described, lies behind the thinking, feeling and willing that is usually turned towards the outer sense world. It is not something that the spiritual researcher creates; it is something that he experiences only within the ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, something that he merely comes upon. He creates it no more than someone who comes in from outside and sees the table here now creates the table, although he creates its image by entering and looking at the table. In the same way, the spiritual researcher creates an image of the soul life that lies behind the ordinary soul life; but this soul life is present in every human soul. It lies, if one may say so, below the threshold of ordinary consciousness, which is turned towards the outer world or towards sensory perception in general.

I would like to say that there are also approaches to finding this soul life. Such approaches are to be found precisely in the development of thought in the nineteenth century. Because there is a yearning in all human beings for knowledge of the soul, such approaches have even gripped people in the broadest circles. We have one of these approaches in the concept, which Eduard von Hartmann did not exactly develop but did work with, in the concept of unconscious soul life. He did, after all, derive all conscious mental life from unconscious mental life. But the situation is somewhat skewed when it comes to Hartmann's unconscious, because it is only characterized in negative terms. If one says: What underlies the conscious is an unconscious, then one is saying no more than: everything that is outside of this table is a non-table, is a table. Now, if I describe everything that sits and stands here as non-table, as untable, I have not yet said anything special. It cannot be described in any other way than negatively if one stops at the level of conscious mental life with the realization. And that is what Eduard von Hartmann wants. One must inwardly fertilize the soul life, as has often been described here, and this ordinary soul life must descend to the other, so that the subconscious, unconscious soul life is grasped by an expanded consciousness, by a consciousness different from the ordinary consciousness that is turned towards the world of the senses.

You see, a soul life is grasped through spiritual insight. This soul life, which is grasped and appears directly in spiritual insight, what is it if not that which works inwardly in man and of which one must imagine that the outer body is somehow its expression, its revelation? But just as we have our ordinary conscious soul life, so its advantage lies precisely in the fact that this conscious soul life does not directly affect the body. Just imagine if the conscious soul life did affect the body - yes, it is really not an exaggeration when I present the following. Let us assume that we see the hand of a stranger and want to grasp its form. If this form did not appear to us as a mere idea, but permeated us, becoming truly alive within us, then our hand would have to metamorphose and become like the other person's hand. We would have to be able to absorb it completely, to make alive within us that which we can only visualize in abstract terms. And if we were to stand face to face with a whole, full human being who made such a strong impression on us that the impression was not just present in an abstract idea, we ourselves would have to take on the form of that person. Thus that which functions as ordinary conscious soul-life would not fulfill its task in the world at all if it were not so completely separated from our bodily life that it does not interfere with the bodily life and allow it to develop independently.

But we need only go back in human development to see at least a hint of what we can call – as I pointed out the day before yesterday – the shaping from within of the forms of the human organism. When we look at people, especially in their very earliest childhood, we see how what is within them is vividly shaped into what they later develop. We see how the spiritual enters into the bodily form. Of course, there are many objections to the assertion that I am now making. However, as I said, it is not possible to cover all the bases in a single lecture. These objections can be easily overcome if one can only talk about them in detail. So we see a vivid manifestation of what is inside a person, in the person's youth, in childhood, and in pathological conditions. We see how the soul and spirit intervene vividly in physical development. The ordinary soul life — one might say, thank God — cannot intervene in physical development; it would not fulfill its task. But read this excellent chapter in Schleich's new book: “On the Switching Mechanism of Thoughts”, this beautiful, I would say epoch-making chapter: “Hysteria - a Metaphysical Problem”, then you will see how it is referred to how, in fact, the soul-spiritual, what is grasped in thoughts, affects the plastic formation of the body in pathological states. We are healthy precisely because it is not so in the normal state. I will cite only the most primitive example from this book. The examples have always been known to anyone who deals with such things; but through the way in which they are introduced in this book, something epoch-making has indeed happened. The one example: a doctor enters a lady's room, in which a fan is humming. She says – she is hysterical, it is a pathological condition with which he is dealing –: There is a big bee! At first, the doctor wants to disabuse her of the idea that it is a big bee; after all, it is only a fan. Then she says: If it were to sting me! At first the doctor also wants to make it clear to her that that would not be so bad either. But at that moment the eye swells up into a lump the size of a chicken's egg.

This is how we see the effect of the mere thought. And as I said, thank God our ordinary thoughts are not such thoughts. And that is precisely why they are the right thoughts for ordinary life, that they cannot. They do not take this plasticizing form, they do not go down into the organism. For that, pathological conditions must arise; but then we see how thought can take hold of material life. Schleich quite rightly calls this an 'incarnation of thought'. But one must not think that one can remain within the ordinary life of the soul when speaking of such things. The ordinary thoughts that a person has are there for the purpose of understanding the world and as a basis for action. If a person is in good health, these thoughts certainly do not intervene in the ordinary life of the soul in a plasticizing way. But in a normal way, if you look at it spiritually, you find that what forms the human being, from childhood on, what shapes the forms, is now based on the same principle in a healthy way, just as the spiritual and soul life, which is still unconscious and remains unconscious as such, remains plastically formative. And it is precisely in this that man's further experience consists, namely, that what first enters the organism, what first takes hold of the organism, later separates itself from the organism, exists spiritually and soulfully on its own, and is experienced precisely as spiritual and soul-like. This is what the further development of man as an individuality consists of.

I have presented certain trains of thought to you; but these trains of thought are not really invented, not logically combined in any way, but they are lifted out of the soul's vision. And as I said, it is not a game of analogies, but it arises from the observation of the soul from the developed soul-spiritual knowledge that the same thing that can later intervene as a plastic principle in pathological conditions intervenes in the normal way in childhood life. The thoughts that I have thus suggested lead further, not by logical spinning, but by continuing the soul-spiritual view of the world. From the contemplation of bodily life, the thought was suggested: the human body, apart from the head, contains the same formative forces as the head, only at a less advanced stage; the head contains the same formative forces as the rest of the body, but at a far more advanced stage. These thoughts combine with each other in the inner vision. This more intimate acquaintance with the life of nature is attained by becoming acquainted with the spiritual and soul life in nature as well. In the higher vision, one must still clarify the following through the more intimate acquaintance with the subconscious spiritual life, as I have just described it. And one can do this through this more intimate acquaintance. Certain thoughts, I might say, only surmised by philosophers, become inwardly completely clear through the kind of knowledge meant here. Again and again, philosophers chew over and over - I do not mean this in a disparaging way - to gain some kind of concept of substance, of matter. In his Ignorabimus speech, D'Bois-Reymond presented in such a brilliant way all that can prove that what matter actually is, or, as he says, where matter haunts in space, cannot be grasped through knowledge. —- Matter basically always remains something unrecognized for ordinary knowledge; it remains outside of ordinary knowledge. Through spiritual knowledge one really comes to realize that matter itself cannot be perceived and that matter cannot enter into our inner being, just as little as the brass of a signet, which I imprint in the sealing wax, can enter into the substance of the sealing wax, although everything that is to enter, let us say the name Müller, passes from the signet to the sealing wax. What is externally material cannot be brought into the interior. But that which is to be brought in comes in in a similar way to the name Miller coming into the sealing wax. That which is in us cannot penetrate outwards to where matter is in space. Ordinary knowledge cannot grasp matter. Matter is simply imperceptible. I would have to talk at great length again if I wanted to explain in detail — which can be done — that matter cannot possibly be perceived as such. Matter can only ever be hypothetically added to the perceptions.

What is the actual basis for this? It is based on the fact that we do not perceive anything material at all. If only matter were spread out and we ourselves consisted of matter in the ordinary sense, we would be unable to perceive anything. Matter is not perceptible! How does matter become perceptible? Matter becomes perceptible because, in addition to matter (you don't have to force this 'in addition to'), there is still ether, etheric essence, in the world around us. When I speak of etheric essence, I must of course refer to what I have often said here, that the concept of ether as it is meant here does not correspond to any concept of ether as postulated by physics, although it can of course overlap with it in many ways. But finally, what kind of ether concept does modern physics have? This modern physics, which is actually on a wonderful path with those who research with all the tools of modern natural science, who make every effort to develop and increasingly develop the scientific way of thinking and attitude? From individual physicists, who must be taken very seriously indeed, in a completely different sense than the amateurish talk of a monistic worldview, we already have the sentence: If you want to have any idea at all about ether, then you can only do so by not imagining any material properties in the ether; ether must be imagined in such a way that all material properties are kept away from it. And now we are experiencing the marvelous fact that two opposing views of things are colliding. In the midst of these turbulent times, we are experiencing the clash of two worldviews with regard to the external, physical world, a fact of unspeakably great significance for anyone who is able to judge such a thing in its full gravity. We are now also experiencing the fact that what physicists have never really tackled in the right way, namely gravity, is being investigated. And there we experience it – I can only hint at these things in a purely historical way – that on the one hand the more materialistic view asserts itself and, as it were, tries to gain insight into the ether from ideas about the material, that is, from purely material properties. And on the other hand, we have a wonderful method of investigating gravity, which, as has already been said, seeks to strip away the material and dematerialize the natural in order to understand gravity. In short, if we want to understand the direction in which real science is heading today, we cannot rely in any trivial way on the talk of the so-called monistic world view, but we have to go into this true and serious scientific endeavor, which is permeated by truly impressive methodological discipline which, in attempting to go from matter up to the ether, strives more and more to achieve what I just meant by individual physicists even saying: the ether can only be imagined if it is no longer imagined with material properties.

In spiritual science, the ether now reveals itself through inner vision and through inner knowledge, just as one otherwise comes to know the external, the sensual existence. This is only possible through the first stage of spiritual vision. You can read about it in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. There, as the first step in spiritual insight, I use the term, please do not misunderstand me, imaginative knowledge. But that is just a term. What is meant is the kind of knowledge — I have often presented this in the last lectures here as well — in which the human being does not simply accept the perceptions, but has to build the perceptions himself. Just as one builds up externally what one also has in reality when one notes it down, so imaginative knowledge will inwardly express what one experiences spiritually. But through this knowledge one does indeed arrive at a conception of ether that cannot be conveyed by external material representations. And then one arrives at the fact that ether is spread out in the world and forms the possibility that things, figuratively speaking, turn their surface towards us so that they can be perceived, and that ether is within us, meeting the outer ether. Ether from within, ether from without meet, and in this way that which flows towards us ethereally from things, that which ethereally rises from us in the organism, is encompassed. This encompasses itself inwardly, and only through this does that which we call perception arise. What makes it so difficult to understand sensory perception is precisely the lack of knowledge of the facts just described.

Take the human eye! This human eye gives images of our surroundings precisely because the material processes from outside continue within the eye, so to speak. What happens in our inner eye is, without our consciousness being present, only a continuation of the laws of light that exist outside in the world. And when the outer ether continues into our eye and is grasped by the inner ether, this is how this perception of light arises. What I am about to say is a direct continuation of what is written in Goethe's beautiful and significant chapter on physical colors and their perception.

Thus we ascend from external matter to the ether, and in so doing we come closer to what lives within us. For that is the other thing now. Matter rises to the ether; we have ether within us; the inner ether enters into interaction with the outer ether. That is the one process. And now let us look at it from the other side. We have seen that when we have our soul life, the conscious soul life, which in a healthy state must not interfere with matter but which nevertheless contains the possibility of formative forces, this conscious soul life leads us down into a subconscious soul life. And this subconscious soul life has, I would say, a completely different power than the conscious soul life. The conscious soul life is the abstract soul life, the soul life that does not hurt us. I would like to give just one example of this: in the conscious soul life we can say a lie calmly, it does not hurt us. But if the lie arises in the subconscious, it hurts; that is, it has the power to develop into reality. It is only in our subconscious mental life that we have a mental life that is capable of forming itself, a mental life that is no longer separate from matter, but can now intervene in matter, although initially it can only intervene in the matter that is available to it. This subconscious mental life can now in turn intervene in what is in us as ether. And in that which is behind matter as ether, and in that which is below our consciousness as subconscious soul life, there arises an interaction that lies below our consciousness and above matter. This takes place in our subconscious. If you follow this train of thought, you can now easily explain the morbid states of mind as well. There is not enough time to go into them. I have often used the term subconscious here, which may even rightly appear dreadful at first to some people, and which really challenges one to make bad or good jokes about it. But the term should not be important. If we take a comprehensive view of the whole human being, he consists, of course, of matter, just as the other external things consist of matter, of the etheric being that he has within and that enters into relationship with the external ether, and of the subconscious soul life, which can now intervene in the ether in a formative way. And that which arises in the interaction between the subconscious soul life, which we discover in the spirit-sight, into which we dive in the spirit-sight, and the weaving, surging ether, that is precisely the imagination, the first step of spiritual vision.

And then, when through knowledge a person has struggled through to that which is not consciously experienced in him, but which is still inner life, then he also experiences how this inner life proves to be related to that which now lives in the external, but is not matter, cannot be imagined as material at all - even according to today's physics - how this becomes one in him.

We can grasp even more closely what I have often characterized in these lectures as the inner human being in the human being. The conscious soul life goes down to a subconscious soul life, and this subconscious soul life is now more powerful than this conscious one and organizes itself together with the etheric life. In this way we actually have that which is present in the human soul life. And when a person awakens this soul life within himself through the exercises described in the repeatedly mentioned books and essays, only then does he really perceive what can be called the spiritual world, just as he perceives the outer sensual world with his physical organism. In the thorough organization of his etheric body lies the possibility of perceiving and knowing a spiritual world, and of knowing that he himself comes from this spiritual world.

And now the thought broadens and is combined with the other thought, which was gained from Goethe's world view. For once one has grasped the inner human being, one can now begin to ask oneself: Yes, what about these two parts of the human nature, the head and the rest of the body, which are at different levels of development? Here we come to the fact that what can be imagined spiritually and soul-wise must be brought into quite different relationships with the head than with the rest of the organism. When one grasps the spiritual man in clairvoyance – but not in the way it is meant in spiritualism or in trivial superstition, but really in the sense that is always characterized here – the spiritual man who underlies the outer man, also the man who has ordinary consciousness — for that is nothing directly soul-like, but only something that lies below it — if one can grasp this person, one sees this inner person in a completely different connection with the main part of the person and with what the rest of the person's body is. And what we find is this: When we examine the head, we find in the head a plastic formation, a shaping, such that the soul-spiritual has flowed completely into the form, the soul-spiritual is completely shaped in the form and has even shaped itself in this form in such a way that it still retains some of its formative powers. And these retained formative forces are those that we can then develop as our thoughts. But what is developed in our thoughts only abstractly out of the head lies in the form in which it can only be achieved subconsciously, at the basis of the formation of our head. And in a completely different way, the spiritual-soul substance underlies the rest of the human organism. These formative forces do not penetrate so deeply into the rest of the human organism; there they retain a certain independence; there the soul-spiritual lives much more strongly alongside the physical body. If I may speak figuratively, imaginatively and figuratively – please allow me this tautology – I would therefore like to say: When the seer has the human head before him, he has a spiritual-soul form, but in addition, only extremely sparsely, a spiritual form. If he has the other human organism before him, he has the bodily form, but the spiritual is richly developed, only it has not yet become as organized in the material as it is in the head. In the head the spiritual has flowed into matter much more than in the rest of the organism. The human head is much more material than the rest of the organism. The rest of the organism is such that the spiritual has not yet flowed very much into the material and still has greater independence.

Now the spiritual insight of which I have spoken comes to a real understanding of the essential meaning of what I have just expressed. What forces of development are there in the human head that have reached a point that lies much, much further ahead in development than what can be observed in the rest of the organism? If one learns to look at what underlies the head, one learns to transfer the spiritual vision to the human head, then one oneself comes to experience soulfully what has been processed in the human head. When one experiences inwardly in soul what formative forces are at work in the human head — today I can only hint at these things in aphorisms — then one finds that what is processed there expands directly into a spiritual world, that one must really think of the formative forces as coming from the spiritual world, even if this passes through the human hereditary currents. Here again we have a beautiful point of contact between modern natural science and spiritual science. There are such points of contact everywhere. Today there are natural scientists who, through their natural research, also admit that such cosmic formative forces are at work in what builds up in the human being while he is developing in the mother's body. So we have something in the human head that is formed from the cosmos. In the human head there is an immediate imprint of the cosmos when one looks at the soul.

If we now ascend further to the spiritual, to the way I have described it to you, we come back further. We gain the following knowledge of the head: at birth, actually soon after conception, this human head is so constituted that its formative forces pass entirely into the material, leaving only a little of the soul behind, living out their full potential in the material. But these formative forces lead back to a time before conception. They lead up into the spiritual world, so that what arises from the cosmos in the formation of the head, the human being has essentially experienced in the spiritual world before he was conceived or born. And when we go from the soul to the spiritual, we will then, within this spirit, recognize in the formation of the head what comes from an earlier life on earth. It is precisely by observing the human head in a spiritual-scientific context that one passes directly from the present earth life into the earlier earth life. And this is supplemented by the other thought, when one now observes what is present in the rest of the organism, apart from the head. In this remaining organism, the soul-spiritual life is still separate, the whole human life, as it is led from birth to death in dealing with the outside world, in relation to other people, to the things of this world, to nature and all the spiritual conditions in which we live, to all social conditions; this is expressed in what is spiritual about us, in the rest of the organism, summarized in the human heart. This is not just a picture, but a real spiritual-physiological fact. But because this human organism has taken on its fixed form at birth, it can initially only remain spiritual-soul-like. However, it is present as formative forces, it remains present as formative forces, and it goes through death as formative forces. If we follow what is in the human organism, apart from the head, then we find that the spiritual view points us to what lies after death. And if we look at the human being spiritually, we find that this is transformed into the next earthly life.

And further: Concrete observation teaches us that the head, as it is now shaping itself with its inner formative powers, is the result of our physical life in a previous earthly existence, apart from the head. Our head has truly been transformed from an earlier life on earth, and our present organism, apart from the head, with all its experiences, retains the formative forces in a spiritual-soul way, and when it departs with death, it gives them to the spiritual world, and they develop so that they can participate in the formation of our head in the next life on earth. And we arrive at the great, significant law: in what our head is inwardly formed — mind you, inwardly formed — we have the result of the formation of what the rest of the organism, apart from the head, was predisposed to in a previous life on earth; and in what struggles and forces in the rest of our organism, we have what goes into the formation of the head in the next life on earth. Once this knowledge is acquired, it will be possible to draw a strict scientific distinction between what lies within the line of inheritance and what does not lie within the line of inheritance. In this field, natural science still has, I might say, very significant doors to open if it wants to meet what spiritual science has to say about the spiritual and soul life.

I would like to draw attention to just one point. Of course, natural science today rightly attributes certain characteristics that we have to the principle of inheritance; we have them from our father and mother, grandfather, grandmother and so on. But we should not think that the natural scientist is saying something when he comes and says: Yes, the spiritual scientist attributes inner formative forces to earlier earthly lives; we learn all this from inheritance! The spiritual researcher does not deny that which can be scientifically explained from heredity, which may lie in the physical line of reproduction, as the spiritual researcher is generally on the ground of natural science. But, as I said, natural science must first open up certain doors and follow certain guidelines. Just think about the following: as I pointed out the day before yesterday, a person reaches sexual maturity at a certain age and is then able to produce offspring. At that point, he has all the abilities within him to pass on to the next generation what he has in the way of physical-bodily formative forces. He must have it in himself. No new abilities can arise later. What a person acquires later in the way of abilities, which he in turn partially incorporates, as he previously incorporated the ability to reproduce, does not pass into the reproductive current, but these abilities work and have an effect in the person in such a way that they form the germ for that which goes through the gate of death, between death and new birth through the spiritual world and in a next life on earth, it is embodied anew in the way I have described. There is then a transition, and one can say - as grotesque as it may still sound today - the formation of the head, but, as I said, the head is formed from within. The formation of the head contains forces that we must seek as the spiritual and soul element accompanying the body, which exists independently of the head, in an earlier life on earth. But what we now have in addition to our head, before the spiritual and soul has completely poured into the physical, that prepares the configuration and shape of the head in a next earthly life. This is certainly still a paradoxical assertion today, and yet, it is how a comprehensive doctrine of metamorphosis for the whole person is built, a doctrine of metamorphosis that encompasses spirit, soul and body and shows how the reality within the human being goes through birth and death and how this reality in the human being is related to the universe. What is it that directly belongs to our earthly life? What directly belongs to our earthly life as an individual human being living between birth and death? Our head! What we usually find to be the most spiritual on the outside is most closely related to the earth. What is less related to the earth also passes into other than earthly worlds in the time between death and a new birth. And when, after the person has passed through the gateway of death, the spiritual has gained the strength to transform itself into the formation of the head, then it has attained its goal.

As you can see, spiritual science speaks in a very concrete way about what belongs to the eternal part of man. And in a very concrete way it can indicate how the human being is embedded in the whole universe. It can point out how that which is in the human head is so occupied by the forces of the earth that the whole spiritual and soul life has poured itself into the head, and how that which exists outside the head is only preparing to be joined to it in the next life on earth. We see how one earthly life follows another, in order to link up to eternity like chain links. When man – not now in an external, abstract description, but inwardly – grasps what can be experienced as the inner man, when the subconscious, the ethereal takes hold and the inner man becomes active, then the soul is seized and it can be understood beyond birth and death in connection with the universe. And when man has awakened this in himself, then a spiritual world also becomes visible before this inner man, a concrete spiritual world, as before the physical eyes, which develop out of transformed matter, the physical world becomes visible. The spiritual and soul worlds present themselves in a definite, concrete way. And just as we become acquainted with concrete physical things and beings through our bodily organization in the physical world around us, so we become acquainted with a spiritual world in concrete individual forms through the higher man, through the man who lives spiritually and soulfully in man. But the spiritual-soul in man must be grasped in a living way, otherwise it remains a mere inkling that can only be found in a conceptual construction. One can only come to the spirit, to the soul, by descending from the ordinary consciousness to the subconscious and really developing a new consciousness for the subconscious and thereby forming a higher human being in the human being with what otherwise pervades matter as ether. This is possible through experience, through real inner experience on the paths described in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”. If one does not attain this spiritual level, then one remains within that which of the soul-spiritual asserts itself in the physical organism. One basically remains in that which is present in man between birth and death, and then one comes to that unclear mysticism, which unfortunately is confused by many with true, but now brightly clear mysticism, which is attained in the way I have just described, through the experience of the inner concrete spiritual-soul man. And because confused, hazy mysticism is confused with that which becomes bright and clear within, that is why spiritual scientific striving is still so often misunderstood today. The nebulous inner self, felt only through the detour of the body, does not really expand into a cosmic self, but becomes blurred in a general sense of the world. It is difficult to express this. That unclear, blurred mysticism is only what the soul can experience with the help of the bodily instrument. The soul must first be released from the body, then the soul-spiritual is truly experienced. And the spiritual must be seen, but not with the same powers of cognition with which the conceptual-legal, natural-legal in the sensual world is seen; because that is seen with the help of the bodily instrument, that does not even go through the gate of death with us. Natural laws are only meaningful between birth and death – not for nature itself, but for us. But when a person awakens the inner man and the spiritual world is around him, then he beholds a concrete spiritual world in which spiritual beings are as physical beings are in the physical world. And then it does not come to what otherwise a yes also quite commendable, but just limited metaphysics comes: in all possible ways one comes from a mere inkling of the spirit, which one veils with concepts, to pantheism, this foggy construct that sees an All-spirit everywhere, just as if one did not want to see individual plants and animals everywhere, but an All-nature. Whether one sees will everywhere, as Schopenhauer did, or finds a panpsychism by philosophical means, all these “pane” come about only because the soul-spiritual works only with the tool of the human head. And basically, mere philosophical idealism, which I have repeatedly tried to describe truly in all its magnitude this winter, could not lead to anything other than a conceptual understanding of the world; for the real spiritual world is only attained in the way I have indicated. But precisely when one works out this concrete view — and today I could only work it out aphoristically — what I have said can really be fully reconciled with the scientific world view, and does not offend any religious feeling. You will soon be able to read about this in my little work 'The Task of Spiritual Science', which will be published in the next few weeks. All that I have described so far only enables man to understand the world around him in all its phenomena. The spiritual world is present in the outer world in its effects, but these effects can only be fully understood when one grasps the spiritual foundations of these effects. Only when we have grasped the soul-forming forces that underlie the world, the spiritual forces of action, can we gain insight into what the world actually is.

Goethe first wanted to see the weaving and surging of the spirit, which had remained unconscious to him, in the reflection of the external material, and he could only perceive this in the living material through his metamorphosis. If the way of thinking that Goethe had is extended to body, soul and spirit, a true science of body, soul and spirit will really appear. Then such a science will also be possible, as I indicated the day before yesterday for understanding the individual national souls and for the historical development of humanity in general as it unfolds on earth.

One can say: there has always been a longing to achieve such a spiritual science. Today we call it anthroposophy, that is, I will try to justify this name for you. Anthroposophy because anthropology looks at the human being as one would if one only used the external organs of the human being. Anthroposophy arises when one lets the inner, awakened human being focus on what it means to be human. In earlier lectures I quoted a saying of Troxler from 1835, from which it can be seen how such an anthroposophy has been longed for. For in the time when Goethe's world view was more or less unconsciously at work in the better souls everywhere, there was already a longing and hope for such an anthroposophy. And as proof of this, let me quote a saying that Immanuel Hermann Fichte — whom I also mentioned in one of the last lectures — made in 1860; it should prove to you that what is being sought here today as spiritual science is something longed for and hoped for in the spiritual movement of the nineteenth century, even if it was somewhat subdued for the reason given. Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of the great philosopher, says in his “Anthropology” at the end, 1860: “But anthropology already ends in the result, justified from the most diverse sides, that man, according to the true nature of his being, as in the very source of his consciousness, belongs to a supersensible world. In contrast, sense consciousness and the phenomenal world arising from its vantage point, with the entire human sensory life, have no other significance than to be the place in which the supersensible life of the spirit is carried out, in that the spirit, through its own act of free consciousness, introduces the otherworldly spiritual content of the ideas into the world of the senses... This thorough grasp of the human being now elevates “anthropology in its final result to ‘anthroposophy’.”

Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, is truly nothing arbitrarily invented, but something longed for and hoped for by the best minds of the nineteenth century. And I am convinced that it is based on a real penetration into the spirit of Goethe's world view. When, a few years ago, the question arose as to the name of the society within which this spiritual research, which is meant here, would be cultivated, I would have liked to have named this society the “Goethe Society” if the name had not already been given to another Goethe Society. It was named the Anthroposophical Society; but for good reasons, because you see: what appears today as spiritual science is long awaited and long hoped for, and it is that which today, I might say, is brought to the surface from subconscious depths of the soul, only the fulfillment of those hopes that were truly not present in the worst minds.

And such hopes were present in yet another way, in a remarkable way and, I might say, arising from the Goethean worldview, in a spirit that lived so completely with his soul in the Goethean worldview – in Herman Grimm. Here, something wonderful comes to light. Herman Grimm is, after all, a historian, especially an art historian. He tried, really out of Goethe's spirit — I am not saying now how he was able to grasp it, but how he was able to assimilate it and spiritualize it — to present the developmental process of historical phenomena in the sense of such a Goethean world view. What is he coming to? At one point in an essay he wrote about Macauley, Herman Grimm tried to understand how one can understand historical development and the place of the individual human being in history. He tried to form a concept about it: What is the place of the human being in the development of history? He still shrank back, because when he wrote the essay – it was at the beginning of the seventies – the time was not yet ripe to describe spiritual science in such a way as one can describe it today – even if it is still often regarded as fantasy or something worse. He does not attempt to ascend to spiritual science, but to form a thought, which he says he initially wants to just let be a fantasy, a thought through which he can imagine: how does the individual human being initially stand in the universe from an historical point of view?

Grimm then utters the following words: “It is conceivable that the spirit of a human being, released from the bonds of the body, might hover above the earth like a mere mirror of what is happening.” — He formally apologizes at the time because no spiritual science could be present: “I am not stating an article of faith here, it is just a fantasy. Let us assume that for some people immortality takes this form” — we have it, the fantasy, immortality takes this form for spiritual science! — ”that they float above the earth, unhampered by what previously blinded them, and reveal to them all the destinies of the earth and of man before the birth of the planet...” Herman Grimm had to imagine life in the spiritual world between death and a new birth at least hypothetically, in order to really imagine and think about the way in which man is embedded in history. And so he said: Now, how can we understand the individual human being? - “Now, suddenly, let us dream on” - one must dream, of course, but the dream becomes truth! “If this spirit, which so freely surveyed things, were forced to join the body of a mortal man again.” That is to say, in order to be able to imagine history and man's place in history, Herman Grimm necessarily had to think of repeated lives on earth. Only in this way could he imagine history.

This is how deeper spirits looked at history and the historical becoming and the inner standing of man. But as I said, such things flowed, I would say, under the prevailing stream of the more materialistic development of the world view in modern times and will probably be carried to the surface by our time, because our time already senses that the spirit and the soul must be recognized again. Indeed, this is felt most acutely when one tries to understand the historical development of humanity. And today it is obvious to seek to understand the historical development of humanity because we are at such a significant stage of this historical development. When one looks at such a view of history, for which Herman Grimm had to imagine repeated lives on earth, and then looks at another historical conception, one becomes very aware of how far mere adherence to the material can go, especially when one wants to understand historical development.

In this context, I have a spirit in mind, of whom I will present a few sentences to you at the end, because he is, of course, quite far removed from any understanding of the spiritual, of the soul. And yet a certain mind wants to explain historical development, for example why religions arose in different forms, why there was initially polytheism, then monotheism arose, and within monotheism Christianity arose, and within Christianity Protestantism arose again. Yes, that there is something spiritual and soulful at work inside, of course he cannot rise to that. But from what can be observed externally, albeit only in a rough way, when one looks at the outside world, including the outside world of history, only through the instruments of the body, he now tries to make clear how the history of religions has developed. He says – the words are not particularly important to the idea presented, but I will read them in the introduction: “As long as consolidation progresses, the organism that will prevail will be the living one that functions best at the given moment, and this tendency is just as evident in abstract thought as in trade and war.” So if you want to understand how a later state arises from an earlier one, then, in his opinion, you can see how the later state became more favorable than the earlier one.

And he applies this to religions: “The development of religions provides the most striking proof of this principle. Monotheism is cheaper than polytheism.” That is to say, people gradually strove to get more for less in the spiritual realm. So they advance from polytheism to monotheism, which is cheaper! It does not need such a widespread cult as polytheism! So: “Monotheism is cheaper than polytheism.” Consequently, the two great monotheistic religions were able to survive in Cairo and Constantinople, the two commercial centers of the first Middle Ages, while the Roman cult perished, along with the Greek and Egyptian and the various Persian religions.

So we have the later monotheistic religions because they are cheaper! They have only one God, so they need a simpler cult, are cheaper! Then he continues: “In the same sense, Protestantism is cheaper than Catholicism.” If you only look at the exterior, you cannot deny it, the Protestant church does not have as much decoration, has not developed as much worship, is cheaper.

“That is why Holland and England – I am not saying this! – adopted Protestantism when they snatched trade with the Orient from Italy and Spain.” Because the Dutch and the English wanted to have it cheaper, they adopted Protestantism!

“Atheism, finally, is cheaper than any religion, and it is a fact that all modern commercial centers tend towards skepticism, that the modern state itself seeks to reduce the costs of worship to a minimum.” Here we have cost as a principle of the progress of religions! However, this is again an example of the approach that I took the day before yesterday: that one can see how, from the different cultures, the endeavor is either to think more spiritually and psychologically about the course of human development, or more in terms of what can only be achieved through external observation.

The author is Brooks Adams, an American, and Roosevelt wrote the preface to this book! I will add nothing more to these thoughts, they show, as it were, the asymptote to which a purely external world view must lead. Of course, what is grasped as spiritual-soul will often appear to a purely external view of the world like mere dreaming. Dreaming — yes, people today would even forgive one for dreaming from a materialistic point of view. I am convinced that if someone, in a dream, could invent a machine that he then constructs in external reality, people would believe in this dream. All that is needed is the power to recognize in its reality that which is found only within the soul and spirit.

That this spiritual power belongs to the developmental and educational principles of the world-view development that has found expression in German spiritual life is precisely what I have tried to explain in the various lectures during this difficult time of trial. And when one has gained an insight into what spiritual science will and must be for the future of humanity, and sees how, ever since there has been a German development, the educational principles of this German development have been, shall we say, dreaming towards this spiritual science, then that also gives a firmness and certainty to stand still within the spiritual life of one's own nation and to have no need to vilify other spiritual lives and to utter such words of hatred as we heard only the day before yesterday, in order to gain inner strength, so to speak, inner justification in rejecting what is alien. German spiritual life can gain inner justification and inner strength by considering what lies within itself.

And so, at the conclusion of this lecture, let me express, as something that can take root in the soul as a feeling, the comparison of what spiritual science wills with what often lives as germs precisely in German cultural life. The way in which the soul and spirit are anchored in German cultural life gives us the inner certainty that Germanness cannot be overcome, because it is destined for greatness in the evolution of the world and of humanity, according to what it contains as germs within itself. We can say today: England possesses one quarter of the total dry land area, Russia one seventh, France one thirteenth, the German element barely one thirtieth of the land! Thus, those who expand over a quarter, plus a seventh, plus a thirteenth of the dry land, are opposed to those who have barely spread over a thirtieth of the dry land. And so those who have spread out over this one-thirtieth and who today consciously stand on this one-thirtieth in relation to what stands on a quarter, plus three-sevenths, plus three-tenths must imbue themselves with what can be experienced from the grasp of the innermost being. There is no doubt that inner necessities can be experienced: those who stand on a thirteenth plus a seventh plus a quarter in relation to those who stand only on a thirtieth, they must not overcome the latter, as they often say today in their fanatical ideal of hatred. For that which lives on this one thirtieth seems, by its inner nature and essence, to be destined for that which, within the earthly context, can still be called a long, long time and, for the human imagination, a temporal eternity. This German essence carries within itself the certainty of its continued existence. And from this certainty emerges what can be summarized in a few words: they will not overcome it, because if the world is to have meaning, they must not overcome it!

Lecture for the “Association of Younger Teachers”

It gives me great satisfaction to be able to speak to teachers for a change. For although my destiny has immersed me in the most diverse professions, and although I try to understand what is happening in the various professions and classes, especially in today's times of confusion and chaos, I also feel particularly at home, I might say, with the teaching profession, to which I myself belonged for many years of my life, albeit in a private way, but therefore under not exactly easy circumstances. But perhaps that is precisely why I feel called to specialize in what is to be said now with regard to the reorganization of conditions within human development for this profession.

One can say, especially when one surveys what is alive in the present day, alive with demands, alive with insights, more or less bright or dark insights, regarding what has to happen — one can say: If the teacher were not heard in what today, as the demand of the time, resounds throughout the world, the whole civilized world, then it would be the greatest conceivable loss for the reorganization of our lives. And if one could imagine that teachers would not turn their attention to working on this reorganization of human affairs, then this reorganization of human institutions would certainly produce something that would very soon be in need of improvement and that, on the other hand, could truly not in any way benefit humanity.

You may assume from my following remarks that I will have many objections to today's school institutions; but I ask you not to take this as if it were somehow directed against today's teachers themselves. For I fully recognize how today's teachers – even if they do not always fully realize it in the pressures of life – suffer deeply, sometimes even groan, especially under today's school conditions. But it is precisely for this reason that it may be possible to discuss what is now called the social question most profoundly and most meaningfully in the circle of teachers. After all, the teacher is also personally and to the highest degree interested in what should happen in the present and in the near future as a result of the call for socialization of human society, even if this is less important. For one may have various objections to the party programs that are floating around in the world today, more or less radically; but from these radical or less radical socialist party programs, all kinds of programs about the so-called “socialization of the school system” are also emerging. If the school system were to be socialized in line with these socialist programs, then not only would the result be what many anxious minds today fear from a transformation of human conditions in line with party socialism, but it would most likely, even if this is not yet sufficiently understood today, result in the realization of the socialist party program for the school of the purest pedagogical madness. If this is again a somewhat radical statement, please excuse it by the fact that I am not inclined to develop anything other than a factual idea, a practical factual idea, in any direction at all, and certainly not something party-related.

After this introduction, you will find it understandable that the question is raised precisely in relation to our current school system: How are the fruits of this school system manifested in practical life, in that practical life from which the call for transformation is emerging everywhere today? |

If we are not just superficially theoretical, but if we are attached with heart and mind to the school system, as the most important factor in the development of humanity, then we must say the following to ourselves. We see how today, in sometimes quite a disturbing way, people who cannot see life in its real demands and possibilities draw up party programs. We see how the belief is nurtured that people want to reform or revolutionize life, when all they can do is reform or revolutionize the worst out of it. We must ask the question, after all, haven't basically the souls of all those who now frighten so many, haven't these souls gone through our schools? We look anxiously at the proletariat today, and it must even be admitted that this anxiety is not entirely unjustified, not at all unjustified. But this proletariat has gone through our schools, and we must admit, if we are not short-sighted, that our schools have educated this proletariat as well. And in what the proletariat wants, as well as in what it is mistaken about, we must recognize something of what is expressed by the saying, “You shall know them by their fruits.” This is not meant to be a superficial, agitational phrase; it is only intended to draw attention to the cultural-historical problem of today's education and teaching. We must be clear about the following.

With the proletarian, a new human being has emerged in the last three to four centuries, but particularly in the nineteenth century: a human being who, in the previous centuries, did not yet exist with this physical and mental and spiritual constitution. What characterizes the proletarian of today is that, in contrast to other members of human society, he is, to a much greater extent than was previously the case, to a certain extent, suspended in the air with his entire human existence. And this must interest us particularly from the pedagogical point of view, that the proletarian in the present is the person who, with regard to his life, must say to himself: If he himself is induced, or if others induce him to give up his position, then he faces nothing. Then, to a certain extent, he no longer feels connected to what holds human society together. On the other hand, it must be said that the education provided by the school, especially in the period during which the proletariat developed in this way, was such that it could not make people into fully-fledged human beings. This was certainly not through the fault of the teaching staff, but through the fault of the school's dependence on the state and on economic powers! In the recent past, it would have been possible to deal with the growing child in the most appropriate way, based on real knowledge of the human becoming. However, as a teacher, one was sandwiched between two powers that basically did not always work in the sense of what the teacher had to consider his task with regard to the education of the human being through the school. Today, with the advent of the school as it has developed out of earlier conditions, the teacher is caught between the parental home and the state. Of course there are exceptions in all fields, and naturally a word that seeks to characterize something cannot always be applied to all individual cases, but on the whole it is true, even if it is radically expressed: Today the teacher has to take over the children from the parents , and when he has to hand them over to the State at the end of their schooldays, the State soon draws out of their souls what the teacher has tried to instil in them. The teacher today is actually stuck between these two extremes, which do not at all work in the sense of education through the school. And when he becomes fully aware of his profession, then he actually groans between these two distortions of his pupil, the distortion by the parental home and the distortion by the state. That is, as I said, a radical way of putting it. But do we not ultimately get different children from the parental home than those who have initially grown up with the parents themselves, who have grown up with the parents in such a way that they enter school with all the prejudices of their parents, that everything that the parents themselves carry in their minds and in their state of mind has rubbed off on them – from the class in which they find themselves? And on the other hand, we release children from school and let them go out into human life, and we have to send them out into the community. What that means for the present time is shown by the terrible situation of humanity in this era.

Of course, we have experienced great misfortune, and we will experience many more misfortunes. But have we not seen in misfortune what we could have seen in happiness if only we had had a sufficient eye for it? Have we not seen as a fundamental characteristic of the present human being that he has not actually developed the inner strength of soul during childhood that would enable him to face life in such a way that the fate of life cannot bend his thinking, his feeling, his will? Today, more than one would imagine, we find broken characters and broken natures in all walks of life. This can be seen in the dark, gloomy thoughts and ideas that people throughout the civilized world are entertaining today about the terrible events that have befallen them. Can anyone today actually imagine how this came about? Can they still see anything at all in life? Do they still feel strong enough to really fit into life energetically? More people than you would think are actually broken human natures in our time! And we also have to ask why school could not work to create a firm hold in people for life, so that they could not be broken by life and their fate?

If it had been left to schools alone for a long time to educate people in such a way that they would have to enter life through what schools had to give them, then today's conditions would be different. But that was not the case. School was able to give people something. But those people who belonged to the privileged, the leading, leading circles of people, they did not place the person in life through school, but through family, through kinship, through patronage and the like. They made sure that the young person got into this or that position in life, precisely through the connections in which they themselves stood in life. The only person for whom this does not apply is the proletarian. That is why he is the only 'modern' person for the school. The proletarian's child cannot be spoiled so much – of course by other things, but not by the parents – because the parents have no time to do so. And the child of the proletarian, when he leaves school, is not introduced into the human community by family connections, by patronage and the like, but must find his place in life by virtue of his own inner soul-life. The proletarian, the human being let loose on humanity, who can only rely on himself, is therefore in a completely different position in relation to this point than the people in the leading, guiding circles. This is what has shaped our school, given it its character; this is what needs to be considered in the present. And this is also what raises the questions from which the teaching staff in particular must take part in the great social problems of this time.

The question arises in a completely new way: How should we forge the human being for life? How should we educate through school so that the human being, in the time in which he goes through school, develops those forces that are inherent in his inner being – the forces of thinking, feeling, willing, and doing – so that they are present in later life in such strength that the vicissitudes of life cannot break them? This question, along with the fundamental questions of the proletariat, is arising with unprecedented intensity. How one must educate, educate through the school, this question takes on a new face today. And that is precisely why it is necessary, above all, for the teacher to have an opinion on how the people who are to be placed in life must be developed in a scholastic way.

What is actually being demanded now, but of whose form one has truly quite dark ideas in the various party programs and party opinions, and how such questions are actually viewed today, is shown precisely by such socialist school programs and school ideas that are being put forward. One need only look at a few of the main points of these socialist school ideas and programs. For example, certain socialist personalities emphasize the unified school. This should not be uniformed; it should be differentiated as much as possible, so that the individual human abilities and talents are taken into account. The socialists express this demand by saying: We demand the differentiation of the curriculum for the unified school, but we demand the unity of the “organization”. That is, the unified school should be organized in a uniform manner. The organizational structure should not take into account the individualities of human beings, but these should be introduced later – but how? It is very strange that such a school program could arise from socialist circles, for the simple reason that socialists, based on their materialistic view of history, always emphasize that the human being is entirely the product of external circumstances, that he is not at all the product of moral, legal, aesthetic, or religious views. All this, law, custom, religious and aesthetic views, even science, is called by socialism in its Marxist papacy a mere “ideological superstructure”. Reality for it is the way in which economic conditions are organized. That actually makes man, everything else evaporates in the human soul as an ideological superstructure. And now socialism draws up a school program in which it demands uniformity of organization and specialization of the curriculum. The curriculum would then provide something that is supposed to be more or less the ideological superstructure, and the organization provides the existing conditions in which the child is to be placed, through which the person is to be formed and shaped.

If you demand a uniformity of organization, then you are actually demanding, according to the basic ideas of socialism, the uniformity of the whole of human nature, because the differentiation in the curriculum will not make it so that the object of this differentiation is not merely the “ideological superstructure”. From this program you can see the contradictions that abound in today's demands, and what is to become of them if we imagine that these contradictions should somehow become reality from today's demands! |

But the demands of the time themselves – can we do anything against them? We cannot really do anything against the demands of the time. They are there. Humanity has at some point reached a certain level of consciousness at its present stage of development, has at some point reached a certain state of mind, which is expressed in particular in proletarian demands, which can only be the signal for a new development that takes place in a completely different way than the proletarian imagines. But a certain inner impulse has taken hold of humanity in its ongoing development, and this impulse has long been expressed in two words – in our time they have become very much a cliché and a catchphrase – democracy and socialism. These two words are emerging with ever-greater force from the depths of human development. And in our time, even though much foolishness is said about democracy and socialism, it must be said that in our time both resound with increased power from these depths of humanity. There is a demand for a greater degree of democratization of the state, and there is also a demand for a greater degree of socialization of economic life. Nothing can be done against these demands; they are certainly elementary demands of the development of humanity. But the task we face in the face of these demands is to take a reasonable position on them. What do these two demands, “democracy” and “socialism,” mean?

They basically mean that much more than has been the case so far, what happens in the state and economic community is placed in the will of the individual. In a democracy, the individual wants to have a greater measure of participation in the institutions of the state, even in the very downtrodden proletarian classes, than he has had up to now. In socialization, the individual wants to have personal influence again, a far-reaching influence on economic life. One need only recall superficially what conditions were like in earlier times, and one will have to say that human society was much more cohesive. The individual was much more inclined to conform to traditions, customs, and conventions, to what was imposed on him by the authorities, by whatever authorities. It is from this sense of authority, from this sense of authority, that man wants to extricate himself through democracy and socialization. And by wanting to take these demands into account, especially on the socialist side, what is actually being demanded for the school? Socialization is also demanded for schools. It is imagined that what is to take place among adults in public and economic life, perhaps in a somewhat weakened form, should also take place to a certain extent in schools. In a program written by a socialist thinker, it is also stated that in the future the authority of the headmaster or principal is to be abolished. They also want to limit the authority of the teacher himself to a certain extent, and they speak of school communities with a certain self-administration of the students, where the teacher is to place himself in a comradely way in the school community. And by eliminating the principal's office and the directorate, the aim is to cultivate people who are particularly suited to democracy and socialism. This means that what appears to be a developmental requirement for humanity is actually being established for children, based on the conditions of the adult community. But something is being forgotten in the process. And the fact that this is being forgotten shows how poor our present-day psychology, our present-day study of the human soul actually is. For good psychologists would never think: If the bonds between adults become weaker, then the bonds between growing children should also become weaker. Good psychologists would say exactly the opposite. They would say, well, if the demand has been made that the bonds of human community should become weaker among adults, so that there may be more democracy and socialism, then all the more reason for the children to be educated in such a way that they become capable of democracy and socialism in later life. For if they are educated as children in such a way that democracy and socialism prevail among them in the organization of the school, then they will certainly be good for democracy and socialism in later life.

That is what, I am convinced, good psychologists would have to say, who are sincere about socialism and democracy for the rising generation. They would have to say: So all the more reason to implant the seeds in the minds of children that cannot be driven out again by democracy and socialism in adulthood! But this leads us to the fundamental question of the methodology of schooling, to the fundamental questions of education, for in future this education will have to take on a different form from that of the past. In future it will have to be based, above all, on a deep consideration of the human being, of human nature itself. One will have to study human nature itself much more deeply than one can at present in order to be able to work as a teacher among children. Our natural science has celebrated the greatest triumphs in the last four hundred years. Those who are familiar with the methods and conscientious nature of scientific research also know what humanity owes to this scientific direction and scientific research ethos in the last four hundred years. But it is impossible, precisely when natural science fulfills its ideal, to recognize the human being with this natural science. One can never recognize the human being with natural science! For, with all the concepts that arise from the observation of nature, the human being can never recognize that in himself which, in him, rises above all nature, which is soul-spiritual in him. It is therefore understandable that in the age in which natural science has risen to its highest level, knowledge of human nature, especially in our Western civilization (the Orientals reproach us for this in sufficient strength), has declined more and more. Anyone who has acquired a knowledge of natural science in the modern sense knows how the actual human existence falls apart under one's hands, especially when one is a good natural scientist. But it is not the case that only natural science makes the human existence fall apart under one's hands; rather, what has become of the natural scientific way of thinking, of imagining, has taken possession of the whole consciousness of the time. It lives in every newspaper editorial, and it dominates the widest circles that today participate in the demands of the day in the latest sense. And that shows us a very significant dichotomy. I could give you many examples that could be proof of this. I will give just one.

There is a very important natural scientist today, Oscar Hertwig, who is an excellent person in his field, biology, perhaps one of the greatest, most important biologists of the present day. He wrote a book several years ago: “The Becoming of Organisms, a Refutation of the Darwinian Theory of Chance”, a very beautiful, meaningful book from a scientific point of view. Now this unfortunate man has decided that he must write a book on social issues. And this book is pure nonsense, it is worthless. This is a characteristic phenomenon. Today, one can think in a scientifically penetrating way, one can conscientiously master scientific methods, and one can know nothing at all about everything social and legal and about that through which man rises above nature. Precisely because our pedagogical thinking has also been influenced by scientific thinking, it has lost sight of the actual process of becoming and development in the human being. However, this becoming and developing human being will be the greatest problem for future pedagogy. I am well aware that some people will say that what I am about to explain in the following sentences is self-evident. But such obviousness is all too often ignored in the present day. There is a saying – as there are many sayings that are correct when applied correctly and that are totally wrong when applied incorrectly – that is: nature does not make leaps. Yes, nature makes leaps everywhere. When it transitions from a green leaf to a colorful flower, it takes a leap, and when it transitions from a colorful flower to a pistil, it takes another leap. Nature takes nothing but leaps. It is the same in human life, if you only look at it deeply enough.

We have three strictly separate life epochs for the youth of humans. The first includes childhood up to the change of teeth. This change of teeth is accompanied by a much, much more intense intervention in the human organism than current physiology in any way suspects. The whole being of the human being, as it develops from birth to the change of teeth, becomes something quite different, spiritually and mentally and to a certain extent also physically, when it has gone through the change of teeth. The second phase of life is that which extends from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. The third begins with sexual maturity and extends to the end of the second and the beginning of the third decade of life, into the twenties. A more precise study, based on the inner qualities of the human being, of the developing human being, must become the basis of a true pedagogy in future anthropology.

In the first period of life, there is a certain moment of growth for the growing child that dominates everything else: the child is an imitator. The child is so predisposed that, as an imitative being, it adopts the nature of the people around it, right down to the gestures it makes, the actions it performs, and the skills it acquires. But this goes much further than one might think. What works from person to person is actually much deeper than one usually suspects. If we are a good person in the environment of a child, then our kindness, our ability to love, our goodwill goes over to the child along with our outward gestures. And especially when we begin to learn language from our environment, then there is an overflow into the growing child of what parents and the environment otherwise keep in their souls. The child adapts completely to its environment; it becomes like its environment, because the principle of imitation prevails in human nature until the time of the change of teeth. This can be observed in individual cases.

Then parents come to you and say: Oh, we have experienced a great misfortune with our child, our boy has stolen from us! — You have to say, look, maybe what the child did does not mean theft at all, how old is the child? — Five years. — You ask further: How did the incident happen? Well, it opened the drawer, took out a coin – I am talking about a specific, concrete case – and even shared with other children what it had bought as a treat. You can then tell the parents: Of course you don't have to let something like that happen, but it happened out of nothing other than what the child has seen so often every day: the mother goes to the drawer, takes out a coin to buy something. The child imitates, does the same, not as a wrong, but as something that must happen as a matter of course out of the principle of imitation. Therefore, until the child changes teeth, parents need to be less concerned with trying to influence the child through all kinds of preaching and good teaching, which has no meaning at all, because during this time, teachings are actually only a sound that penetrates the child's ear. Instead, parents need to be concerned with being such that the child can imitate everything. This would be the best educational principle during this time.

If we reflect a little on the present situation, we will not find it so radical to say that schools very often get children who are not very well brought up. For this principle of doing nothing, saying nothing, indeed, thinking nothing, that the child might not spoil by imitation, this principle is truly still little known. But what lies in this principle of imitation? Yes, when this principle of imitation is taken into account in the first years of childhood, when the soul forces are particularly strengthened by what can be strengthened by a properly observed principle of imitation, then something arises in the child that later — because the flowering of what has been sown often occurs quite late in life — enables it to be a truly free human being. Someone who has never had such people in their environment, to whom they can give themselves so completely that they can imitate them, that they absorb into themselves what they do, is not prepared for a democratic life and will never be able to enjoy freedom in life. This is what must be considered in the context of life. As I said, we must only be clear about the fact that the blossoms and fruits of what has been sown into human life sometimes arise much later than one might think. What is sown in the first seven years of life through a correct principle of imitation is then deeply imprinted in the soul of the child and only comes to fruition in the twenties and throughout the whole of the following life. As is generally the case in life: no one acquires the ability to bless with their hand for their later life who has not been educated in their childhood to ask with their hand. What is educated in childhood often transforms into the opposite in life, asking transforms into blessing and the like.

Then the time begins, which is particularly significant for school, the time from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. This time has an underlying characteristic developmental principle in the developing human being. This is - if you really study people, you will come across it - the sense of authority. There is no way to develop certain powers of thinking, feeling and willing in the growing human being between the ages of six or seven and fourteen or fifteen that must be developed if you want to raise the child in these years without the sense of authority. One must go through it in these years, to look at one or more other people in such a way that one can say to oneself – even if one does not say it out loud as a child – but that one says to oneself inwardly: What this person says is the truth. You never learn to seek the truth in life if you have not first sought it in a person who was an authority for us. There is no way to develop certain abilities in human nature if we do not put the child in a position to be the absolute authority for the child through what we are as teachers and educators. In this respect, a kind of sacred sense of authority must prevail in the school. And if you believe that anything other than this sacred sense of authority will educate towards democracy and socialism, if you believe that a democratic-socialist school community will educate towards this, then you are very much on the wrong track. If we want adults to have an inner maturity, if one may say so, in relation to democratic and socialist life, then children must have learned to look up to teachers as authorities. Above all, we must create this atmosphere in the school if we want to educate in the right way for our time. Only when a person grows up between the ages of seven and fourteen in such a way that he or she, so to speak, climbs up to the other person who is his or her authority, will the fully developed human being develop. And this fully developed human being can only develop if we approach many things in a very thorough pedagogical way during this time. It must be said that, especially for this time, one thing in particular is characteristic when it comes to authority.

You all know Jean Paul's saying that in our first three years we actually learn more for life from our nurse than we do later in three academic years. That was still the case in Jean Paul's time. This saying is absolutely correct, there is no objection to it. But you know that much is determined by the physiology of the child. The child does not need to be maltreated in terms of his memory. He remembers so much, retains so much in his memory, than he needs to retain at this age until the change of teeth. But with the change of teeth, it becomes necessary to take careful consideration of the child's memory. Above all, we must not overload the memory during this period, that is, we must not force something into the memory that will then fall out by itself. It is hard to believe that this is not known. This, too, is a consequence of today's poor psychology. It is hard for a person when his memory is so mistreated during this time that he has to incorporate things into his memory that then fall out by themselves. Therefore, one has to ensure that one works as much as possible through repetition and the like – repetition must form the basis for the period between the seventh and fourteenth, fifteenth year – that one lays the things that one first presented in more detail, if possible in short, summarized sentences, for the memory, so that one really has certain things within oneself, at least to a certain degree, and retains certain things from these years of life within oneself, as a Christian does the Lord's Prayer, albeit to a lesser degree, so that it comes up again and again and again, and forms part of the inner life of the soul. During this time, one must not forget to focus on the development of the soul's powers. But in this respect much is sinned, for in this time more attention is paid to the school subjects that are required by life and the state than to the growing human being himself. The situation is such that everything that is as conventional for life as reading and writing is not something that is as internally based as, for example, geometry or arithmetic. The fact that we have this language, in particular, is something that is less fundamentally connected to the outside world, and also to the generality of the world. That we have these letters of the alphabet has less to do with general world conditions than, for example, a triangle having three sides or its angle sum being 180 degrees or the like. Everything that is as conventional as reading and writing can be used primarily to develop intellectuality, which particularly forms the mind. It would be going too far if I were to now expand on this sentence of a true psychology in a broader way, but anyone who looks at life from all sides will find this sentence to be true.

On the other hand, everything that is more closely related to general world conditions or that appeals to human memory, such as history or geography, is more closely related, though it may seem paradoxical, to the forces of feeling and shapes the life of feeling. And everything we teach the young child artistically shapes the life of will, and we should actually organize the individual school subjects in such a way that we have the developing human being in mind and always know: with this we shape thinking, with this we shape feeling, and with that we shape the will. It is the developing human being that matters, not a certain amount of knowledge.

Once we have these principles, children will learn something that is very rarely taught today. Nowadays, children learn a great deal: geography, arithmetic, drawing, and so on. I do not want to talk about that. But they should learn in the way I have just described; however, there is little teaching about learning. But life itself is the great school of life, and you only get out of school properly if you bring with you the ability to learn from life throughout your entire life. But you can't do that if you are grafted onto knowledge during these years. You can only do that if the school is used to develop these powers of thinking, feeling and willing in the human being in his soul. Then one learns how to learn from life. If we want democracy and socialism, then we must not be so arrogant as to think that we can determine everything and already know everything. We must get beyond megalomania. One only has to be a twenty-one-year-old reasonable, mature person to be elected into all state parliaments, to speak in a way that those people who have experience in life speak. But then one must be educated to the innermost human modesty, that we are not absolutely perfect human beings for a moment, but developing human beings from birth to death. That every day of life has a certain value, and that we do not live into our thirties in vain after going through our twenties, but that every new day and every new year always brings new revelations.

But this must be imparted as a real impulse for life through the things I have just mentioned. In the age of natural science, these things could not always be properly appreciated. In the age of natural science, for example, a principle has crept into schools that is extremely correct when viewed from one side, but highly questionable when viewed from the other: that is, the principle of visualization. I always feel a little horror when I enter a classroom and see the calculating machine there, with which the children are supposed to learn counting and adding “vividly”. In arithmetic, it is still possible. But if we radically extend the principle of vividness, it must be said that the principle of vividness in education is only justified if everything in the world is really vivid. But do you believe that everything in the world is really vivid? There are many things in the world that cannot be vivid, namely all emotional and volitional values, sympathy, antipathy, and so on. These cannot be made clear at all, they must pass from the teacher to the pupil precisely according to the principle of authority, through indeterminate fluids, if I may use this expression. This has a very great significance in terms of cultural history.

We see how people today are intellectually over-educated, especially in our Western civilization, and how they always express everything they demand of life in intellectual principles. That which is now the most intellectual, which is entirely only intellect, is the Marxist program. That is precisely the fundamental characteristic of the Marxist program, that it only received its structure from the intellect. One really only understands what is in the Marxist program when one knows that everything in it is dictated only by the intellect, often by a very sharp intellect, by an extremely sharp, ingenious intellect – but only by the intellect. In human nature, in the human soul, the individual soul powers are interrelated. If one power is developed too strongly, the others are left behind; some powers develop more, others are left behind. If the powers of the intellect are developed too strongly, the emotions are left behind at a lower level. They may become strong, but they become elementary, they become wild. And so we see that in our time of intelligence, the most desolate emotions and the most terrible instincts arise as “historical demands”. For that is what comes from Eastern Europe, what is beginning to flood Central Europe: elementary instinctive demands, which are the opposite pole to intellectuality. One would like people to start thinking about the actual connections in this regard.

For example, there are two truly bourgeois philosophers. One is more of a naturalist in the world of the nineteenth century, Avenarius, the other is Mach. One is in Zurich, where he also taught, the other in Vienna. These two people, Avenarius and Mach, had developed the scientific mentality to the highest degree. They had made this mentality into a philosophical system. Why? Because the principle of bringing only the most vivid aspects of natural science to bear on human science was everything to them.

These people were really very good, good citizens, highly respectable people, I can assure you of that. And now Avenarius' philosophy and Mach's philosophy have become the state philosophy of the Bolsheviks in Russia! This connection might seem inexplicable. On the surface, one might perhaps want to justify it by saying that many Bolsheviks studied in Zurich. But that is not the point, because no philosopher likes to be associated with someone to whom he is not inwardly related. Rather, the inner connection is that what has been expressed in such purely natural-scientific thinking is so one-sided that, on the other hand, through the mysteriousness of human nature, it evokes those emotions, those elementary instincts, which are then given full expression in Bolshevism. This is no coincidence; there is an inner lawfulness behind it. And no one has more to reflect on such things than the teaching profession, because these things belong most intensely in cultural education.

We simply have to ask ourselves how we should educate the child. We cannot just rely on formalistic methodology, pedagogy and didactics in our time, when everything is in turmoil; we have to draw on cultural history to build a healthy pedagogy. Therefore, we have to counter the principle of vividness with something that builds character. We have tried in our circle – one can have objections to some of it, but it is along the lines I have just indicated – we have tried to replace mere physiological gymnastics, where only limb movements in relation to physiology come into consideration, with e which is the soul-inspired art of movement for human beings. It will be seen that, just as it is an art, it is also, on the other hand, inspired gymnastics, and that it is precisely through this that it can achieve something significant for the education of the will. And so we must reshape many things in which we now firmly believe if we really want to count on an education of the human being through which the human being can grow into democracy and socialism in the right way. Otherwise, democracy and socialism will become the most terrible scourge for civilized humanity in the future. What must be taken into account most of all is that in an age when people want to participate, firstly in state life, secondly in economic life through all kinds of “councils”, where even what has been achieved by capital is to be replaced by the reason of the various works councils, transport councils, economic councils – that in this time, precisely in terms of their education, people must undergo what will enable them to practise what democracy and socialism demand. For democracy and socialism should not be a mere human demand; they should also represent a system of human duties and obligations.

That is how seriously we must take things today, and we must in particular bring what lies in the demands of democracy and socialism into pedagogy and education. And if a person is to develop true insight into the needs and abilities of others, if socialization is to take place, then the human being must have developed within himself that capacity for love through the principle of imitation, through the principle of authority, which brings him to true brotherhood in life. Socialism without people inclined towards brotherhood is a wooden iron! Therefore, one may say: It would be a pity not to ask the teachers first and foremost when it comes to dealing with new developments in our social future, because only from this quarter can the wind blow that will really have a healing effect with regard to the characterized demands of the time.

I can easily believe that today, and also for the transitional period, the teaching staff in particular might have serious concerns about what needs to be done to make such a school and such an education possible, as characterized here, through the efforts of the “Federation for the Threefold Social Organism”. This Federation for Threefold Order sees in the dependence of the school on the state, in the permeation of the school with the state principle, that which will make it impossible for the future to cultivate in the school what has been discussed here today. The socialists could reflect on this a little. They want to nationalize or socialize everything in a certain way. The class of people that preceded them nationalized the school. The school is completely nationalized; it is a good place to learn what nationalization is. And today, with the call for socialization, anyone who takes things seriously, anyone who is capable of seeing the big cultural and historical picture, must say: what is needed is denationalization of the school. Therefore, the “Bund für Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus” has the principle of placing the school system entirely in its own hands, of giving the school system self-government, so that not even supervision remains with the state, but what is achieved in the school through self-government should grow purely out of the needs of spiritual life itself. Much will arise from this. I will give you just one example, because it may be easier for us to communicate through an example on this broad topic.

Today we distinguish between primary schools, secondary schools and universities. At the universities, education is also taught. This education is now to be given a slightly better position at the universities, but it is actually still always taught as a “minor subject”. Until now, it was like this: some philosopher was appointed to teach philosophy, and then he was also given education as a minor subject. This was usually a burden for him, he did not like doing it at all. In the future, things must be different. For in the future, everything that is spiritual life must be connected with general human life. In the future, if such an ideal as I have outlined before you today can really be fulfilled, in the future the teacher will definitely be a psychologist. He will educate the growing human being based on his in-depth knowledge of human nature, and he will know best what pedagogical truth is. Then the teacher, who otherwise teaches children, will be called to the university to teach pedagogy there. And after teaching there for a while, he will go back to school to teach children again, gain new experience, and then teach pedagogy again later. This will become a true 'Republic of Letters', as Klopstock once dreamed of. Only by taking things so thoroughly and so deeply can we make any progress at all. The present time is destined to communicate these things to the outer life.

But to accomplish all this, every sphere of the spirit must be a kingdom unto itself. At most, it could give rise to the following concern: If the state, through its regulatory measures, no longer contributes to the teacher's income, then the situation of teachers will be very dire. Well, the teacher will belong to an economic corporation, just as there are other economic corporations. Besides being a teacher, he will be part of the economic body, the third limb of the threefold social organism, and will receive his income from this independent economic entity. For the threefold social organism will have an independent economic entity, just as it has an independent state entity, where the right to cultivate on a democratic basis and as it will have its own free spiritual realm. And what today goes indirectly into the teacher's bank account through taxation will then come directly from economic life. Furthermore, it is only through the independent spiritual life that the right atmosphere for school and teaching will be created.

A healthy social organism also requires a correct evaluation of the various goods and achievements of life, one that comes from the whole human being. This evaluation of goods and achievements must be there. But in a healthy social organism, the view must not prevail that what the teacher actually achieves for the growing generation can be “paid for”. That is a gift that the teacher will impart from the spiritual world to humanity! This attitude must take hold in the healthy social organism, so that the teacher is the medium through which the abilities of the human being, the individual qualities of the human being, are brought up from their dark backgrounds, as they are predisposed in human nature. It is merely the megalomania of philistinism to believe that what can actually be achieved in the school must be paid for. What the economic body of the healthy threefold social organism will have to provide is only the opportunity for the teacher to live as all other people live. In the consciousness of this offering of the possibility of life and the evaluation of teaching, which will be the healthy impulse, without which there can be no democracy, one must completely separate. For that democracy which levels everything, which can no longer evaluate things, will only destroy things, and that socialism which believes it can pay for everything will also destroy life. Not only must the teacher himself be the one factor that is heard when the call for democracy and socialization can be followed, but the evaluation of the teaching profession itself must arise again from the constitution of the healthy social organism. The aim of the Federation for the Tripartite Social Order is to achieve independence in each of the three areas of life. Therefore, it wants to place what has so far been mixed into an inorganic, chaotic unity – economic life, spiritual life and state life – on its healthy three foundations: an independent spiritual life, an independent democratic state or legal life and an independent social economic life. And the human being forms the higher unity in the three. He will participate in all three areas. There is no need to fear that unity will be lost. Anyone who thinks that the idea of threefolding is about dividing the horse into three parts has a poor understanding of what it is about. We do not want to divide the horse into three parts; we just do not want it to be said that the horse is only a real horse when it stands on one leg. A healthy social organism stands on its healthy three legs. This is, firstly, an independent spiritual life, to which education and the school system belong; secondly, an independent legal life, to which the democratic state belongs; and thirdly, an independent economic life, which alone can be socialized. If you want to co-socialize legal life and even intellectual life, then you end up with nothing more than a socialism of economic life, which pushes everything into the uniformity of economic life, which is supposed to clothe and feed people, and which gradually drains everything that can only develop independently: state or legal life and intellectual life.

This is a serious question, especially as a pedagogical question, as a cultural pedagogical question, which in the broadest sense is the fundamental question of our time. As far as I have been able to do so in these already long considerations, I have tried to show an understanding of what the impulse of the threefold social organism really wants and what it particularly wants for the liberation and redemption of spiritual life and of the school and education system from some of the bonds in which they are bound. It would give me great satisfaction if the aims that arise from such considerations were to a certain extent taken into account by teachers and educators.

Final words after the discussion

In the lively discussion that followed, it was objected that the proletarian children had been spoiled by bad role models and were not suitable for educating “new people”. Authority would be better replaced by leadership and following, as the school communities strive for. Education is determined by the personality of the teacher, regardless of the political context. Only a new teacher training program must educate the teacher to be independent; today the teacher needs the authority of the state. The state has given the teacher authority and has not disturbed him further; he is not to be dispensed with.

Dr. STEINER: First of all I would ask to be allowed to deal with the individual questions that have been put to me. First of all the Chairman's question regarding the children of the proletariat.

If I said, or if it can be inferred from my words, that I have described the proletarian as the “type of the new man,” then I ask you not to take this to mean that the “new man” is a kind of angel. It is a very common mistake to assume that when one speaks of the new, especially in the development of humanity, one also has the view that the new is always also the better. That is the effect of a capital error of the stereotyped parties. For them, the new was always the better. In this sense, I did not want to describe the proletarian as the “type of the better man”, but only to say that he is the type of man who has developed in the last times, in the last three to four centuries, especially in the nineteenth century. When I said that the bourgeois child is pampered by its parents, I also said that the proletarian child is pampered too – I ask you to please remember that I added this subordinate clause – but it is not pampered by parents who have no time for it. The fact of the matter is that the proletarian child today is usually a bigger rascal than the bourgeois child. One can fully agree with that. And I imagine that the honored chairman, who is a teacher of proletarian children, experiences it perhaps just as horribly as he describes it. I could think that precisely because the proletarian is the type of the new man, the proletarian child is the bigger rascal. But it is so in a different way. It is not because it imitates its parents, who are in a certain class, and thus imitates the class characteristics, but because it is educated on the street and left alone, imitates everything possible. It is generally worse off. It has outgrown humanity, to which there is simply nothing particularly good to imitate today. It has grown out of a general humanity, so that in this respect it stands in life as the proletarian stands in life later on. It has more outgrown life. The bourgeois child, on the other hand, is more placed in a certain hothouse. That is the difference. There is no question that the proletarian child imitates all sorts of things and comes to school with the success of this imitation, with things that are not very desirable. But my aim was to show how new tasks arise for the proletarian child, firstly, because it does not come from its parents with very specific class peculiarities and is then not released into life that father, mother, brother, sister, uncles, aunts and others who support it, but that it needs to rely only on what has been brought up in its soul, in the whole person. One has often repeated a saying of a man who has not exactly distinguished himself favorably in his post, the saying “Free rein to the most capable.” But things have now become a cliché. Because it is easy to say “free rein for the most capable” when you really mean only your own nephew or your sister's child. So these are things that must be taken literally, not by the letter but by the spirit. We live in such a phrase-ridden world precisely because we can take things literally so little. I ask you to bear this in mind. That, then, with regard to imitation.

As for the sense of authority, it is natural that the children of the proletariat may have little to go by in this respect. But here we must strive, above all, by training our pedagogical staff, to really develop this sense of authority in the children of the proletariat.

Then it was said that it does not matter whether the personality takes care of the development of thinking, feeling and will within or outside the state. I could not really understand the question, even though it came up twice. What matters is that the personality is not deprived of its strength by being crammed into state regulations. One must simply take into account what it means when what comes from the free personality of the teacher himself cannot be passed on, but only what is introduced into what he is supposed to teach through the decrees, curricula and objectives of the state; when the aim is not to educate people to become full human beings, but to train people who will then have to serve the state in the right way at this or that point in the state.

Then the objection was raised – and this always comes up when this question is discussed – that educational interests and needs are not all that great in today's world, and that most parents would be happy if they didn't have to send their children to school. It has even been said that no one would send their children to school anymore. But what I said did not touch on the superficial question of whether or not to send children to school. In my book The Essentials of the Social Question, I speak of a child's right to education, and of the need for a corresponding contribution to education from the future economy, even in the future state. So, I am not talking about the fact that “compulsory schooling” is perceived as a nuisance by those parents who do not want to send their children to school, but rather to the fields, but I am talking about the fact that in a healthy social organism, the child has a right to an education. Now one could say: if this right exists, the state – why the state should have been hammered today, as one speaker said, I don't know – will still be there as the legal institution – but I only had to speak about the spiritual institution today. And here the objection could be raised that if this right to educate the child is asserted, then parents will have to send their children to school, and then, for all I care, compulsory schooling can be abandoned. But that has nothing to do with the self-sufficiency of spiritual life, nothing to do with what is done in schools, with the administration of the school system. I recently answered the question as follows: If there is no compulsion to attend school, if there is a right to education, you can even threaten to appoint a guardian for the child of those parents who do not want to send their children to school, who will represent the child's right to an education with the parents; then they will happily send their children to school. All these secondary questions can be answered if there is the goodwill to truly understand the main question: everything depends on the spiritual life being freely left to its own devices.

Then the conflict that arises when the state or some other force later fails to tolerate what the teacher has planted in the children as an authority has been hinted at. But it is precisely from the realization of this conflict that the demand for the separation of the school system from the state arises. It is precisely in order to avoid the impossibility of a state later not tolerating what has been placed in the soul of the child through authority at school, that the school and education system should be placed on its own ground. If the state is not at the same time the authority for the teacher, then when later in life a person is forced to do something else, he will not think back to his teacher in such a way that the teacher is now worthless to him when the state says otherwise, but he will think back in such a way that he will feel it as a difficult fate that he cannot carry out what the authority of the teacher has planted in his soul. If you think about it in detail, you will see that the solution to this conflict has already been very successful. But precisely because this conflict weighed heavily on the soul for a long time, the demand for the spiritual independence of the school and educational system has been established from an observation of life. All similar things – and there are many similar things to the conflict that has been very successfully mentioned here – are only possible if the school system is placed in what is based on democracy, in the legal life of the state.

What Mrs. B. said about authority sounded so abstract and theoretical to me that I do not believe such things can have any real significance for life, for practical life. No one could tell from what I said that I assumed that the child could form a “judgment” about the fact that the teacher is an authority. These are things that arise naturally in the atmosphere of life.

Regarding the question of teachers, it will arise from all kinds of prerequisites that in the future it will be important that there is a selection process for the teaching profession and that people are not admitted to the teaching profession merely by passing exams or acquiring a certain amount of knowledge. Knowledge can, under certain circumstances, be acquired later in a few hours, it can be caught up on from the various manuals. What matters is the whole personality, the innermost gift of the teacher. Of course, I do not mean that if one has not been immersed in this knowledge before, one can easily acquire it later in a few hours. Rather, if one needs it – one must of course have been in it before – then one can easily acquire it again later, where it is needed. What is important is that a certain guarantee be created for what should determine the teacher to teach, a guarantee that through his whole personality he is so immersed in human culture that something can pass from him to the pupil, which can then work in an authoritative way. These are things that must be considered much more deeply and thoroughly than is often attempted today, when such abstract things as “leadership” and “followership” or “school community” are put forward. I would also ask you to consider the fact that I spoke of “school communities.” What matters is that we take things as they are said, and not that we first translate them into an abstract program that we have made up ourselves.

Then there would be much talk about the question of the separation of church and state. Historically, it is the case that for a long time it simply could not be otherwise than that the school was in a certain way an appendage of the church. The state has done a good job in modern times of detaching the education system from the church and putting it on its own ground. But now we are once again faced with the necessity of improving the things that are attached to the school by making it dependent on the state, by placing the school on its own ground. The fact that these things can very easily be viewed one-sidedly and in an agitative way should not be underestimated today. In much of what is said about these things today, I hear something that is not entirely objective. We must be clear about one thing: we must not in any way arrive at a standardization of the human soul through any kind of future pedagogy or future school constitution. We must not consider something to be the only valid view of the soul and demand that it be taught to children. We must also be able to put ourselves in the shoes of people who think and feel differently. It is important not to be afraid of this when, for example, Catholic parents demand that their children also receive Catholic religious education. There is no need to be afraid of this if you yourself stand strong on your own ground. Just as you need not be afraid of any other world view if you have your own enthusiasm and strength for your own world view. These things should be allowed to develop in the free competition of ideas, but in no case by the law-making power of the state. Just as it is harmful when a church is made a state church by the law-making power of the state and thereby receives the favor of the state, it is equally harmful when a church is persecuted. No kind of religious belief should be persecuted or supported by the law-making power of the state. And anyone who starts with this thought and thinks it through to a sufficient extent will find that it is indeed necessary to put the spiritual life and especially the school and teaching system on its own ground.

What has been said about the authority exercised by the teacher not being intended to remain for life, but for the young person to break free from it, is either a matter of course or something has been misunderstood. For it is of course quite natural that one cannot be placed under the authority of a teacher for one's entire life. This authority should work towards one being able to say: What would it be like to become a teacher? Then, through what the teacher's authority has placed in one's soul, one would be able to become an authority oneself. But one must grasp things much more thoroughly and deeply, because a teacher's authority can indeed be maintained throughout one's entire life. I have already said that what the teacher gives in education cannot really be 'paid for'. Payment means something quite different. But what education can do is to shape the mutual relationship between teacher and student in such a way that the teacher can remain an authority for a person throughout their life. And I would like to ask what could be more beautiful than to remember a teacher later on, when one has reached the age of sixty and can look back to one's youth, and then say to oneself: This teacher was an authority for me, I still feel the greatest gratitude towards him today, I have become what I am partly through him! This authority can be retained and can live on in a lifelong gratitude towards the teacher. These are the things that a psychology that is equal to today's tasks must take into account.

If it has been said that the state is necessary after all, or that it can be replaced by a spiritual senate or the like, then it has already been said: Those who have not felt state coercion have simply not seen it. And you see, the fact of the matter is that it really is the case that being a teacher of the state has become second nature to many people. And when it has become their second nature, they no longer realize that their free personality does not actually teach from the sources of spiritual life, but they have become accustomed to the state, have become accustomed to continuing in teaching what the state offers them. They feel “free”. But this feeling of freedom is no proof that one is really free, especially in the mentality of present-day humanity.

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that a person who is the “great world teacher” for a large number of people, Woodrow Wilson, gives such a strange definition of what he understands by freedom in his writing “On Freedom” that one could climb up on the walls. He says something like: You can call a mechanism that has no inhibition and runs as the various events cause it to; or you can call a ship that moves in the same way according to the same principle free. But this mechanical freedom is not the real one we mean: you have to feel it.

Then, too, many things have been said that I have not said at all. In particular, the gentleman who defended the state spoke of all sorts of such things. I did not speak at all about the present state, but anyone who understood me correctly will know that I said: From what is being striven for by today's socialists, this and that threatens to become reality, and what must not come about would come about, so things must be arranged in a certain way. — Now, my dear audience, I really cannot go into things that are only constructed from my words and then polemicized against. But there is one thing I would like to address: An authority will also be necessary for the teacher again. I did not say anything about the authority that will be necessary for the teacher, but I did say that the teacher should be an authority for the child! Whether an authority is necessary for the teacher is a completely different question, which will be answered by the fact that ultimately life itself will take care of it. Pay attention only to life as it is, that is far too little observed today. Pay attention only to life and reality, and you will say to yourself: Yes, people are so different from each other that ultimately someone who can be an authority in the most diverse ways will still find an authority above himself. It will be taken care that someone can always find an authority above himself. Well, this does not have to lead to a supreme pinnacle. A person can be an authority simply by being superior in other respects.

When I spoke of Klopstock's “Republic of Letters”, it does not mean that everyone will now do as they please. Rather, they will not simply do as they please, but out of the needs of intellectual life, in order to make it as fruitful as possible, there will again be a voluntary leaning towards those who are to be an authority in the future. A “constitution” that is not based on rigid laws, on bony, state decrees, a constitution can be conceived in the free spiritual life; only it will relate to the real, living conditions of the people who participate in this spiritual life. The “law”, however, must first be replaced on this ground by the free human relationships, which are, after all, individual and can always change from week to week, and which cannot be bound by rigid laws and immortalized in some rigid form. What is important, therefore, is that spiritual life be given the opportunity to live in the form that is possible for it out of its own strength, so that the teacher of the school is not dependent in any way on a state official, but that he in a human, objective and appropriate way, as follows from the spiritual life, by another person who is also directly involved in the spiritual life and works with him in the same spiritual life. That is what matters. We can see that even today there is a certain fear of independence in spiritual life, and that many feel comfortable under the protection of the state. But that is precisely the point: so many feel comfortable under this state protection. However, this state protection is being sought even more by those who now want to succeed.

The development of the last few centuries was such that the state had power from earlier conquests and similar circumstances, and then little by little individuals wanted to get hold of this power in order to be protected by it. For a time it was the church. It preferred not only the living word, flowing from the spirit and convincing people, but also a little help from the police. Then came the schools. They preferred not the living word flowing from the spirit to reach the child, but state compulsion behind it. Then, in the end, the various economic classes and corporations also came, until we finally got that economic corporation – in Germany, of course, the industrialists and heavy industrialists in particular were keen on this – which also wanted a share of the power of the state. And then behind them were the Social Democrats, who in turn wanted to take the state for themselves. So the state power was the gathering place for everyone. What the future must strive for is that state power should not be a gathering place for everything that wants to creep under this power, but that it should be placed on democratic ground. But what matters is that on this state ground that which the mature human being has to agree with every other mature human being should be realized; there we are dealing with what the mere constitutional state is. It is remarkable that people still do not want to understand this today, although it was very close to understanding this constitutional state when someone who was once Prussia's Minister of Culture came to a correct understanding of these conditions. In Humboldt's essay “On the Limits of the Effectiveness of the State” you will find beautiful approaches to what the state should actually be. But if it is to be “democratic”, then only that which every mature person has to do with every other mature person may prevail in it. Then that which can be discerned in spiritual life must be taken out of the actual life of the state, and then the state must not include economic life, where what matters is economic experience, credit, and so on. That is to say, if anyone seriously wants democracy, then he cannot want socialism and intellectual life in the state, but must say to himself: If democracy is to be carried out, the only healthy thing to do is to place the intellectual life on the one hand and the economic cycle on the other in free territory. The fact that this is not understood – in Russia it has not been understood! has the effect that today something highly undemocratic, even anti-democratic, is being striven for in economic life: the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat. I encountered this in its most blatant form a few months ago in Basel, when after a lecture someone stood up, obviously a communist, and said: If the salvation of the future is to come about, Lenin must become world ruler! — You call for 'socialization' with these people and you don't even understand the very beginning of socialization, namely that you first have to socialize the relationships of domination; that socialization does not consist of monarchizing the relationship of domination and imperializing socialism. They think they want to socialize, but they don't even want to start with the socialization of the power relations, but instead they appoint an “economic pope” over the whole world. That is how they think.

These are the contradictions that arise today. That is why one would like to have a sense that the things that come to light in the threefold social organism are based on something deeper. We did not arrive at the idea of threefolding by being able to say, out of arbitrary, abstract principles and out of habits of life: I believe or I do not believe in these things. Of course, many things have to be placed in their proper context. But the impulse for the threefold social order comes from a truly hard observation of life and from a felt seriousness about the great cultural tasks of the present time. If one honestly wants socialism and democracy, then one must not simply want what many people say when they put it together: “social democracy.” Because in that way, spiritual life is not properly taken into account. On the contrary, anyone who honestly wants democracy and socialism needs above all a truly free spiritual life, which cannot be an arbitrary spiritual life. The impulse for threefolding has arisen out of an understanding of reality and out of a sense of the seriousness of present-day conditions. In these days we in Central Europe should feel here very particularly how serious the times are. We should in this time, when we have to say to ourselves: the question is one of life or death! — we should feel that we need to rethink and relearn about many old things, and that for the future it cannot be a matter of small changes to some institutions, but of a real rethinking, re-feeling and re-learning of the whole human being. Only in this way will we understand our time and only in this way will we be able to truly move forward!

Dear attendees!

The German nation is engaged in a tremendously serious struggle. A struggle that shakes and throbs through all of us. A struggle in which a new wave of our nation's destiny is to be formed out of blood and out of acts of arms.

It is a time when, one might say, the furthest extremes of human feeling, human emotion, and human imagination collide, flowing through our hearts. Deep sorrow, which spreads over countless losses, pain and grief, blood – all this provides a kind of foundation, but one that is surmounted by an atmosphere of enthusiasm, an atmosphere of bliss at what the members of the German nation are able to do in order to to maintain and secure, in the face of the iron necessity imposed on them, that position in the world, that position within European culture, which they have inherited as a precious legacy from their fathers, as a precious legacy from the historical development of Europe itself. In such a time, in which a new destiny is being formed out of blood and military deeds: But the most important things of the present, of such a present, are spoken about in different words than those that can be spoken in such a reflection, as it is this evening. The weapons speak, of course in the figurative sense. Courage speaks, the bravery of those who are exposed to the great historical fields of our present events.

But especially in such a time everything must be close to us that is connected with the whole attitude, with all the tasks, with the whole feeling and will of the German people. Therefore, it may well be appropriate for us to devote an hour of reflection to that which can take shape in our soul when we turn our gaze to something that has developed not within the valor of arms, not within the arena of external events, but deep within the innermost being of the soul itself. But we feel, perhaps more than usual, especially in such a time, how – just as blood flows through all parts of the human organism, a blood flows through you – so a power, such an essence flows through all the expressions of life of the people. Therefore, in tonight's meditation, I would like to present as one of the symptoms of the German character what I would call the world view of German idealism.

I would like to present it as it has been incorporated into the various world views of the European peoples. The nations that are fighting with each other in our present time have also been touched in their interrelations by what the content of their worldview, their conception of life, is. And in this struggle of worldviews and conceptions of life, what can be called the worldview of German idealism has emerged. I would not, dear ladies and gentlemen, wish to fall into the tone in which Germany's enemies today fall when they endeavor to describe German thinking and German feeling to their own people. I think it is much more in keeping with the German character to let the facts speak for themselves. Especially in this area, where the most inner and sacred goods of the human soul are at stake. The judgment about the significance of the German people in the development of mankind can only be formed from a calm, serious, objective consideration of the facts of the spiritual development of mankind itself.

If we now consider the interrelationships of those nations with which the German people have come into contact in the course of their more recent struggle for a world view, if we consider these, then a central theme emerges from precisely that point of view which has been taken for years in these lectures, also in this city, from this place, from the point of view of spiritual science, from which I have been allowed to lecture every winter for years in this city as well.

If one wants to look into the soul of a nation, then it is necessary to first look at the essence of the individual human soul. I cannot discuss today in detail the thoughts that I have often expressed here about this individual human soul; I will only touch on them from the point of view that should lead to our reflection today. Particulars that are to be mentioned today will be the subject of tomorrow's lecture. But by pointing out some of the things I have been allowed to say here over the years, also proving them from the foundations of spiritual science, it may be said that, before the eye of spiritual research, this human soul does not present itself as the vague surge of inner life, as which it so often presents itself to today's soul teaching, which is more influenced by a positivistic - as it were - view. Spiritual science regards this mixing up of all the individual expressions and structures of the soul life, as is often found in the external soul science of today, as just as unscientific and as unfruitful for a true contemplation of life as it would regard the failure to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen in scientific observation when one wishes to consider it in its connection with world phenomena. I have often said, as here, that just as the chemist breaks down water into hydrogen and oxygen in order to be able to observe it in its context in the natural world, so the spiritual observer must explore the human soul in its , which is not an arbitrary abstraction, which does not correspond to a mere external judgment, but to a real experience of that which makes up the whole extent of human soul life.

The spiritual researcher must first divide this human soul life into a sum of those processes that he designates with the term sentient soul. This sentient soul is connected with the elementary effects of the human soul, with that which, I might say, is still directly released from the physical, the bodily. The sentient soul is connected with this; with that which still lies partly in our blood; with that which breaks away from our inner feelings to become impulses of our being, without us being able to completely radiate it with the light of our consciousness. The sentient soul is spiritual, but it is the part of the human soul that is most intimately bound to the body of all the human soul parts. But it is also the soul element that causes the human being to direct his soul outwards. It is the soul element that ensouls the senses: the eyes when they look out into the world that is to be observed by the human being; the other senses when they come into contact with the surrounding world.

A soul element that then breaks away more, that is already more permeated by human consciousness, by the inner intentionality of the human soul, that is less bound to the elementary of human physical nature, is the mind or emotional soul. Of course, on the one hand, dear honored attendees, this mind or emotional soul is freer from the outer physical nature than the sentient soul, but it is also poorer for it. All the richness that is poured into our soul life through the elemental impulses of our entire human nature being poured into the sentient soul is no longer present in the intellectual or mind soul. As a mind soul, it is inward, but it is more loosely connected to the whole extent of the outer life of nature.

The soul element in which the human being can best, I would say, fulfill his present task in this life through the activity inherent in him, is then the consciousness soul. It is the soul through which the human being most comprehends himself as a personality, most becomes aware of himself as an individuality in the world. It is the faculty by which man can develop the highest degree of consciousness in himself, by which he can know himself as a self. But it is the soul element that, because it is most inward, shows least how man is connected with all the depths of outer existence. It is the soul member that is most closely connected to the human conscience, to that which is most personal to the human being, and at the same time it is most devoted to what the human being designates and must designate as his useful purposes, which are satisfied in external existence.

Precisely in the same way, to use yet another comparison that shows how spiritual science thinks entirely in terms of natural science, precisely in the same way as there are seven colors in a rainbow, but we can trace them back to three —, just as there are three color shades in a rainbow and the observation of these three nuances does not correspond to some kind of amateurism, but to real science - the reddish-yellow nuance, the greenish nuance, the blue-violet nuance - so the triad of these nuances is present in the life of the soul: the sentient soul, the soul of mind or feeling, and the consciousness soul. And just as the unified light is expressed through the nuances of the rainbow, so it is through the nuances of the soul, through the three, I could also say modes of activity of the human soul, that which we describe as the actual I, as the reality of the human inner being. Just as light appears through the yellow-reddish, through the green, through the blue-violet, so the I appears through the sentient soul, through the mind or emotional soul, through the consciousness soul.

Now, esteemed attendees, just as we can find this very structure in the individual human soul – as I said, I can only mention this today – so we can only truly get to know the souls of nations if we illuminate them from the point of view that we gain from this view of the human soul itself. We then gain the insight that, insofar as the souls of nations express themselves in the whole of human development, these national souls themselves are nuanced in such a way that one national soul expresses more the character of the sentient soul, another more the character of the mind or emotional soul, and yet another national soul more the character of the consciousness soul. It is really not an arbitrary way of looking at it. It is not, I might say, a forced abstraction when one regards the peoples of Western Europe, the Western and South-Western European peoples, in this way, according to the character of their folk souls. On the contrary: an unbiased study of the way in which the folk soul expresses itself leads to such a conception.

Let us now consider the soul nature of the Italian people from this point of view. Of course, dear readers, the individual stands out from his people when he strives to do so. But that is why there is a national character that bears the nuance of the national soul. There is no need to construct something arbitrarily, but only to go into what – if one has just one guiding thread from the knowledge of the human soul – naturally follows from the nature of the folk soul. Then the following consideration can be described as by no means unfruitful, as it seems to me.

The nuance of human soul nature that is expressed in the Italian soul can be described as the nature of the sentient soul. And if we, esteemed attendees, turn our gaze, our soul's gaze, to the cultural development that has been poured out on the peoples of Europe since the dawn of modern cultural development, since the sixteenth or seventeenth century, we find in it the opportunity to become acquainted with the various soul nuances and their mutual relationships and their mutual forces of influence, I would say, in an unbiased way. We find that in a very special way in the sixteenth century, there emerges that which one can say It is the task that was precisely the task of the Italian national soul, by virtue of the character of its sentient soul. Yes, precisely the greatest thing that came from this side, both from this time and from what immediately preceded this time, testifies to us that it has this character.

Let us take the personality who is so often referred to when speaking of the dawn of the modern world view. Let us take Giordano Bruno; he who fell victim to the fanaticism of the opposing world view of the sixteenth century. When we let the peculiar world-view of this man take effect on us, we feel in this personality the echo of what comes to us from Dante. We feel in it, in the world-view of Giordano Bruno, the echo of what comes to us in colors and in the richness of form from the painting of Raphael or Michelangelo. What do we find in all this? Just when you delve into the way in which Giordano Bruno presents himself to the world, how he presents himself to the world - placing himself in it, surveying the whole universe, breaking through what the medieval world view still saw as an outer boundary - how he breaks through the firmament of the space and pointing out into the infinite, as he could do it through his sensory activity inspired by inner feeling, so we can say to ourselves: He has conjured up this image of the world, which is as much scientific as artistic, out of direct perception, out of the same inner soul activity through which Dante, by virtue of his feelings, conjured that which he felt for the individual members of his people into the mighty image he created of the spiritual worlds into which the soul passes through the gate of death according to his vision. The essential thing – today we can only touch on this – in Giordano Bruno's world view, and also in the world view that his predecessor – from whom he adopted much, Telesius had, and also in the world view that Galileo wove into his world view, we see everywhere that the main emphasis is on directing the human being's attention to what external perceptions [and what] the sensory world gives. To explore this sensual world in such a way that one also uses all the powers of the mind, that is, the powers of the mind or soul, the powers of the consciousness soul, in order to achieve the sensual image in perfection. We see this as a task that opens up for us in this field of the culture of the national soul.

Thus we see a world picture emerging in southwestern Europe, which owes its greatness primarily to the fact that it is focused on external sensuality, and all the other powers of the soul that are not sensuality are used to arouse this sensuality in a pure way. This world view emerges from the elementary powers of the sentient soul.

And if we ascend to the Western peoples of Europe, and consider French culture from this point of view, we find expressed in it - I can only describe these things symptomatically today, by placing individual personalities before you as the living symptoms of historical development. If we look at this culture, we find a man like Cartesius, like Descartes, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, shaping into a world picture, I might say, the very essence of this culture. And if we engage with this world view, if we ask ourselves: what forces in the human soul shape this world view, in contrast to the forces of the sentient soul, which have just been cited for the Italian world view? We find that it is the powers of the intellectual soul or the soul of feeling. Just as I might say that the Italian conception of the world is supposed to present to the human soul what I might call the purely sensuous nature, so the conception of the world of the scientific intellect, or what we may here call purely rationalistic judgments about the world, is supposed to form a conception of the world. The human mind, which is so directed to the finite in the human conception of the world precisely because it is placed in the finite human being, is cultivated by Cartesius: What are the sources of your certainty? How can you say something certain about that which is true, which is truthful, real? And because he draws from the sources of thought, from the rationality of human beings, Cartesius, Descartes, develops rationalism as - I would say - the characteristic expression of the French national soul. This intellect first of all attaches itself to that which is immediately present: to the human self itself, to the inner personality. It attempts to attain certainty of life and the world from this inner personality, from that power which in turn is most intimately connected with this personality. “I think, therefore I am!” the world-famous saying of Descartes. Man assures himself of his existence by becoming aware of his mind at work within him. He cannot doubt his mind. Therefore, he can find in his mind the sources of certainty that can be given to him.

But a world picture emerges from it, dear honored attendees, over which the whole nature of the mind is poured out. The mind has the peculiarity that it is, so to speak, a self-contained entity in itself and also in its setting in the human personality. It does not go beyond the boundaries of the human personality. I would like to say: Descartes also remains in a sense in thinking. He does not stimulate in himself the other powers of the soul, those powers of the soul through which we can let the whole human being flow into nature and its secrets, in order to feel and sense this nature and to live with it. Descartes remains in thinking, remains in ratio. This characterizes his entire world view. The characterization, which is particularly characterized, dear attendees, by the fact that Cartesius, by only focusing on self-assurance - on what his own thinking assures him of as certain - comes to believe that animals are only living machines. They are not ensouled like humans. The thinking that has become fixed in one's own personality - I would like to say - does not find the way out of itself to submerge lovingly into the outer nature. It does not even reach as far as the soul for the animal world. Soul-less machines, mechanisms, moving machines are the animals. [He penetrates even less to the essence of the other nature. To arrive at certainty, realism withdraws the means by which it could penetrate to the soul of all the rest of nature. One would like to say: This world view wanted to secure human truth; and in this way it secured it, that it renounced a way of living in nature.

Thus we see a world picture over which spreads – I would like to say – that which man finds in himself through his thinking. This world picture then worked through the whole French world-view development. We find it today in a certain sense in Bergson and Boutroux. Everywhere we see how people rely on what is supposed to follow only from human thinking. We see it emerge particularly characteristically at the end of the eighteenth century, [...] where it is expressed in the materialism of French thought as a worldview, which is basically the father of all theoretical materialism, [yes] of all materialistic worldviews of the most recent times; before which Goethe once by confronting it – and thus in the personality in whom the world view of German idealism was most vividly present – faced Goethe, by saying: There the world of moving atoms is presented to us. If we could at least see some reason why these atoms move, and if we could see why our whole beautiful, diverse and magnificent world with all its wonders arises from these moving atoms.

But materialism – so Goethe believes – [...] only lives in some concepts of moving atoms, and does not show – since it has no need to show – how connected that is, which it thus assumes to be behind the phenomena, with the great diversity and beauty of the world's phenomena! We see one of the most German of Germans, Goethe, rebelling against this materialist world view. This world view expresses the entire character of the intellectual soul or mind soul.

And if we look at British culture from this perspective, we find that this British culture, as it begins in more recent times, directly channels the power of the human soul to that which is spread out before human observation. We see how Bacon von Verulam appears - a personality who demands of the human soul in the most incisive way that it purify all that [which leads it away from what it can observe by being in the world, what it can observe with its senses - with the consciousness that is peculiar to us as human beings! Bacon wanted to cleanse the world view of all that man can bring into it through his mere thinking, through a deepening into his inner self.

Just as sensualism is the world view corresponding to the Italian national character; just as rationalism is the world view corresponding to the French national character, so is so-called empiricism, the focus on external reality, which of course initially only has a meaning for the human consciousness soul, for that in which the human being wants to place himself here as an earthly being with his conscious purposes. This outer reality, what is given in empiricism, as it is said, is the object of the outer consciousness soul. That is what one wants to gain when one looks at it in terms of its characteristic properties, the British world view, that is, all the content it can contain. And from the dawn of modern spiritual life up to Darwin and Spencer, up to the present English world view, we find this basic trait everywhere. But we see that in recent times, strangely enough, it has united with that which lives so truly in the consciousness soul. The consciousness soul, as I said earlier, sets out to get to know the human being through the purposes he pursues as an external being on earth in his immediate sensory surroundings. The consciousness soul focuses on these purposes. On what is useful to man. Let us look back at the example of Darwin. And we see from the form that Darwin gave to the theory of the development of the organic how the principle of usefulness is already being considered in the becoming of the beings. The beings arise and perfect themselves in the struggle for existence. How in the struggle for existence? Because the being that is organized in such a way that it is most useful to itself displaces the others.

It is characteristic that the emergence of the so-called pragmatism – this name was coined in England and more recently in America – is the latest form of the world view prevailing there. What is this pragmatism? It asks: Yes, to what extent can a person, who wants to approach truth through thought, arrive at the truth? It was felt quite intensely that one cannot actually educate oneself with one's soul powers through mere thoughts. Yes, but what are mere thoughts? What are thoughts that a person can form when he looks at phenomena? Is there a world of thoughts that one could say are real? Man goes through the world, so they say, he looks at things. He thinks about them. Is there somehow a power that forms the truth in man? So pragmatism asks. - No, man cannot find such an external power. But man forms concepts, and he can then have them. How can he have them? In such a way that they enable him to summarize the phenomena of the world in a purposeful way. This pragmatism does not seek some background of a source of truth, but it seeks to form such a conception that is expedient for summarizing the multiplicity of phenomena, thereby summarizing the multiplicity of phenomena in the best possible way. This is a concept that can be perceived because it serves to summarize the phenomena. There is no other source of truth.

When we speak, for example, of a unity in the human soul's manifestation – we can assume this unity from what has been said – then we can summarize the individual expressions of the human soul in a purposeful way.

When we speak of gravity, we do not do so because of any inner truth. There is nothing else that prompts us to speak of gravity when we form the concept of gravity, other than the fact that it corresponds to the purpose of summarizing many phenomena that we encounter in the world under one unifying concept. Utility pours over the whole human striving for a world view within pragmatism.

I did not in any way attempt to characterize the facts from any point of view of sympathy or antipathy, but I tried to identify the guiding thread of the worldviews of the three nationalities according to the nuance of soul that expresses itself in the corresponding people, in the corresponding culture. One can see that what I have briefly characterized – and this is why it can only appear arbitrary – but precisely if one were to go deeper, all arbitrariness would disappear, it could be traced through the entire scope of the development of the worldviews of the respective peoples could be traced through the entire scope of the development of the world view of the peoples concerned – testifies to us: Italian culture has particularly developed the sentient soul character; French culture the rational mind or mind soul character; British culture the consciousness soul character.

Now let us turn our gaze to the center of Europe. Let us try to let this soul's gaze briefly roam over those phenomena that also present themselves to us within the last period of human development. This new period announces itself in a peculiar way. There we see, I might say, in a world view of beauty, Giordano Bruno creating out of a purified sensualism, in a state of drunken sensuality. But at the same time, there we see in the sixteenth century, in the seventeenth century in France, Montaigne creating out of the intellectual or emotional soul a world view of pure doubt. Here we see, in Montaigne, I might say, in a different way, less ingeniously, less philosophically than in Descartes, but in him, how one of the most significant signs of this culture is expressed. We see how he is confined to what man alone is capable of thinking, to what is connected with his thinking; but at the same time, he senses that this thinking is limited in its validity as truth by the fact that it dwells only within us. This gives him doubt about the external sense world. That is why Montaigne says: Yes, the external senses provide us with a certain image of the external world. But does it have to be true? We have no means of knowing, for we can only believe our reason. But we have no means in it of proving that something is not revealing itself that is something quite different from what we can suspect behind the sensory phenomena. The sensory phenomena can be deceptive. But can what we have in reason tell us the truth either? We see that we want to prove something in our reason. But soon we come to realize how deceptive this reasoning was in us. Now we have to prove what we have proved all over again. And that presents itself to us immediately, as if from this or that point of view. But it is questionable. We begin to demand a proof of the proof of the proof. The true sage, says Montaigne, is the only one who doubts everything, who goes through the world with a soul that can bear doubt.

And in the field of world view, the Italian's and the Frenchman's contemporary is precisely Bacon, who wants to refer the human soul, as I have characterized it, to that which is purely the object of external utility. This contemporary of his, regardless of what objections one might otherwise have against him, regardless of what point of view one might take: it is characteristic of the development of Central Europe, characteristic of the development of German folk culture, this personality – a contemporary of Giordano Bruno, intoxicated, as it were, with sensuality, of the doubter Montaigne, of Bacon, who referred to mere external empiricism, is Jakob Böhme, the profound German mystic. He – who, while Giordano Bruno wants to connect the drunken mind with the whole world, the outer sensual infinity of the world, who, while Montaigne wants to find man alone wise when he is able to doubt everything, the contemporary of Bacon – is Jakob Böhme, [the contemporary contemporary of just that Bacon] who, when he wants to point man to the truth, points him away from everything he might possibly imagine or develop within himself, and points him to the mere intellectual and conceptual summarization of the phenomena of the consciousness soul. The contemporary of these three, who all point man outward, is Jakob Böhme, who at the same time turned his inner path toward those realms that the human soul can enter when it becomes fully conscious of itself in its deepest inwardness.

And let us turn to this wonderful world picture of Jakob Böhme. We see how this contemporary of Montaigne, the greatest modern doubter, seeks certainties borne inwardly by the deepest soul faculties in a purely spiritual, supersensible world, in a world of human inwardness, which he knows at the same time, because it is human inwardness, to be the inwardness of that which confronts us in the external world, in outer existence. The great affinity of that which man finds when he reaches most deeply into his inner being, with that which man finds when he roams most widely through the whole extent of outer existence, that is what Jakob Böhme wants to show, out of the German soul.

The greatest seeker of certainty – a contemporary of the greatest doubters. The greatest believer in human inwardness, and at the same time the greatest denier of what human inwardness might assert with certainty about any phenomenon in the world. We see emerging at the dawn of the newer development of the world a mind that has arisen out of the culture of the German people and that wants to go to the center of the soul's being and, from the activity of this center, wants to illuminate all that lives in the lives in the sentient soul, in the intellectual soul or mind, in the consciousness soul, like light in the color nuances that appear to be externally divided into reddish-yellow, greenish, and bluish-violet. A culture of the I, a culture that finds its way into the human interior, seeks because it is clear that if you dive deep enough into this human interior, you will find in these depths, in the abyss of the human interior, the gateway to what is still behind what the drunken science of Giordano Bruno finds as the exterior. Jakob Böhme knows how to find the inner core of this outer appearance for himself, in accordance with his attitude and the tenor of his world picture, by descending into his own inner being. Thus, in the heart of Europe, at the dawn of the newer evolution of humanity, we find a world picture that mysticism has sensitively characterized.

Even if we consider it imperfect from our present-day point of view, ... we find that it sets the tone for the development of world-view, showing us - as I said, it is not intended to present any dogmatic world-view, only to characterize the development - how the German worldview strives to seek the forces that it is supposed to shape in the human ego, which is aware of immersing itself in the spirit of the universe when it only delves deeply enough, in the human ego, in the intimate, in the innermost nature of the human soul itself. And we find this character, ladies and gentlemen, held throughout the more recent development.

He who stands as it were as the first cornerstone of this newer Central European, this newer spiritual world-view development is much misunderstood: Kant. It often seems to people as if Kant had wanted to put forward a world-view of doubt, a world-view of uncertainty. But in another way, what Kant wanted has also been formed from the depths of the human being's ego nature. And now something very peculiar in the newer development comes to light. As I said, I only want to emphasize the facts, let the developments be characterized by an at least striving - I don't know how far I will achieve it, but at least striving - impartiality towards the facts. One thing in particular comes to us from this German development. That which must inspire man in his innermost being, although it is not directly real, is placed in the focus of the soul: the idea, the ideal.

The most alien thing to the times in which Kant lived and the culture from which Kant emerged would be the British view of today, as expressed in the British world view: that truth should have no other source [than the expediency for which external phenomena are to be summarized]. For absolutely valuable, so that no doubt, nothing that could somehow take away certainty, should approach it, absolutely certain is that which makes human life valuable, although it is not an external sensual reality, that is the idea, that is the ideal. This world view felt that ideas and ideals reach into the human soul and give the human soul the highest value. No matter whether the human soul attains such a high value from nature or from some other source, it attains the highest value through the fact that ideas can be present in it. And now, more or less unconsciously, Kant was already living with the impulse to eliminate everything that did not want to recognize the absolute, unconditional validity of the ideas, their highest value for the human soul. He found that A science has been developed, a world view has emerged that is based on the sensory world. But man cannot, with the powers that come from his soul, grasp this sensual world view in such a way that he can get to its direct sources — if I may use the pedantic word, but it is from Kant himself —, to the “thing in itself”. So Kant tried to get to the bottom of this sensuality, this external reality, as it presents itself to the human senses, to bring clarity to it. He examines the human soul life in his own way. He finds: What presents itself as the sensory world is not the immediate reality. And the human soul is not at all able to penetrate into the immediate reality with the powers it has. Only through those forces that are the forces of the idea, the forces of the ideal, can it experience reality directly within itself. And so we see the remarkable thing about Kant: that he does not, as is often believed, want to present a world view of doubt, of groundlessness, of non-recognition, but that he was seeking a world view that would remove all doubt by making it clear that we cannot know anything about the senses, but because we cannot know anything, we can give all the more to the fact that what projects into our soul life as an idea, as an ideal, has an unconditional value. Sensuality must not disturb us in our contemplation of the absolutely valuable, the idea, the ideal, by the certainty it has. Kant does not present a world view of doubt, but a world view that seeks to eliminate doubt from the world. However, he does come to say that he must fight knowledge. Kant says it in order to make room for faith. At first, he only believes that a kind of faith can unfold for that which enters the human soul in an idealized way; but that is precisely what characterizes him: the ideal, the idea, is so valuable to him that he himself dethrones knowledge for its sake, in order to provide this ideal with the right throne, the right world standing.

And now we see how the individual heroes of the world view of German idealism follow. We see how directly the – I would say – very own national philosopher of the Germans, how directly Johann Gottlieb Fichte, embraces this Kantian world view. Let us look back at rationalism, at the purely intellectual world view of Descartes, which represents the original form of the world view of French popular culture: “I think, therefore I am”. In thinking, something is seen that can be trusted as a source of certainty. But from this thinking one must conclude – but I don't want to get involved in philosophical ravings now or have to come to it by some other means than by conclusion – that this thinking is based on a being, a first being that can be recognized by thinking, that can be looked at, because it proves that it must be there because one thinks. It is there, because one thinks, because thinking emerges from it. All this, if you look at it carefully, is so utterly alien to Fichte's remarkable, magnificent – I would even say heroic, in a world-view sense – soul. Fichte creates a completely different view of the human inner being, of the deepest soul. One that is still extremely difficult to understand today. For Fichte does not want to arrive at the soul, at the ego, by grasping it in its being. Rather, Fichte wants to grasp being [in its being generated] as an act of doing, that is, in order for me to experience my ego as me, I must continually create myself. In the moment when I lose the creative powers in me, when I cannot, out of unknown depths, place myself in a direct existence for my inner being, I am no longer an ego. With that, the thought, the “I think” is submerged in the will. And the inseparable unity of will and thought is made the basis of the human ego. At the same time, the characteristic of the self refers to something that is in a state of constant creation, of constant activity. You are only with yourself if you bring about this state of being with yourself every moment. To the extent that you can and do create yourself, in every moment of your sensual-physical and intellectual existence, you are a self.

What does Fichte, the most national of German philosophers, want? He wants to grasp the center of human existence, and he wants to grasp it in such a way that he does not develop in it a lasting, an actually lasting, [that he seeks a] unchanging being, but a continually active, a never resting. The human being, who is then his own creature. The most wonderful thing about strength, about human capacity, placed at the center of the soul's light, appears to us at the same time as the center of Fichte's world view. And here at this center, Fichte wants to grasp the self-generating I, the I that is endowed not only with the ability to think about its being, but with the ability to continually will itself. Here he wants to grasp at the same time, not in an existence that one wants to seek behind appearances, that one wants to seek here or there through some other science, but in the volition that the ego itself generates, Fichte wants to seek what lives within, in this human volition, in this human inner activity, through which the ego continually generates itself: the idea, the ideal. The I generates itself, and into this stream of self-generation the idea, the ideal, pours itself. Into this stream of self-generation the most intimate coexistence of the divinely high ideal, the divinely pure idea, with what man calls his most intimate inner experience, pours itself directly into it.

And now, I would say, Fichte advances to what is perhaps the boldest – there is, of course, much that is debatable, but still: boldest – thought that a thinking world view, a merely thinking world view, has ever conceived. Fichte looks at this self-creating I, at this I that is in the one moment because it creates itself, but does not merely sustain this being now until the next moment, but also lives through its deeds in the next moment, and in the next moment again, which never rests, always creating itself - Fichte looks at this I, and in it he now finds his reality. True reality must be measured by the standard of this reality. What, as we have just seen, intrudes into this I? As this I creates, ideas and ideals flow into its creative powers. They are the absolute valuable.

But now this I, with the help of the bodily organization, confronts the external sense world. This external sense world is permanent, it is something that cannot create itself, and is therefore less real than the I, which is constantly creating itself. Why then does the I, this absolutely creative I, enter the less real sense world? Because this I, with the ideas, the ideals, with the moral duty - which flows into the ideas, the ideals, into this I - needs a field of activity to live itself out. For Fichte, the world of the senses is not there for its own sake, but, as he says, as a sensitized material for the reception of duty, that is, of ideas and ideals. For Fichte, the world is there because duties, ideas, and ideals are paramount in spiritual life, and because these ideas and ideals need a world of the senses in order to be active. Thus the world of sense must be there as the consequence of ideas and ideals. Today we need not go into what we have on our soul, perhaps against the scope or the fundamental truth of such a world view; we only want to go into the way of the people's striving. We want to go into what strives within the soul power of the people to recognize the truth. We want to trace the character of this popular striving in the time that preceded the one in which the German people created their state, the external structure of their activity, which they must now defend with blood and arms, but which they created because they drew the strength to do so from what preceded this state, but which is rooted in the deepest peculiarity of the German national soul. And from this point of view, let us also direct our gaze to the man who has now continued Fichte in a certain way, who has worked alongside Fichte, after Fichte, the much-tried Schelling.

To focus on that which forms Fichte's basic essence, on a world view that is above all permeated by the ideas and ideals that flow into human beings and that require external sensuality to because the ideas and ideals - to fill out the world view - need an object within which they can operate, building on this Fichtean premise, Schelling also delved into this center, into the human ego. That center, where, according to Fichte's view, this thinking is linked to the soul of the world. But Schelling, he feels differently than Fichte. To him it seems prosaic, it seems abstract to name all of nature with all its diversity, with all that delights our senses, with all that promotes our welfare, our happiness, with all that the mind so gladly, so willingly immerses itself in, from which it draws so draws so much from — that which spreads out in the wide, visible nature —, that only looks at it from the point of view that it is there to give a sensualizing material to the duty, to the spiritual in the world picture, which flows into the ego; Schelling finds this impossible in view of his attitude. He has, I would say, too much German feeling in him.

Fichte's greatness is German willpower. Schelling's greatness is the German mind, which lovingly wants to engage with the smallest and the greatest phenomena of nature, with that which pours gloriously through space, that which spreads out in time. But while he wants to penetrate into every detail with a loving mind, he is also clear about one thing: certainty, security, true reality can only be found where you immerse yourself in yourself, where you can find the union of the human soul with the world soul in your own self. What you seek there and [...] find, you find because you experience it directly, because you experience it in such a way that, by being, you are at the same time with you [...] as that which, as true reality, pulses through life. What you can find in yourself, you will never find in outer nature. Therefore, fill yourself with that within you which can be a reflection of that which is most profound in this external nature as well. And so, what Schelling experienced within grew to such an extent that when he observed nature, he merged with the external existence of nature. Thus, nature itself became soul-like and spiritual to him. So Schelling looks into nature and says to himself: the essence of the human soul rests within it. But when I look out into nature, it is the same essence. I look at the stone: it has something, is connected with something, which is like the essence of the human soul; it only has it enchanted in form, in external nature; it has brought it into forms. And so the plant world in all its diversity. And so the animal world. And so also the outer physical human world. If I want to express myself figuratively: for Schelling it becomes as if - before the human soul entered this physical existence - a world spirit soul deeply related to the human soul... that which the human soul only and feels within itself, had first spread out before itself in forms, so that the human soul can see itself here twice..., and its essence poured out, magically poured out in space and in time, as it lives outside in nature.

But then Schelling says to himself, if that is so, if this nature is an enchanted soul-being, then I must find - when I experience nature by fully putting myself in the place of every single being, in every single form of life - the spirit of nature living out itself everywhere. But I do not find it by looking at nature dull. I must create it. My soul must create out of my soul that which lives most deeply in animal, plant and stone. My soul must put itself in that place and thereby create it. Hence Schelling's bold expression: to comprehend nature is to create nature.

And thirdly, we see the person who most fully developed this world view of German idealism, albeit only in abstract thoughts that are difficult for some to grasp. We see Hegel, the man from Stuttgart, the profound one, the most profound of the three. We can call Fichte the most powerful, the man of the German will, Schelling the man of the German mind, we can call Hegel the man of German reason itself. While Schelling immerses himself in nature, but only by taking the creative power of the ego with him, in order not just to comprehend nature, but to create nature out of the human soul through contemplation, Hegel wants to, as it were, from the soul, from what it is directly, from the universe that it creates for itself according to the Fichtean ego being, from which he wants to penetrate into what the soul is together with the deepest world thoughts. From the individual spirit, from the individual ego, Hegel wants to go to the world spirit, which is connected at one point with the individual spirit of man.

From the human ego to the world ego, Fichte sought a human essence that has within itself the power to continually generate and thus to develop and educate itself. Schelling seeks in the human being the power that can create in the ideal world picture that which is inherent in nature, while Hegel seeks in the human soul that which can receive the divine world spirit in itself, where it can hold a dialogue with this divine world spirit. While Schelling wants to pour the whole human soul into the soul-like nature, Hegel wants to sink all of this human soul-like nature into the essence of the world spirit, into the essence of the world soul. And he is clear about one thing: when the soul looks beyond what is outwardly spreading, when it lives completely with itself, then it communes with the world spirit. Then that which lives in it as concept, as idea, as ideal, is that which the world spirit lets flow into it. And by going from idea to idea, developing the whole organism of ideas that it can develop, the soul does not merely follow itself, no, it is aware that when it withdraws from all externality in this way, it unites with the world spirit. She does not think for herself, the world spirit itself thinks its thoughts in her. I surrender myself to the thinking of the world spirit, to the rule of world reason. As a result, the whole organism of the world idea - the world view of German idealism - spreads in the soul.

We can certainly say, esteemed attendees, that Fichte sought the human ego in its power, in its self-creative activity, but he remained - and because a greatest is boldly striven for, this greatest - I would say — itself the error of its virtue, it has its one-sidedness. Fichte stopped at this self-creative of the ego at something, so that one must say, at the point where he stopped, because the human soul actually creates itself only as a knowing being. It is therefore characteristic that Fichte calls what he has created as philosophy, as a world view, the theory of knowledge. The way Fichte grasps this self-creative I is actually only the knowing human being. But for us it is the path that matters, not a dogma, not an absolute truth, but the search for the German national soul. One would like to say: All that is spread out in this human nature, in that it experiences the whole fullness of the world of feeling, that the whole of outer nature is mirrored in it, all that is formed in the totality of the human inner soul life, with its deep pain, its high bliss and deep suffering, it is not directly explainable in the way in which the self-creative I is active in Fichte. The only thing that can be explained is – I would like to say – the knowing I. If man were to stand in the world as a knower, as a mere recognizer, if man's only task in the world were to have knowledge, then it would be as Fichte thought. But we see a wonderful development of strength in the fact that, on the one hand, all thinking, all research, all reflection is devoted to incorporating this one impulse into the world view of German idealism. Even if Fichte believed that he was answering all the riddles of the world, he did not answer them in their entirety, but he did show the one thing: How does man, as a cognizer, as a knower, as one who investigates the world, stand before himself? And how is he, as a knowing human being, connected to the sources of existence? To place this nuance in the world view of German idealism was, after all, Johann Gottlieb Fichte's task.

In Schelling, we find how the whole of external nature becomes something for him – I would like to say – that stands before his soul as a human physiognomy stands before our soul. We do not merely perceive it by describing individual lines, by characterizing its expression, but we perceive it in such a way that we perceive the soul speaking through it in it, in its inwardness, and allow ourselves to be affected by what is behind the physiognomy as the soul-like. Thus, what is spread out before man in nature, in its wonderfully deep unity, becomes the great physiognomy of the world soul that Schelling tried to decipher. But because he sets out in the strictest sense of the word to create everywhere: by enjoying nature and observing it, he can only create as much as was already revealed by nature according to the character of his time. This general character of human soul-creation, insofar as the soul-like is a reflection of nature's creation, that is what Schelling reveals. But while man stands in relation to nature in such a way that all his deepening of his soul life cannot replace for him the direct experience, the loving engagement with phenomena, insofar as one can observe them, Schelling believes that he can create more from within about nature than the mere predisposition for observation. Once again, with the error of a great spiritual virtue, he grasps a nuance of the world view of German idealism in a one-sided way!

Hegel seeks to experience the ruling world spirit itself in the human soul. He seeks to have such thoughts in the soul, such a developing reason, as if the world spirit itself were made to speak in the soul. But Hegel remains one-sided. For him, this world spirit does not appear as the one [that in all activity, at one time imparts the essence of the activity of the one being and at another time, in another activity, reveals a different essence.] In Hegel this world spirit appears as the great logician, who alone unfolds the details of the world's reason, and the world's reason becomes the only all-existing. But to present this single thing in its characteristic before the world, to incorporate this nuance into the world view of German idealism, this mistake of a great virtue, this one-sidedness, was necessary to grasp the thought in its highest degree: Man, when he plunges into his inner self, can depart from his ego to such an extent that he is so powerfully active in his ego that he extinguishes this ego itself, so that the world spirit may shine forth in him! In order to grasp this thought with the greatest intensity, it had to be grasped in this one-sided way. For in the search for truth, it is the power of comprehension that matters most to us, and not that the world spirit itself be conceived like a mere logician.

But we also see, we also know, honored attendees, how these three nuances in the world view of German idealism are intimately connected with the entire spiritual striving of the German people. For when this world-evolution of the German people was to be shaped into a personality, when the deepest, most intimate and at the same time most comprehensive and most living human and spiritual striving of this people was to be embodied in Goethe, then, I might say, he embodied in synthesis what had emerged with the greatest emphasis of one-sidedness in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. But at the same time, by building up thoughts, I might say, with all the inwardness of the human soul and with all the powers of natural existence, living through them in the image of the human striving personality itself in Faust, [by characterizing him in such a way that as Goethe did] depict it, the universality of the human soul's striving for light could only emerge in modern times from [that] folk culture, which seeks the light at the center of the soul's life, while the other modern cultures seek the individual color nuances of the soul. We see, but we see the nature of the human ego as it is always creatively active, as it must intervene in every subsequent moment to create its being anew, to transform itself. We see this distinctly - only in all its broad vitality and in full abundance - I would say - the merely ideal in the human being embodied in Faust, in that Faust whose motto is: “Whoever strives, we can redeem him!” In that Faust, who is indeed presented to us as being in the concrete, in the immediately elementary, striving for what Fichte presents as theory. So that this Faust-I continually creates itself throughout the entire plot of Faust in order to successively insert its I into other spheres, other fields of world existence, in order to become related to other spheres, to other fields of world existence.

And we see how Schelling lives as a nuance, Schelling's view as a nuance in “Faust”. Schelling stands before nature, as before the great magician, and experiences: even if it is an illusion, it is an illusion to ignite a great aspiration; I say not to depict, but to ignite. Schelling stands before nature as if he could create it from within by wanting to understand it. Understanding nature means creating nature – and we see Faust transformed into the living, into the fullness of human existence. Faust, as he wants to reach “all life force and seed”. How he longs with all his might, which itself is magical power, to grasp that which creates and lives in nature, to unite with it, to unite with the spirit of nature. He wants the spirit, the spirit of life, which “swells and ebbs in the tides of life, in the storm of action,” to stand before him. He does not seek to create nature, he seeks to understand, he seeks that which creates in nature, as the world and deed genius.

Schelling sought in an abstract way in his soul the creator in nature. Faust sought the center in nature, where the essence is to be found, which, as the creator, stands in opposition to the created. Like Schelling, he wants to achieve a living force that creates as nature does. Faust, on the other hand, seeks to reveal such a being that flows and surges from one individual being to another in nature and shows us not only what has been enchanted and created, but also what lives in everything created as a creator.

And just as Hegel, as a philosopher, incorporated his nuance of reason, which is supposed to be the conversation of the world spirit itself in the individual human soul, into the world view of German idealism, so we see - and this in turn is implemented in the living so admirably in the whole striving of Faust - we see, as the goal that appears to us, what man can experience in his inmost being when he has always endeavored, when he has become akin to all the self-creative powers that the I continually creates and fathoms, but thereby continually develops, ceaselessly develops. When man has gone through this, when he has knocked at those gates through which nature unlocks its creativity, when he has found the spirit that he addresses as “Exalted Spirit, you gave me everything, everything” - in other words, the spirit that the creator stands vis-a-vis the created – he comes through all possible stages of human development to the one where he is able, when his eyes are closing, when he goes blind, when he is standing directly before death, to unite with the world spirit. Admittedly, Goethe touches here on an inner experience of the union of the human soul with the world spirit, which in its abundance and experiential content infinitely transcends the mere abstraction of Hegel's reasoning world spirit. But the attitude is the same in both cases.

We could cite many more examples, and we would see everywhere the German way of seeking the foundations and sources that underlie ideas and ideals, so as to have the world not merely as a symbol before the external senses, but as a weaving, surging world picture of ideas and ideals. And like this world picture of German idealism, such a shaping of this knowledge demands that it can say: Yes, all external sensuality is such that what stands as the most valuable for the soul life can intervene: the ideas and ideals originating from the divine sources of the world. In this way, in the sense of human striving within German culture, that which strives towards the world view of German idealism places itself within the other world views. And I believe that the German may objectively describe as his striving what has been characterized there, without his being able to believe that the slanderous accusations now made by his enemies have any value. He may say: He does not seek the individual color nuances of the soul; he seeks what - like the light shining through the individual color nuances - shines through and flows through these individual color nuances as the innermost, as the best of the human soul.

And one can indeed say, dear attendees, that when one points to this world view of German idealism, one reveals something that cannot live in every soul. Certainly, it appears that way; but two things must be emphasized. I can only hint at these two things, but they could also be explained further if one goes into the phenomena that were just pointed out. So great, so powerful was the will in this striving for the world view of German idealism, in the time of Germany, which was the most significant time of idealistic struggle – as our present time will undoubtedly appear as the most significant time of real struggle – so this world view of German idealism in Germany's most ideal time seems to present itself to our minds that we can say: What the people who have endeavored to achieve worldviews and the most diverse tasks in the nineteenth century and up to the present day within our culture have done, was to try to penetrate from different points in order to understand these individual representatives of the worldview of German idealism more precisely. Even their opponents were always somehow trying to penetrate this world view from different angles, at least to fight and struggle with it. And whatever world views and attitudes towards life have developed since then, we can feel the pulse of German idealism everywhere, even from opposing points of view. We can feel it to this day. We feel it as something that belongs to the best of the German character, to that which is realized in this German character. We feel it as one of the most characteristic expressions of the German essence. We feel it as that which symptomatically denotes the greatness and power of the German mission, and which may be so designated because there is truly in such a designation a striving that cannot make this designation appear as megalomania, but that the fullest modesty is connected with this characteristic.

Thus we see that we are still standing inside – and to what extent we are standing inside, I will have to elaborate on tomorrow in the lecture – we see how we are standing inside with all our striving in the full revelation of what was struck at that time, what was struck by individuals. That is the one thing I want to emphasize: the greatness of the world view of German idealism. Above all, it is connected with what has been done to this day by those who strove for a conception of the world and of life, and what will be done for those who follow in this sense for a long time to come.

The other thing I want to emphasize is that every impulse of a worldview that enters the worldview initially occurs in a few people. And the way it occurs is not decisive for the way it works. But if one delves into it, not intellectually, but rather in terms of feeling and emotion, not in terms of dogma, but in terms of the will, in terms of the particular orientation that underlies the world view of German idealism, then one finds that there is something in it that can still be lived out, that can still be developed, that one can say: something can arise from it that bears no resemblance to the difficult-to-understand arguments of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, something that can develop in such a way that it can be easily understood by the simplest mind.

Dear attendees! It is only through years of immersing myself in this world view of German idealism that I have come to the full conviction that there is something in it that can be implanted in human nature from childhood on, that there is a trinity to which the human being can be educated, to a feeling of self-creation in the I, which directly gives the human being - I would like to say - in all his striving a religious trait, as was the case with Fichte. Not Fichte's philosophy, but the forces that lived in Fichte's philosophy, to let them take effect on oneself, and to transfer them to general culture, to the simple man, to each individual, that will be possible one day. To become aware that something lives in the human soul that is intimately related to nature, to that which lives in the innermost part of nature, this special attitude towards nature, this life with the mind towards nature, this feeling of oneself in — The tendency of Hegel is that man can descend so deeply into his soul that he can hold a dialogue there with the world soul itself. Hegel's tendency for man to be able to descend so deeply into his soul that he can hold a dialogue with the world soul itself, that when he becomes free from the life in the outer natural and sensual world, he can hear his harmony with the world spirit resound spiritually within him, this attitude towards the divinely active, ruling world spirit, that will, without the Hegelian world view with the logical character perhaps even being known, be encouraged in the simplest soul by the person to whom one wants to transfer what I mean.

The world view of German idealism, not as it is dogmatic, but as it has been lived as a goal, as a spiritual impulse, can become popular. And however paradoxical and strange it may sound, the effect that this world view of German idealism can have on a human soul, what it can trigger in a human soul, how it can attune this human soul spiritually, sensually, working, creating in everyday life, is just as possible as the deeper meaning of the Grimm fairy tales becoming part of the human soul. It is no more difficult to live together intimately with the sense of the Grimm fairy tales, with the sense of the German folk tale, the German folk legends, than with the sense of that which lives in the world view of German idealism. But this points us to a development of that to which this world view of German idealism is the root, into far-off futures. And what is destined to develop will develop, however many those circling around Germany, around the German people, those who want to fight against the existence of the German people. The great trust that the German can have in his future can arise from the insight into what he has tied to his most sacred, to his national feeling.

And so, from the feeling that can be absorbed from the world view of German idealism, from what has been striven for and from the fact that these forces that could strive for such things are in the German nation, the great confidence that the German has in his further development, which he may express in the confidence that he may have in all the difficult struggles and the terrible struggles in which he is involved, and could still be involved. In this way, without resorting to sympathy or antipathy, and above all without resorting to antipathy, preconceived notions or hatred for what other national souls have to shape, one can describe the peculiar character of German national striving, as it expresses itself in one of its blossoms, in the world picture of German idealism, and one can say: Those who can understand something like that will understand whether the German people have a mission peculiar to them, to which they must cling, regardless of their nationality. Whether there is much understanding for this world view of German idealism in our time, especially among our enemies, is another question. And again: by speaking about this world view of German idealism, the German can at the same time show that he can speak differently, can speak from the spiritual facts, and that this is different from the way in which many of those who want to dispute the German's existence speak today, who have imposed on him the necessity of a fierce struggle for this existence.

I think, esteemed attendees, that the German need only emphasize in such a way what is most profound in his world view - and in nothing disintegrate those slanders that also encircle Germany, that encircle the German people. Let us see how differently one must speak in the context of the German essence. It is also a simple fact. Esteemed attendees! What, for example, did the inhabitants of Britain have to invent to justify what is expressed in their current struggle? How did the Germans merely have to point out that the necessity of their struggle for existence was imposed on them, whereas the inhabitants of Britain had to point out? They had to point to something that cannot be described as anything other than a mask. Could they point to something about which the German can say: he had to create the German state in the last decades, after the German, out of his nature, had worked towards this state until then? Could the inhabitants of Britain justify the necessity of their existence in the way they created it through the Boer War, in about the same way as the German can justify what the German does today as the consequence of the war of 1870/71? The true reasons had to be masked there. That the struggle for freedom of other nations is not the ideal there, one need only refer to the history of Britain.

The French had to – and this is again not something that arises from some kind of hatred, but from the mere characterization, from the mere objective characterization of the facts – invent a new sophistry through the minds of Bergson and Boutroux, who characterize the German world view by wanting to conclude from the innermost character – as Boutroux wanted in a lecture he gave to his French audience, based on this German world view – that, by its very character, it is a world view that wants to conquer everything in the world, that wants to clash with everything in a warlike manner.

Bergson had to invent his own philosophical sophistry to show how France's struggle against the German essence is a struggle of the spirit against matter, a struggle of civilization against barbarism. We see a completely new sophistry blossoming.

Russia has prepared herself well for what she needed to do in order to prepare in a corresponding way for what now threatens the German essence from there. Russia needs a new term for her old delusion, so as not to point to her mission as a matter of course, as the Germans do, but to point to something that lives as a delusion. Now, again, it is not the intention here to make a characterization from the outside, but because I naturally do not have the time to characterize in detail the extent to which the striving that threatens us from the East is a delusion, I would like to cite another key witness, a spirit who must know this, a spirit who is most deeply rooted in modern Russian intellectual life, the great Soloviev, who is placed in the nineteenth century and who – I would like to say – brings the whole of Russian intellectual life together as if in a philosophical focus for reflection. He speaks of how another spirit of Russia summarizes Russia's world-historical mission in the words: Why does Europe not love us, why does Europe fear us? Danilevsky poses this question. And he says:

“Europe fears us as the new and higher type of culture, called to replace the decrepitude of Romance-Germanic civilization.”

These words express the entire delusion of the East. It should not be denied that the seeds germinating in the East contain magnificent and powerful seeds for the future of humanity. In the way they are now living, I will characterize it by reading Solowjow's, the great Russian's, answer to this characteristic of Danilewski:

“Nevertheless, both the content of Danilevsky's book and his later admissions and those of his like-minded friend”

- meaning a certain Strakhov -

"Europe looks at us with apprehension and mistrust because dark and unclear elemental forces live in the Russian people, because its spiritual and cultural forces are poor and insufficient, but because its demands are clear and sharply defined. The calls for what the Russian people want as a nation resound powerfully out into Europe: that it wants to destroy Turkey and Austria, defeat Germany, conquer Constantinople and, if possible, also India.

The great Russian Solowjow characterized the comprehensive Russophobia long before it had been reborn in a new form, long before it had been reborn in the form that it currently poses as a threat from the East. And then he continues:

“And when we are asked how we intend to replace what we have destroyed and lost, how we propose to bless humanity, what spiritual and cultural rejuvenation we can bring into world evolution, then we must either remain silent or spout senseless phrases.”

I do not want to say this; one of the greatest of Russian minds characterizes what appears to be a Russian delusion from the East, thus.

“And,”

he continues,

“If Danilevsky's bitter confession is true, that Russia is beginning to fall ill”

written in the 80s of the nineteenth century,

"then, instead of asking ourselves why Europe does not love us, we should rather be asking ourselves a different, more important question that is closer to us: why and how did we become ill? Russia is still quite physically strong, as it showed in the last Russian war; so our suffering is a moral one. We are burdened, in the words of an old writer, by the sins hidden in the national character and of which we are not aware - and so it is above all necessary to bring these into the light of clear consciousness."

Written in the 80s of the nineteenth century!

“As long as we are spiritually bound and paralyzed, all our elementary instincts must only harm us. The essential, indeed the only essential question for true patriotism is not the question of power and vocation, but of Russia's sins.”

The question may arise: Is this the Russian patriot who has ignited the present war with the ideals of the madness that Soloviev rejects here, or is it Soloviev who, in this way, vigorously points out what Russia needs and what most certainly could not have led to this war?

Italy, to justify what it has developed from its world conquest plan as its current actions – it would have to be much too detailed, one would come to far too much detail if one wanted to somehow characterize the strange words of d'Annunzio, but I think one will be able to add the whole peculiarity of what sounds like a justification from there to the justification of the opposing states, if one merely points out the one thing: The Italian people were looking for a justification for their current actions, and many, many words were spoken; but one in particular was always mentioned, which indicates that The French need a new sophistry, the English need a new mask, the Russians need their old delusion, and the Italians need – a new saint. Through completely profane means, egoism has been canonized! For the word of “holy egoism” as the justifying essence of that which arises from below is repeatedly heard by us anew.

It can be left to objective judgment to decide whether this – as one may speak of the innermost part of the German, as in the sense of the world view of German idealism – whether this justifies more objectively the mission of the German people or the sophistry, the mask, the delusion there and even the new saint there.

In view of the world view of German idealism, esteemed attendees, as in one of the nuances in the essence of the German national soul, to which the German so intimately wants to and must connect today, in view of the many nuances in this national soul, also precisely on this nuance of German idealism, the world view of German idealism, one may also recognize in it that which I believe, that in all modesty – without being guilty of that which is so slanderously spoken about the German from all sides today – in all modesty the German may say that he recognizes in three ways that which is his duty today. He feels in three ways that it is his duty today. He feels justified in this threefold way before the innermost part of his conscience, his conscience as a human being and as a part of history, knowing that he has no right to speak in a sophistical way about other inferior national spirits, about their barbaric habits. He need only call to mind the most sacred part of his own striving and recognize this most sacred part of his own inner striving as the precious, holy legacy of German prehistory. Then he can feel that the one thing by which he knows how to position himself powerfully in the German present and in the right way - is the love of the German past and of all that German past has been handed down to the German of the present, which he must adhere to, for which he stands up in love because he recognizes it in his innermost being, which makes him happy, which inspires him, which lifts him above pain and suffering. It is the love for the past.

And what sustains him through the difficult duties of the present is his faith in the present of the German spirit, in the power that flows from this German spirit into the present and that must bring about what will maintain the German spirit in its position as firmly as it has been handed down from the bright past. Love for the past and faith in the present join the third, which flows from the other two, and which pours into the soul strength and confidence, which follow from the other two in a living way. They join, the first two, love and faith, to the well-founded hope, flowing from the innermost nature of Germanness - to use this Fichte word - for the future fulfillment of that which the past has inspired for the German, for which the German present strives. Love for the past, faith in the present, hope for the future: these are what hold us together in our hard, but also blissful present, in body, soul, and spirit.