The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday I made two observations drawn from the science that we must call the science of Initiation, and I should like to remind you of them, for we shall need them as a connecting link. First, I said that the truths, the deepest truths, relating to the Mystery of Golgotha must by their nature be of the kind that cannot be substantiated through external historical evidence perceptible to the senses. Anyone who sets out by an external historical route to find a proof of the facts concerned with the Mystery of Golgotha, in the same way as historical evidence is sought for other facts, will be unable to discover it, for the Mystery of Golgotha is meant to relate itself to mankind in such a way that access to its truths is finally possible only by a supersensible path. If I may put it rather briefly—where the most important event in earthly existence is concerned, men are intended to accustom themselves to approaching it by supersensible means, not through the senses.

The second thing I said yesterday is that man, with the understanding he possesses according to his development as an earthly being, is never able, right up to his death, to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha through his own understanding developed within the sense-world. I went on to say: It is only after his death, during the time he spends in the supersensible world, that there develops in man the understanding, and the forces for that understanding, which can fully make clear the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence I stated yesterday something which will quite naturally be held up by the external world as an absurdity, a paradox. I said that even the contemporaries of Christ were unable to reach such an understanding until the second or third century after the Mystery of Golgotha, during their life beyond the threshold; and that what has been written about the Mystery of Golgotha in those centuries was inspired by men who had been contemporaries of it and, from the spiritual world, from the supersensible world, had an inspiring influence on the writers of that period.

Now there is an apparent contradiction to this in the fact that the Gospels are inspired writings (as you may gather from my book, Christianity as Mystical Fact; they are inspired writings of Christianity. The inspired Gospels, therefore, could give expression to the truth about Christianity only because—as I have often emphasised—they were not written out of the primal nature and being of man, but with the remnants of atavistically clairvoyant wisdom.

What I have said here about the relation of mankind to the Mystery of Golgotha is drawn from the science of Initiation. If in this way something has been given out of supersensible knowledge, the question may well be asked: How does it appear when compared with the facts of external historical life? Hence at the beginning of this lecture to-day I want to put forward, as a particularly characteristic case—at first only as a question which should receive an answer by the end of our studies to-day—a typical ecclesiastical author of the second century. I might just as well—but then naturally I should have to give the whole treatment a different form—choose some other writer of the Church, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, or any other. But I am choosing one who is often mentioned—Tertullian. With regard to the personality of Tertullian I should like to ask how the external course of Christian life is related to the supersensible facts of which I was speaking yesterday, and have repeated in essence to-day.

Tertullian is a very remarkable personality. Anyone who hears the ordinary things said about Tertullian—well, he will hardly get beyond the knowledge of Tertullian that is generally current. He is said to have been the man who justified belief in the being of Christ, in the sacrificial death and the resurrection, by saying, Credo quia absurdum est—“I believe because it is absurd,” because no light is thrown upon all this by human reason. The words, Credo quia absurdum est, are not to be found in any of the other Fathers of the Church; they are pure invention, but they are the source of the later opinion about Tertullian that has been held, often dogmatically, right up to the present day.

When, on the other hand, we come to the real Tertullian—there is no need to be an actual follower of his—then the more exactly we get to know his personality, the more we respect this remarkable man. Above all we learn to respect Tertullian's use of the Latin language, the language which expresses the most abstract way of human thinking, and had come in other writers of his time to exemplify the thoroughly prosaic character of the Romans—Tertullian makes use of it with a true fieriness of spirit. Into his style of treatment he brings temperament, brings movement; he brings feeling and holy passion. Although he is a typical Roman who expresses himself as abstractly as any other Roman about what is often called reality—and although in the opinion of people versed in the Greek culture of that time he was not a particularly well educated man—he writes with impressiveness, with inner force, and in such a way that while using the abstract, Roman language, he became the creator of a Christian style. And the way in which Tertullian himself speaks is impressive enough. In a kind of apologia for the Christians he writes in such a way that one seems to be listening directly to the speech of a man in the grip of a holy passion.

There are certain passages where Tertullian is defending the Christians who, when they are accused under a procedure very like torture, do not deny but testify that they are Christians—testify to what they believe. And Tertullian says of them: In all other cases those who are tortured are accused of denying the truth; in the case of the Christians it is the reverse; they are declared infamous when they testify to what is in their souls. The aim of torturing is not to force them to speak the truth, which would be the only sense in torture; the aim is to force them to say what is untrue, while they continue to speak the truth. And when out of their souls they testify to the truth, they are looked upon as malefactors.

In short, Tertullian was a man with a fine sense of the absurd in life. He was a subtle observer who had already identified himself with what had developed as Christian consciousness and Christian wisdom. So it is really significant when he makes such a statement as: You have familiar sayings; very often you say out of immediate feeling in your soul: “God be with you,” “It is God's will,” and so on. But that is the belief of the Christians: the soul—if only unconsciously—is confessing itself to be Christian.

Tertullian is also a man of independent spirit. He says to the Romans, to whom he himself belongs: Consider the Christians' God and then reflect upon what you are able to feel about true piety. I ask you whether what you as Romans have introduced into the world is in keeping with true piety, or whether true piety is what the Christians desire? Into the world you have brought war, murder, killing (said Tertullian to his fellow-Romans); that is precisely what the Christians do not want. Your sanctuaries are blasphemies (so said Tertullian to the Romans) because they are trophies of victory, and trophies of victory are signs of the desecration of sanctuaries. ... Thus spoke Tertullian to the Romans. He was a man of independent feeling. And turning to the ways of Rome he said: Do men pray when they instinctively look up to the sky, or when they look up to the Capitol? Thus Tertullian was in no way a man entirely merged in the abstractions of Rome, for he was permeated with a lively sense of the presence in the world of the supersensible.

Anyone who speaks on the one hand with the independence and freedom of Tertullian, and at the same time out of the supersensible—such a man is very rare, even in those days when the supersensible was nearer than it later came to be. And Tertullian was more than merely rational. To declare that “when the Christians say what is true, you claim them to be malefactors, whereas men should be claimed as malefactors only if when tortured they say what is untrue ...” certainly that was rational, but it was also courageous. And Tertullian said other things, too, for instance: When you Romans look up to your Gods, who are demonic beings, and really put questions to them, you will receive the truth. But you do not want to receive the truth from these demonic beings. If an accused Christian is confronted by someone who is possessed by a demon, and out of whom the demon speaks, and if the Christian is allowed to question it in the right way, the demon will admit that it is a demon. And of the God whom the Christian acknowledges the demon will say—though with fear: “That is the God who now belongs to the world!” Tertullian does not call on the evidence of Christians alone, but also on that of demonic beings, saying that they will confess themselves to be demons if they are simply questioned, questioned fearlessly; and that, just as it is described in the Gospels, they will acknowledge Christ-Jesus to be the true Christ-Jesus.

At all events we have here a remarkable personality who, as a Roman, confronts his fellow-Romans in the second century. This personality strikes us especially when we consider his relation to the Mystery of Golgotha. The words spoken by Tertullian concerning the Mystery of Golgotha are approximately these: The Son of God is crucified. Because this is shameful, we are not ashamed. The Son of God has died; this is easy to believe because it is foolish. Tertullian's words are: Prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est. It is credible, perfectly credible, because it is foolish. Thus: God's Son has died; this is perfectly credible because it is foolish. And He has been buried, He has risen again; this is certain, because it is impossible. From the words, Prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est, the other untrue words have originated: Credo quia absurdum est.

Let us rightly understand what Tertullian says here about the Mystery of Golgotha. He says: The Son of God is crucified. If we men contemplate this crucifixion, because it is shameful we are not ashamed. What does he mean? He means that the best that can happen on earth is bound to be shameful, because it is the way of man to do what is shameful and not what is excellent. Were anything declared to be a most splendid deed, says Tertullian, a most splendid deed brought about by man, it could not be the most excellent event for the earth. For the earth the most excellent deed will indeed be one that brings shame to men, not fame—this is Tertullian's meaning.

To continue: “The Son of God has died. This is perfectly credible because it is foolish.” The Son of God has died; it is quite credible because human reason finds it foolish. Were human reason to pronounce it sensible it would not be credible, for what is found sensible by human reason cannot be the highest; it can never be the highest thing possible on earth. For human reason with its cleverness is not so high that it can arrive at what is highest; it arrives at the highest when it is foolish.

“He has been buried and has risen again. It is certain because it is impossible.” As a natural phenomenon it is impossible that the dead should rise again; but according to Tertullian the Mystery of Golgotha has nothing to do with natural phenomena. Were anything to be counted as a natural phenomenon, it would not be the most valuable thing on earth. What has most value for the earth can be no natural phenomenon and must, therefore, be impossible in the kingdom of nature. It is just on this account that He has been buried and has risen again, and it is therefore certain because it is impossible.

I should like to put Tertullian before you, with these words of his just quoted from his book, De Carne Christi, as a question. I have tried to describe him, first as a free, independent spirit, secondly as one who in man's immediate surroundings perceives the demonically supersensible. But at the same time I quoted three propositions of Tertullian's on account of which all clever people must look upon him really as a simpleton.

In matters of this kind it is certainly remarkable how one-sidedly people judge. When they put forward a proposition as false as Credo quia absurdum est, they are pronouncing judgment on the whole man in accordance with it. It is, however, necessary to take the three propositions—which certainly are not at first glance intelligible, for Tertullian is not to be easily understood—to take them first together with his complete awareness of the inter-working of the supersensible world into the human environment.

And now we want to bring before our souls something which in some measure is suited to spread light over the Mystery of Golgotha from another point of view. I have in mind two phenomena about which I said a few words during our studies of the day before yesterday. These two phenomena in the life of mankind are, first, the phenomenon of death, and secondly the phenomenon of heredity—death which is connected with the end of life, and heredity with birth. Where these are concerned it is important to have a clear insight into human life and the being of man. From all that I have been describing to you for some weeks you will be able to gather the following.

When man looks around with his senses at his environment and wishes to grasp the world of the senses with his understanding, then among the phenomena of the senses he encounter? also the phenomena of inheritance, for to a certain extent the characteristics of forefathers can be traced in their descendants, who are subject to the unconscious working of these inherited forces. Things connected with the mystery of birth, all the various inherited characteristics, are often studied without our knowing it. When, for example, we are learning about folklore, we are always speaking about inherited characteristics without noticing it. We cannot study a people without seeing all that we are studying in the light of inherited characteristics. When you speak of a particular people—of Russians, for example, of Englishmen, of Germans—you are speaking of qualities belonging to the realm of heredity, qualities the son acquires from the father, the father from the grandfather, and so on. The realm of heredity, connected as it is with the mysteries of birth, is indeed a wide realm, and when talking about external life we are often speaking of the facts and forces of heredity without being aware of it.

The fact that the mystery of death plays into the life of the senses is indeed constantly before us at the present time; it needs no reiteration. But if we look back over the human faculty for knowledge, something different becomes apparent. We see that this facility is adapted for grasping a great deal in the natural order, but it regards itself as sovereign and wants to grasp in terms of the natural order everything found therein.

Now this human faculty for knowledge is never adapted for grasping either the fact of heredity, which is connected with birth, or the fact of death. And so it turns out that the whole of man's outlook is permeated by false concepts, because it assigns to the sense-world phenomena which indeed are manifest in the sense-world but in their whole being are of a spiritual nature.

We count human death—it is different with animals and plants, as I have shown—we count human death among the phenomena taking place in the sense-world, because that is what it appears to be. But with this we get nowhere in learning about human death. It would never be possible for a natural science to say anything about the death of human beings; for on those lines we arrive merely at exchanging our whole human outlook for a delusion, with the facts of death mixed into it everywhere. We learn something about the truth of nature only when we omit death, and omit also inherited characteristics. A typical feature of human knowledge lies in its becoming corrupted, becoming mere appearance, because it claims to be able to deal with the entire world of the senses, including death and birth. And because it mixes death and birth into its whole outlook, its outlook concerning the world of the senses is falsified. We shall never perceive what man is as a sense-being if we ascribe to the sense-world the inherited qualities, which are indeed connected with death. We corrupt the whole picture of man developing along his normal straight line—I have told you of three streams, the normal straight line and the Luciferic and Ahrimanic side-streams—we corrupt the whole picture of mans development if we ascribe birth and death to his essential being in so far as he belongs to the world of the senses.

That is the strange situation in which we find the human faculty for knowledge! Under the guidance of nature itself this faculty is driven to thinking falsely because, were it able to think in accordance with truth, it would have to separate off from nature a picture of human life in which there was no heredity and no death. We should have to rule out death and heredity, paying no attention to death and birth, making our picture without them—then we should have a picture of nature. Inherited characteristics and death have no place in Goethe's world-outlook. They do not come into it and are not in keeping there. It is indeed the special characteristic of Goethe's world-outlook that you are unable to fit death and heredity into it. It is so good just because death and heredity have no place there, and that is why we can accept it as a true picture of the reality of nature.

Now up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha people still thought about death and heredity out of certain spiritual depths, and more in conformity with nature. The Semitic peoples looked upon inherited characteristics as a direct continuance of the working of the God Jahve. They eliminated everything connected with heredity from nature, seeing it as the direct working of Jahve—for as long, at least, as the Jahve-outlook was properly understood. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, signified the continued working of inherited characteristics.

On the other hand, the Greek outlook—though in its decadence it had little success—sought to grasp something in the nature of man that lived in him between birth and death but had nothing to do with death. The Greeks sought to raise out of the sum-total of phenomena something with which death had no power to interfere. They had a certain horror of the very idea of death. Just because they concentrated on the realm of the senses, they had no wish to understand death; for they instinctively felt that when the human gaze is directed purely to the world of the senses—as it was with Goethe—death becomes a stranger. It is not in keeping with the sense-world; it is foreign to it.

But now there arose other outlooks, and the alteration in certain ancient outlooks appeared most typically among the leading peoples and individuals at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching. Men increasingly lost all ability to look into the spiritual world in the atavistic way; and so they came more and more to believe that birth and death, or heredity and death, belong to the world of the senses. Heredity and death—they do indeed play their part, very palpably, in the world of the senses, and men came more and more to the view that heredity and death belong there. This view wormed its way into the whole of man's outlook. For centuries prior to the Mystery of Golgotha the whole human outlook was permeated by the belief that heredity and death have to do with the world of the senses. Thereby something very, very remarkable came into being. You will understand it only if you allow the spirit of what I have been telling you in the last few days to work upon you in the right way.

Now the fact of heredity was easily seen by observing how it figured among the phenomena of nature, and it was thought to be a natural phenomenon. Increasingly the belief gained ground that heredity is a natural phenomenon. Every fact of this kind, however, evokes its polar opposite: in human life you can never cultivate a fact without that fact evoking its opposite. Man's life runs its course in the balancing of opposites. A basic condition of all knowledge is the recognition that life runs its course in opposites, and a state of balance between opposites is all we can strive for. What, therefore, was the consequence of this belief that heredity has its place among natural phenomena and belongs to them? The consequence was the bringing of the human will into terrible discredit; and this took the form—because its opposite developed—of bringing into the human will a fact belonging to the past, a fact we know in Spiritual Science as the influence of Luciferic and Ahrimanic spirits. And the effect on the soul of looking for heredity among the phenomena of nature was so potent that it led irresistibly to a moralistic world-outlook. For out of this misunderstanding of heredity its opposite came into being—the belief that once through the human will something had happened which went on to permeate the world as “original sin.” It was precisely through the introduction of heredity into the phenomena of nature that this great evil originated—the placing of “original sin” into the moral realm.

In this way human thinking wasted astray; it was unable to see that the way original sin is generally represented is blasphemy, terrible blasphemy. A God as conceived by the majority of people, a God who permits out of pure ambition, one might say, what happens in Paradise—according to the usual telling of the story—a God who does not do this with intentions of the kind described in the book Occult Science, but in the way usually described, would be no God of the heights. And to attribute this ambition to God is blasphemy. Only when we come to the point of not setting inherited characteristics in a moral light, but seeing them as a physically perceptible fact in a supersensible light; only when we relate them to the supersensible without any of this moral interpretation; when in the supersensible light we decline to fit them into a moral world-picture in the manner of rabbinical theology—only then do we come properly to terms with this matter.

Rabbinical theology will always give an elaborate intellectual interpretation of what are manifest in the world of the senses as the forces of heredity; but we should school ourselves through a spiritual outlook to discern the spirit in the inherited characteristics found in the sense-world. That is what it really comes to. And the essential thing is for you to see that, but for the Mystery of Golgotha, mankind would by then have reacted to the point of denying the spirit because people would have ceased to recognise the spirit in the inherited characteristics within the sense-world; for men have increasingly replaced the conception of the spirit by rabbinical and socialistic interpretations.

A tremendous amount is involved when a man is constrained to say: You understand nothing about the sense-world if you are not prepared for those phenomena which, because of their spiritual connections, do not really belong there. We must point to the connections of heredity with spiritual perception, supersensible perception. When the intellect takes hold of the realm of the senses, which is itself permeated with a spiritual, supersensible element, and turns it into a realm of morality, intellectually measurable—that is the spirit to which the spirit of Christ, the spirit of the Mystery of Golgotha, stands opposed. I mean this with reference to heredity and to death.

Certainly the Church Fathers were able to verify that even among the heathen there were many who were convinced of immortality. But what was involved in this? Only in ancient times had it been truly recognised that in the world of the senses death is indeed a supersensible phenomenon. By the time of the Mystery of Golgotha the prevailing outlook had been corrupted by an acceptance of death as an experience of the sense-world; and thereby the forces of death were extended over the rest of that world. Death has to be looked upon as a stranger in the sense-world. Only then can a genuine science of the natural order arise.

A further element came in with the reflections of various ancient philosophers on immortality. They turned to the immortal in man. They were right in doing so, for they said: Death is there in the world of the senses. But they said it out of a corrupted world-outlook; for otherwise they would have been impelled to say: Death is not there in the world of the senses; only in appearance does it enter there. Out of their corrupted world-outlook they said that death is in the sense-world. ... And they gradually pictured the sense-world in such a way that death had a place there. In consequence, all other things are corrupted ... it goes without saying that everything else goes wrong when death is given a place in the sense-world. When this was said out of a corrupted world-outlook, other things too had to be said, for instance: We must turn to something in opposition to death, to something of a supersensible nature that opposes death. And indeed, because in the last days of antiquity and out of a corrupted world-outlook people turned to an impersonal spirituality, this world of spiritual immortality—even when called by some other name—was the Luciferic world. What people call something is unimportant; what matters is the active reality behind the picture in their minds. And in this case the reality was the Luciferic world. Even if the words sounded different, these philosophers of late antiquity had in all their interpretations said nothing but: “As souls approaching death we want to take flight to Lucifer, who will receive us, so that immortality will be ours. We die into the kingdom of Lucifer.” That was the true meaning of their words.

I have told you about the forces that prevail in human knowledge, as a result of all the conditions I have described—well, these forces have remnants which can be seen still active to-day. For what must you admit if you take in earnest the words I have spoken to-day out of Initiation-wisdom? You will have to say: Man has his origin and his end. Neither may be understood with the human intellect that serves to understand nature; for by introducing birth and death into the sense-world, where they do not belong because they are strangers, we arrive at a false outlook about both the supersensible and the sensible. Both are corrupted—the comprehension of the spirit and the comprehension of nature. And what is the consequence? One consequence for example, is this: there is an anthropology which traces the origin of man to very primitive ancestors, and it does so quite scientifically and very cleverly. Go through these anthropological writings which trace men back to primitive ancestors, who are portrayed as though the characteristics which still belong to savage peoples were the starting-point of the human race. Scientifically, this opinion is quite in order, but the conclusion which should be drawn from it is the following: Just because it is scientifically in order to believe that birth and death belong to the world of the senses—on that very account it is false; on that account the real origin of man was different. When Kant and Laplace thought out their theory, they built it up from natural science. On the surface there is nothing to be said against it—but things were different for the very reason that the Kant-Laplace theory is correct from the standpoint of natural science. You arrive at the truth if, both for man's beginning and his end and for the origin and end of the earth, you acknowledge the opposite of what holds good for natural science in its present-day form. What Anthroposophy has to say about the origin of the earth will be all the more in accordance with the truth, the more it contradicts what can be said by a natural science that is correct in the sense of to-day.

Hence Anthroposophy does not contradict the natural science of to-day. It allows validity to natural science, but, instead of extending it beyond its boundaries, it shows the points where supersensible perception must come in. The more logical Anthroposophy is, the more correct will it be in respect of the present natural order, which is necessary for man and inherent in him, and all the more will it refrain from saying what is not true concerning the origins of man's existence and of the earth. And the less natural science divines what death really is, the more will it indulge in fantasy where death is concerned. But without the Mystery of Golgotha it would have been human destiny to think unavoidably out of a corrupted world-outlook about the most important things. For this did not depend at all on human will or human guilt; it depended entirely on human evolution.

In the course of his evolution man simply came to regard as his real being the combination of flesh, blood and bones in which he found himself. An Egyptian of ancient days, in the older and better period of Egypt, would have thought it terribly comic had anyone maintained that what walked around on two legs, and consisted of blood, flesh and bones, was really man. These things, however, do not depend upon theoretical considerations; they cannot be spun out of rumination. Gradually it came to seem natural for a man to accept as himself a form consisting of flesh, blood and bones—a form which in truth is a reflection of all the Hierarchies. So much error was spread abroad on these matters that, curiously enough, those very individuals who were led to see the error blundered into a still greater one.

Certainly there were some who arrived at the idea—but in an Ahrimanic-Luciferic way—that man is not just flesh and blood and bones. They now said: “Well, if we are something better than this combination of flesh, blood and bones, we will despise the flesh; we will look upon the human being as something higher and rise above this man of the senses.” But this image of flesh, blood and bones, together with the etheric and astral bodies, as seen by man is an illusion; in reality it is the purest likeness of the Godhead. As I have explained, the error we have been talking about is not an error because we ought to be seeing the devil in the world; but it is an error to identify ourselves with physical nature because in our own world we

should be seeing God in us. It is also false to say: I am a quite high being, a tremendously high being, a tremendously lofty soul ... and everything around me is inferior and ugly (see blue in diagram, I). It is not like that. This is how the matter really is: There are the kingdoms of the higher Hierarchies, all divine Beings (diagram, II); they have considered it to be their divinely-appointed aim to give shape to a form that is in their image (blue circle). This form presents itself outwardly as the visible human body. And into this form, which is a copy of the Godhead and is shamefully belittled when looked upon as something inferior, the Spirits of Form have planted the human ego, the present soul—the youngest of man's members, as I have often said (the point in the blue circle.)

If the Mystery of Golgotha had not come about, man would have been able to gain only false conceptions about heredity and about death. And these false conceptions would have become ever more exaggerated. At present they appear at times in an atavistic way (as in many socialistic groups to-day an atavistic world-outlook prevails), so that death and birth are reckoned as phenomena of the senses. It would have been a necessity in man's further evolution for the door of the supersensible to be altogether closed to him. And what he could find of the supersensible within the sense-world—heredity and death—would have betrayed him, coming in a treacherous way to say: “We are of the senses” ... whereas they are not. Only by refusing to believe in a nature that shows us death and birth in a false light shall we reach the truth—such is the paradoxical way in which man is placed into the world.

There had to be planted into man something to bring equilibrium into his evolution—something able to lead him away from the belief that heredity and death are phenomena of the senses. Something had to be put before him to show clearly that death and heredity are not phenomena of the senses, but are supersensible. For this reason the event that gives man the truth about these things must not be accessible to his ordinary forces, for these are on the road to corruption and have to be set right by a powerful counter-shock. This counter-shock was the Mystery of Golgotha, for it entered human evolution as something supersensible, and so it gave men the choice—either to believe in this supersensible event, approaching it in a supersensible way but now consciously, or to succumb to those views which must result from regarding death and inherited characteristics as belonging to the world of the senses.

Hence two facts that are inseparable from a true view of the Mystery of Golgotha are those which form, as it were, its boundaries: namely, the Resurrection, which cannot be understood independently of the Virgin Birth—born not in the way that makes birth a delusive fact few mankind, but born in a supersensible way and going through death in a supersensible way. These are the two basic facts that have to act as boundaries to the life of Christ Jesus. No-one understands the Resurrection, which is meant to stand in opposition to the false idea that death belongs to the world of the senses—no-one understands this truth who does not accept its correlate, the Virgin Birth, the birth that is a supersensible fact.

Men wish to understand these truths, and modern Protestant theologians want to understand them in terms of theology, with the ordinary human intellect. But the ordinary human intellect is but a pupil of the sense-world, and, moreover, of a corrupted view of the sense-world which has arisen since the Mystery of Golgotha. And when they cannot understand these truths they become followers of Harnack, or something of the sort; they deny the Resurrection, while talking round and about it in all sorts of ways. And as for the Virgin Birth—well, they look upon that as something no reasonable being can even discuss.

Nevertheless, with the Mystery of Golgotha is intimately connected the metamorphosis of death—in other words, the metamorphosis of death from a fact of the sense-world into a supersensible fact; and the metamorphosis of heredity means that what the sense-world reflects in an illusory way as heredity, connected with the mystery of birth, is changed in the supersensible into the Virgin Birth.

However much that is erroneous and inadequate may be said about these things, man's task is not to accept them without understanding them. His task is to acquire supersensible knowledge, so that through the supersensible he can learn to grasp these things, which cannot be understood in the sense-world. If you think of the various lecture-courses in which these things have been spoken of, if you think particularly of the content of what I have given as the Fifth Gospel, [ Seven lectures given in Christiania (Oslo) from October 1st to 6th, 1913.] you will discover a whole series of ways by which these things may be understood, but understood supersensibly only. For it is right that, as long as the intellect of the student keeps to the realm of the senses, in accordance with the outlook of to-day, these facts cannot be understood. It is just when the most sublime facts of earthly life are such that they are unintelligible to the intellect of the student of the sense-world—it is just then that they are true. Hence it is not surprising that the science of Initiation is opposed by ordinary science, for it speaks of things which—just because they do not contradict true natural science—must contradict a natural order derived from a corrupted view of nature. Theology, too, has largely fallen a victim to this corrupted view of nature, though in a different direction.

When you take the other matter of which I was speaking yesterday, that only after death is man able to come to a right conception of the Mystery of Golgotha, then, if you reflect a little, you will no longer find it inconceivable that through the gate of death man enters a world where he cannot be tricked into thinking that death belongs to the world of the senses, for he sees death from the other side—I have often described this—and from this other side he learns increasingly to study death. And by this means he becomes ever more fitted to contemplate the Mystery of Golgotha in its true form. Thus we have to admit that had the Mystery of Golgotha not come about (but what is said in this connection can be understood only through supersensible knowledge), death would have taken possession of man. Evil also would be in the world, and wisdom also. But since men through their evolution had to fall into a corrupted view of nature, they were bound to have a false view of death. In wishing for immortality they turn to Lucifer, and in wishing to turn to the spirit they fall victim to Lucifer. If they do not turn to the spirit they become like dumb animals, and if they do turn to the spirit, they fall into Lucifer's grip. Looking to the future implies a wish to be immortal in Lucifer; looking towards the past means interpreting the world in such a way that inherited characteristics, which are supersensible, are viewed in terms of morality, thereby inventing the medieval blasphemy of original sin.

A real devotion to the Mystery of Golgotha is a protection against all these things. It brings into the world a true conception of birth and death, gained on a supersensible path. By a true conception of this kind men should be healed from the effects of the corrupted conception. Thus Christ Jesus is the Healer, the Saviour. And therefore—because men have not chosen to follow a corrupted conception of the world because they are good for nothing, but have come to it through their evolution, through their nature—therefore the Christ works healingly; therefore He is not only the Teacher but the Physician of mankind.

These things must be pondered—as I have said and must always repeat, they can be discerned only through supersensible knowledge—but if we are to ask ourselves: What kinds of knowledge could be reached by the souls who inspired such a spirit as Tertullian in the second century?—we must look to the dead who were perhaps contemporaries of Christ Jesus and have thus inspired Tertullian. Certainly, since there was much corrupted knowledge in the world, many things came through in distorted, clouded colourings. If, however, through the words of a Tertullian we hear the inspiring voices of the contemporaries of Christ, we shall understand how Tertullian was able to say such words as: “God's Son has been crucified. Because it is shameful, we are not ashamed of it.” Through a corrupted outlook men were bound to fall into shame; that which gives greatest meaning to the earth is manifest in human life as a shameful deed. “God's Son has gone through death. It is perfectly credible because it is foolish”—Prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est. Precisely because it is foolishness by any criterion that man can reach with his ordinary intelligence up to the end of his physical life—for that very reason it is true in the sense of what I have been telling you to-day. “He is laid in the grave and has risen again; this is certain because it is impossible”—because within the corrupted phenomena of nature it does not happen.

When in the supersensible sense you take Tertullian's words as being inspired by Christ's contemporaries, who by that time had long been dead, you may say: Certainly Tertullian has absorbed all this, just in the way he could do in accordance with the constitution of his soul! ... But you will be able to divine how he came to be so inspired. Indeed, such a source was accessible only to a man who with his inner knowledge was so firmly grounded in the supersensible that he referred to demons being witness to the Divine, just as he spoke of human witnesses. For Tertullian spoke of how the demons themselves say they are demons and recognise the Christ. That was the preliminary condition for Tertullian being able to lay hold of what was given him through inspiration.

For those who incline to be Christians in a false way, there is something very disconcerting, thoroughly disconcerting, here. For just think, if even demons tell the truth and point to the true Christ, the demons might ultimately be questioned by a Jesuit—someone or other whom the Jesuit maintained was possessed by demons might be impelled by these demons to speak about the real origin of the Jesuits' Christ, and the demon might then say to the Jesuit: “Yours is not the Christ; the Christ of that other is the true one.”—You can understand the Jesuitical fear of the spiritual world! You can see how alarming it is to be exposed to the possible danger of being disowned in some corner of the spiritual world! Then someone might call Tertullian as witness for the Crown and might say: “Now see here, my dear Jesuit, the demon says himself that your God is a false God—and Tertullian, whom you have to recognise as a bona fide Church Father, says that demons tell the truth about themselves and about the Christ, just as the Bible states.” In short, the matter becomes very ticklish as soon as it is admitted by the supersensible world—even though in an unorthodox form—that demons witness to the truth. For even were we to cite Lucifer, he would not say what is untrue about the Christ! But it might leak out that something else is untrue about the Christ.

Now the truths of Initiation often sound different from what human beings find it convenient to acknowledge. Certainly this leads to things going rather criss-cross when to-day an endeavour is made to introduce Initiation truths to the external world—especially when they have to be introduced into the midst of immediate reality. Yes, as soon as the field is open for statements coming from the supersensible, some very remarkable conflicts may arise—when these statements are opposed by others which owe nothing to the supersensible!

This can often be applied to ordinary life. It has brought me a certain satisfaction that a suggestion I made really to myself during my lectures—and things I say during lectures I give out as my own conviction, with no intention of compelling others to accept them—this suggestion has been followed up, and our Building, out of all the conditions experienced at the present time, has been called the “Goetheanum.” And even if this has been with the assistance of certain supersensible impulses, it seems to me to be both right and good. But if I am asked by anyone for the reasons from an intellectual standpoint—as though I ought to count them all up on my fingers—if I am asked to give all the reasons for this, I should appear to myself a prodigious Philistine if I were to count up all the reasons for what has been felt out of a deep necessity—all the reasons for and against would seem to me like sheer hair-splitting.

One is often in this situation precisely when ascribing supersensible impulses to the will. People often say: “I don't understand this, I can't grasp what it means.” But is it terribly important whether you or anyone else grasps what a thing means? For what does this grasping (begreifen) mean? It really means putting a matter in the light where repose the thoughts which for decades a person has found comfortably suitable for himself. Otherwise its meaning is no different from what people call “understanding.” What people themselves call understanding often signifies very little where truths revealed from the spiritual world are concerned. Just in the most supersensible spheres—where truths are not mere theory but are meant to seize upon the will, to strike into the world of deeds—just here there is always something rather questionable when people ask intellectually: Why, why, why is this so? Or: How is this or that to be understood? In this connection we ought to accustom ourselves to finding for certain things belonging to the supersensible world an analogy—but only an analogy—with recognised facts of nature. If you leave here and a dog bites you and you have never before had a dog bite you, I don't know whether you will ask, Why has it bitten me? Or, How am I to understand it?—For what sort of connection has it with the intellect! You will simply relate the facts. So it is with certain supersensible things—we simply relate the facts. And there are many such things, as you can gather from what I have told you to-day—that in the sense-world there are two apparent events which conceal their real meaning: human death and human birth, which bring the supersensible into the world of the senses and are strangers in that world. They disguise themselves as sense-phenomena and in that way they extend their disguise over the rest of nature, so that the rest of nature also is bound to be seen in a false light by human beings to-day.

Thoroughly to understand these things, to absorb them thoroughly into our own approach to knowledge, is one of the future demands that will be made on human life. The Time Spirits will make this demand especially on those who are seeking knowledge for the future and wish to bring active will-impulses into some particular sphere. Particularly must the spiritual branches of culture be taken in hand—theology, medicine, jurisprudence, philosophy, natural science, even technics and social life, even politics—yes, truly, politics, even that strange creature! Into all this, those who understand the times ought to introduce the fruits of Spiritual Science.

In the course of our enquiries during the next few days I should like to draw your attention to two things which seemingly bear little relation to each other. But when we have concluded our enquiries you will realize that they are closely connected. I should like in fact to touch upon certain matters which will provide points of view, symptomatic points d'appui concerning the development of religions in the course of the present fifth post-Atlantean epoch. And on the other hand, I would also like to show you in what respect the spiritual life that we wish to cultivate may be associated with the building which bears the name ‘Goetheanum.’

It seems to me that the decisions taken in such a case have a certain importance, especially at the present time. We are now at a stage in the evolution of mankind when the future holds unknown possibilities and when it is important to face courageously an uncertain future and when it is also important, from out of the deepest impulses, to take decisions to which one attaches a certain significance. The external reason for choosing the name ‘Goetheanum’ seems to be this: I expressed the opinion a short time ago in public lectures that, for my part, I should like the centre for the cultivation of the spiritual orientation that I envisage to be called for preference the Goetheanum. The name to be decided upon had already been discussed last year; and this year a few of our members decided to support the choice of the name ‘Goetheanum.’ As I said recently there are many reasons for this choice, reasons which I find difficult to express in words. Perhaps they will become clear to you if I start today from considerations similar to those which I dealt with here last Sunday, by creating a basis for the study of the history of religions which we will undertake in these lectures.

You know of course—and I would not touch upon personal matters if they were not connected with revelant issues, and also with matters concerning the Goetheanum—you know that my first literary activity is associated with the name of Goethe and that it was developed in a domain in which today, even for those who refuse to open their eyes, who prefer to remain asleep, the powerful catastrophic happenings of our time are adumbrated. My view of Goethe from the standpoint of spiritual science, and equally what I said recently in relation to The Philosophy of Freedom, are of course a personal matter; on the other hand, however, this personal factor is intimately linked with the march of events in recent decades. The origin of my The Philosophy of Freedom and of my Goethe publications is closely connected with the fact that, up to the end of the eighties I lived in Austria and then moved to Germany, first to Weimar and then to Berlin, a connection of course that is purely external. But when we reflect upon this external connection we are gradually led, in the light of the facts, if we apprehend the symptoms aright, to an understanding of the inner significance. From the historical sketches I have outlined you will have observed that I am obliged to apply to life what I call historical symptomatology, that I must comprehend history as well as individual human lives from out of their symptoms and manifestations because they are pointers to the real inner happenings. One must really have the will to look beyond external facts in order to arrive at their inner meaning.

Many people today would like to learn to develop super-sensible vision, but clairvoyance is difficult to achieve and the majority would prefer to spare themselves the effort. That is why it is often the case today that for those naturally endowed with clairvoyance there is a dichotomy between their external life and their clairvoyant faculty. Indeed, where this dichotomy exists super-sensible vision is of little value and is seldom able to transcend personal factors. Our epoch is an age of transition. Every epoch, of course, is an age of transition. It is simply a question of realizing what is transmitted. Something of importance is transmitted, something that touches man in his inmost being and is of vital importance for his inner life. If we examine objectively what the so-called educated public has pursued the world over in recent decades, we are left with a sorry picture—the picture of a humanity that is fast asleep. This is not intended as a criticism, nor as an invitation to pessimism, but as a stimulus to awaken in man those forces which will enable him to attain, at least provisionally, his most important goal, namely, to develop insight, real insight into things. Our present age must shed certain illusions and see things as they really are.

Do not begin by asking: what must I do, what must others do? For the majority of people today such questions are inopportune. The important question is: how do I gain insight into the present situation? When one has adequate insight, one will follow the right course. That which must be developed will assuredly be developed when we have the right insight or understanding. But this entails a change of outlook. Above all men must clearly recognize that external events are in reality simply symptoms of an inner process of evolution occurring in the field of the super-sensible, a process that embraces not only historical life, but also every individual, every one of us in the fullness of our being.

Let me quote¹ by way of illustration. Today we are very proud that we can apply the law of causality in all kinds of fields; but this is a fatal illusion. Those who are familiar with Hamerling's life know how important for his whole inner development was the following circumstance. After acting for a short time as a ‘supply’ teacher in Graz (i.e. a kind of temporary post before one is appointed to a permanent position in a Gymnasium) he was transferred to Trieste. From there he was able to spend several holidays in Venice. When we recall the ten years which Hamerling spent on the Adriatic coast—he divided his time between teaching in Trieste and visiting Venice—we see how he was fired with ardent enthusiasm for all that the south could offer him, how he derived spiritual nourishment for his later poetry from his experiences there. The real Hamerling, the Hamerling we know, would have been a different person if he had not spent the ten years in question in Trieste with the opportunity for holidays in Venice!

Now supposing some thoroughly philistine professor is writing a biography of Hamerling and wanted to know how it was that Hamerling came to be transferred to Trieste precisely at this decisive moment in his life, and how a man without means, who was entirely dependent upon his salary, happened to be transferred to Trieste at this particular moment. I will give you the external explanation. Hamerling, as I have said, held at that time a temporary appointment (he was a supply teacher, as we say in Austria) at the Gymnasium² in Graz. These supply teachers are anxious to find a permanent appointment, and since this is a matter for the authorities, the applicant for such a post has to send in his various qualifications—written on one side of the application form—enclosing testimonials, etcetera. The application is then forwarded to a higher authority who in turn forwards it to still higher authorities, etcetera, etcetera. There is no need to describe the procedure further. The headmaster of the Gymnasium in Graz where Hamerling worked as a temporary assistant, was the worthy Kaltenbrunner. Hamerling heard that there was a vacancy for a master in Budapest. At that time the Dual Monarchy did not exist and teachers could be transferred from Graz to Budapest and from Budapest to Graz. Hamerling applied for the post in Budapest and handed in his application, written in copper plate, together with the necessary testimonials to the headmaster, the worthy Kaltenbrunner, who placed it in a drawer and forgot all about it. Consequently the post in Budapest was given to another candidate. Hamerling was not appointed because Kaltenbrunner had forgotten to forward the application to the higher authorities, who, if they had not forgotten to do so, would have forwarded it to their immediate superiors and these in their turn to their superiors, etcetera, until it reached the minister, when it would have been referred back to the lower echelons and have passed down the bureaucratic ladder. Thus another candidate was appointed to the post in Budapest, and Hamerling spent the ten years which were decisive for his life, not in Budapest, but in Trieste, because sometime later a post feil vacant here to which he was appointed—and because, of course, the worthy Kaltenbrunner did not forget Hamerling's application a second time!

From the external point of view therefore Kaltenbrunner's negligence was responsible for the decisive turning point in Hamerling's life; otherwise Hamerling would have stagnated in Budapest. This is not intended as a ctiticism of Budapest; but the fact remains that Budapest would have been a spiritual desert for Hamerling and he would have been unable to develop his particular talents. And our biographer would now be able to tell us how it was that Hamerling had been transferred from Graz to Trieste—because Kaltenbrunner had simply overlooked Hamerling's application.

Now this is a striking incident and one could find countless others of its kind in life. And he who seeks to measure life by the yard-stick of external events will scarcely find causes, even if he believes that he is able to establish causal relationships, that are more closely connected with their effects than the negligence of the worthy Kaltenbrunner with the spiritual development of Robert Hamerling. I make this observation simply to call your attention to the fact that it is imperative to implant in the hearts of men this principle: that external life as it unfolds must be seen simply as a symptom that reveals its inner meaning.

In my last lecture I spoke of the forties to the seventies as the critical period for the bourgeoisie. I pointed out how the bourgeoisie had been asleep during these critical years and how the end of the seventies saw the beginning of those fateful decades which led to our present situation.^T1 I spent the first years of these decades in Austria. Now as an Austrian living in the last third of the nineteenth century one was in a strange position if one wished to participate in the cultural life of the time. It is of course easy for me to throw light on this situation from the standpoint of a young man who spent his formative years in Austria and who was German by descent and racial affiliation. To be a German in Austria is totally different from being a German in the Reich^T2 or in Switzerland. One must, of course, endeavour to understand everything in life and one can understand everything; one can adapt oneself to everything. But if, for example, one were to raise the question: what does an Austro-German feel about the social structure in which he lives and is it possible for an Austro-German without first having adapted himself to it, to have any understanding of that peculiar civic consciousness one finds in Switzerland? Then the answer to this question must be an emphatic no! The Austro-German grew up in an environment that makes it totally impossible for him to understand—unless he forced himself to do so artificially—that inflexible civic consciousness peculiar to the Swiss.

But these national differentiations are seldom taken into account. We must however give heed to them if we are to understand the difficult problems in this domain which face us now and in the immediate future. It was significant that I spent my formative years in an environment where the most important things did not really concern me. I would not mention this if it were not in fact the most important experience of the true-born German-Austrian. In some it finds expression in one way, in others in another way. To some extent I lived as a typical Austrian. From the age of eleven to eighteen I had to cross twice a day the river Leitha which formed the frontier between Austria and Hungary since I lived at Neudörfl in Hungary and attended school in Wiener-Neustadt. It was an hour's journey on foot and a quarter of an hour's by slow train—there were no fast trains, nor are there any today I believe—and each time I had to cross the frontier. Thus one came to know the two faces of what is called abroad ‘Austria.’ Formerly things were not so easy in the Austrian half of the Empire. Today one cannot say things are easier (that is unlikely), but different. Up till now one had to distinguish two parts of the Austrian Empire. Officially one half was called, not Austria, but ‘the Kingdoms and “lands” represented in the Federal Council’, i.e. Cis-Leithania, which included Galicia, Bohemia, Silesia, Moravia, Upper and Lower Austria, Salzburg, the Tyrol, Styria, Carniola, Carinthia, Istria and Dalmatia. The other half, Trans-Leithania,³ consisted of the ‘lands’ of the Crown of St. Stephen, i.e. what is called abroad Hungary, which included also Croatia and Slavonia. Then, after the eighties, there was the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina, occupied up to 1909 and later annexed, which was jointly administered by the two halves of the Empire.

Now in the area where I lived, even amongst the most important centres of interest, I did not find anything which really interested me between the ages of eleven and eighteen. The first important landmark was Frohsdorf, a castle inhabited by Count de Chambord, a member of the Bourbon family, who had made an unsuccessful attempt in 1871 to ascend the throne of France under the name of Henry V. There were many other peculiarities attaching to him. He was an ardent supporter of clericalism. In him, and in everything associated with him, one could perceive a world in decline, one could catch the atmosphere of a world that was crumbling in ruins. There were many things one saw there, but they were of no interest. And one felt: here is something which was once considered to be of the greatest importance and which many today still regard as immensely important. But in reality it is a bagatelle and has no particular importance.

The second thing in the neighbourhood was a Jesuit monastery, a genuine Jesuit monastery. The monks were called Redemptorists,⁴ an offshoot of the Jesuits. This monastery was situated not far from Frohsdorf. One saw the monks perambulating, one learned of the aims and aspirations of the Jesuits, one heard various tales about them, but this too was of no interest. And again one felt: what has all this to do with the future evolution of mankind? One felt that these monks in their black cowls were totally unrelated to the real forces which are preparing man's future development.

The third thing in the locality where I lived was a masonic lodge. The local priest used to inveigh against it, but of course the lodge meant nothing to me for one was not permitted to enter. It is true the porter allowed me on one occasion to look inside, but in strict secrecy. On the following Sunday, however, I again heard the priest fulminating against the lodge. In Brief, this too was something that did not concern me.

I was therefore well prepared when I matured and became more aware to be influenced by things which formerly held no interest for me. I regard it as very significant and a fortunate dispensation of my karma that, whilst I had been deeply interested in the spiritual world in my early years, in fact I lived my early life on the spiritual plane, I had not been forced by external circumstances into the classical education of the Gymnasium. All that one acquires through a humanistic education I acquired later on my own initiative. At that time the standard of the Gymnasium education in Austria was not too bad; it has progressively deteriorated since the seventies and of recent years has come perilously close to the educational system of neighbouring states. But looking back today I am glad that I was not sent to the Gymnasium in Wiener-Neustadt. I was sent to the Realschule and thus came in touch with a teaching that prepared the ground for a modern way of thinking, a teaching that enabled me to be closely associated with a scientific outlook. I owed this association with scientific thinking to the fact that the best teachers—and they were few and far betweenin the Austrian Realschule, which was organized on the most modern lines, were those who were connected in some way with modern scientific thinking.

This was not always true of the school in Wiener-Neustadt. In the lower classes—in the Austrian Realschule religious instruction was given only in the four lower classes—we had a teacher of religion who was a very pleasant fellow, but was quite unfitted to bring us up as devout and pious Christians. He was a Catholic priest and that he was hardly fitted to inspire piety in us is shown by the fact that three young boys who used to call for him everyday after school were said to be his sons. But I still hold him in high regard for everything he taught in class apart from his religious instruction. He imparted this religious instruction in the following way: he called an a pupil to read a few pages from a devotional work; then it was set for homework. One did not understand a word, learned it by heart and received high marks, but of course one had not the slightest idea of the contents. His conversation outside the classroom was sometimes beautiful and stimulating and above all warm and friendly.

Now in such a school one passed through the hands of a succession of teachers of widely different calibre. All this is of symptomatic significance. We had two Carmelites as teachers, one was supposed to teach us French, the other English. The latter in particular scarcely knew a word of English; in fact he could not string together a complete sentence. In natural history we had a man who had not the faintest understanding of God and the world. But we had excellent teachers for mathematics, physics, chemistry and especially for projective geometry. And it was they who paved the way for this inner link with scientific thinking. It is to this scientific thinking that I owed the impulse which is fundamentally related to the future aims of mankind today.

When, after struggling through the Realschule one entered the University, one could not avoid—unless one was asleep—taking an interest in public affairs and the world around. Now the Austro-German—and this is important—arrives at a knowledge of the German make-up in a totally different way from the Reich German.⁵ One could have, for example, a superficial interest in Austrian state-affairs, but one could scarcely feel a real inner relationship to them if one were interested in the evolution of mankind. On the other hand, as in my own case, one could have recourse to the achievements of German culture at the end of the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth century and to what I should like to call Goetheanism. As an Austro-German one responds to this differently from the Reich German. One should not forget that once one has become inured to the natural scientific outlook through a modern education one outgrows a certain artificial milieu which has spread over the whole of Western Austria in recent time. One outgrows the clerical Catholicism to which the people of Western Austria only nominally adhere, an extremely pleasant people for the most part—I exclude myself of course. This clerical Catholicism has never touched their lives deeply.

In the form it has assumed in western Austria this clerical Catholicism is a product of the Counter-Reformation, of the ‘Hausmacht’ policy of the Hapsburgs. The ideas and impulses of Protestantism were fairly widespread in Austria, but the Thirty Years' War and the events connected with it enabled the Hapsburgs to initiate a counter Reformation and to impose upon the extremely gifted and intelligent Austro-German people that terrible obscurantism, which must be imposed when one diffuses Catholicism in the form which prevailed in Austria as a consequence of the Counter Reformation. Consequently men's relationship to religion and religious issues becomes extremely superficial. And happiest are those who are still aware of this superficial relationship. The others who believe that their faith, their piety is honest and sincere are unwittingly victims of a monstrous illusion, of a terrible lie which destroys the inner life of the soul.

With a Background of natural science it is impossible of course to come to terms with this frightful psychic mishmash which invades the soul. But there are always a few isolated individuals who develop themselves and stand apart from it. They find themselves driven towards the cultural life which reached its zenith in Central Europe at the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century. They came in touch with the current of thought which began with Lessing, was carried forward by Herder, Goethe and the German Romantics and which in its wider context can be called Goetheanism.

In these decades it was of decisive importance for the Austro-German with spiritual aspirations that—living outside the folk community to which Lessing, Goethe, Herder etcetera belonged, and transplanted into a wholly alien environment over the frontier—he imbibed there the spiritual perception of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing and Herder. Nothing else impressed one; one imbibed only the Weltanschauung of Weimar classicism—and in this respect one stood apart, isolated and alone. For again one was surrounded by those phenomena which did not concern one.

And so one was associated with something that one gradually felt to be second nature, something, however, that was uprooted from its native soil and which one cherished in one's inmost soul in a community which was interested only in superficialities. For it was anomalous to cherish Goethean ideas at a time when the world around was enthusiasticbut the words of enthusiasm were pompous and artificial, without any suggestion of sincere and honest endeavourabout such publications (and I could give other examples) as the book of the then Crown Prince Rudolf An illustrated history of Austria. The book in fact was the work of ghost writers. One had no affinity with this trash, though, it is true, one belonged outwardly to this world of superficiality. One treasured in one's soul that which was an expression of the Central European spirit and which in a wider context I should like to call Goetheanism.

This Goetheanism, with which I associate the names of Schiller, Lessing, Herder and also the German philosophers, occupies a singularly isolated position in the world. And this isolation is extremely significant for the whole evolution of modern mankind for it causes those who wish to embark upon a serious study of Goetheanism to become a little reflective.

Looking back over the past one asks oneself: what have Lessing, Goethe and the later German Romantics, approximately up to the middle of the nineteenth century, contributed to the world? In what respect is this contribution related to the historical evolution prior to Lessing's time? Now it is well known that the emergence of Protestantism out of Catholicism is intimately connected with the historical evolution of Central Europe. We see, an the one hand, in Central Europe, in Germany for example—I have already discussed the same phenomenon in relation to Austria—the survival of the universalist impulse of Roman Catholicism. In Austria its influence was more external, as I have described, in Germany more inward. Now there is a vast difference between the Austrian Catholic and the Bavarian Catholic, and many of these differences which have survived date back to the remote past. Then came the invasion of Catholic culture by Protestantism or Lutheranism, which in Switzerland took the form of Calvinism or Zwinglianism.⁶ Now a high proportion of the German people, especially the Reich Germans, was Lutheran. But strangely enough there is no connection whatsoever between Lutheranism and Goetheanism! It is true that Goethe had studied both Lutheranism and Catholicism, though somewhat superficially. But when one considers the ferment in Goethe's soul, one can only say that throughout his life it was a matter of indifference to him whether one professed Catholicism or Protestantism. Both confessions could be found in his entourage, but he was in no way connected with them. To this aperçu the following can be added. Herder⁷ was pastor and later General Superintendent in Weimar. As pastor, of course, he had received much from Luther externally and was familiar with his teachings; he was aware that his outlook and thinking had nothing in common with Lutheranism and that he had entirely outgrown the Lutheran faith. Thus, in everything associated with Goetheanism—and I include men such as Herder and others—we have in this respect a completely isolated phenomenon. When we enquire into the nature of this isolated phenomenon we find that Goetheanism is a crystallization of all kinds of impulses of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Luther did not have the slightest influence on Goethe; Goethe, however, was influenced by Linnaeus,⁸ Spinoza and Shakespeare, and on his own admission these three personalities exercised the greatest influence upon his spiritual development.

Thus Goetheanism stands out as an isolated phenomenon and that is why it can never become popular. For the old entrenched positions persist; not even the slightest attempt was made to promote the ideas of Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe amongst the broad masses of the population, let alone to encourage the feelings and sentiments of these personalities. Meanwhile an outmoded Catholicism on the one hand, and an outmoded Lutheranism on the other hand, lived on as relics from the past. And it is a significant phenomenon that, within the cultural stream to which Goethe belonged and which produced a Goethe, the spiritual activities of the people are influenced by the sermons preached by the Protestant pastors. Amongst the latter are a few who are receptive to modern culture, but that is of no help to them in their sermons. The spiritual nourishment offered by the church today is antediluvian and is totally unrelated to the demands of the time; it cannot lend in any way vitality or vigour. It is associated, however, with another aspect of our culture, that aspect which is responsible for the fact that the spiritual life of the majority of mankind is divorced from reality. Perhaps the most significant symptom of modern bourgeois philistinism is that its spiritual life is remote from reality, all its talk is empty and unreal.

Such phenomena, however, are usually ignored, but as symptoms they are deeply significant. You can read the literature of the war-mongers over recent decades and you will find that Kant is quoted again and again. In recent weeks many of these war-mongers have turned pacifist, since peace is now in the offing. But that is of no consequence; philistines they still remain, that is the point. The Stresemann⁹ of today is the same Stresemann of six weeks ago. And today it is customary to quote Kant as the ideal of the pacifists. This is quite unreal. These people have no understanding of the source from which they claim to have derived their spiritual nourishment.

That is one of the most characteristic features of the present time and accounts for the strange fact that a powerful spiritual impulse, that of Goetheanism, has met with total incomprehension. In face of the present catastrophic events this thought fills us with dismay. When we ask: what will become of this wave—one of the most important in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch—given the atmosphere prevailing in the world today, we are filled with sadness.

In the light of this situation the decision to call the centre which wishes to devote its activities to the most important impulses of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch the ‘Goetheanum’ irrespective of the fate which may befall it, has a certain importance. That this building shall bear the name ‘Goetheanum’ for many years to come is of no consequence; what is important is that the thought even existed, the thought of using the name ‘Goetheanum’ in these most difficult times.

Precisely through the fact I have mentioned to you, Goetheanism in its isolation could become something of unique importance when one lived at the aforesaid time in Austria where one's interests were limited. For if people had understood that Goetheanism was something which concerned them, the present catastrophe would not have arisen. This and many other factors enabled isolated individuals in the German-speaking areas of Austria—the broad masses live under the heel of the Catholicism of the CounterReformation—to develop a deep inner relationship to Goetheanism. I made the acquaintance of one of these personalities, Karl Julius Schröer¹⁰ who lived and worked in Austria. In every field in which he worked he was inspired by the Goethe impulse. History will one day record what men such as Karl Julius Schröer thought about the political needs of Austria in the second half of the nineteenth century. These people who never found a hearing were aware to some extent how the present situation could have been avoided, but that it was nevertheless inevitable because no one would listen to them.

On arriving in Imperial Germany one had above all the impression, when one had developed a close spiritual affinity with Goethe, that there was nowhere any understanding of this affinity. I came to Weimar in autumn 1889—I have already described the pleasing aspects of life in Weimar—but what I treasured in Goethe (I had already published my first important book on Goethe) met with little understanding or sympathy because it was the spiritual element in him that I valued. Outwardly and inwardly life in Weimar was wholly divorced from any connection with Goethean impulses. In fact these Goethean impulses were completely unknown in the widest circles, especially amongst professors of the history of literature who lectured on Goethe, Lessing and Herder in the universities—unknown amongst the philistines who perpetrated the most atrocious biographies of Goethe. I could only find consolation for these horrors by reading the publications of Schröer and the excellent book of Herman Grimm which I came across relatively early in my life. But Herman Grimm was never taken seriously by the universities. They regarded him as a dilettante, not as a serious scholar.

No genuine university scholar of course has ever made the effort to take K. J. Schröer seriously; he is always treated as a light-weight. I could give many examples of this. But one should not forget that the literary world with its many ramifications—including, if I may say so, journalism—has been under the influence of a bourgeoisie that has been declining in recent decades, a bourgeoisie which is fast asleep and which, when it embarks upon spiritual activities, has no understanding of their real meaning. Under these circumstances it is impossible of course to arrive at any understanding of Goetheanism. For Goethe himself is, in the best sense of the word, the most modern spirit of the fifth postAtlantean epoch.

Consider for a moment his unique characteristics. First, his whole Weltanschauung—which can be raised to a higher spiritual level than Goethe himself could achieve—rests upon a solid scientific foundation. At the present time a firmly established Weltanschauung cannot exist without a scientific basis. That is why there is a strong scientific substratum to the book with which I concluded my Goethe studies in 1897. (The book has now been republished for reasons similar to those which led to the re-issue of The Philosophy of Freedom.) The solid body of philistines said at that time (it was a time when my books were still reviewed, the title of the book is Goethe's Conception of the World:^T3 in reality he ought to call it ‘Goethe's conception of nature.’ The so-called Goethe scholars, the literary historians, philosophers and the like failed to realize that it is impossible to present Goethe's Weltanschauung unless it is firmly anchored in his conception of nature.

A second characteristic which shows Goethe to be the most modern spirit of the fifth post-Atlantean age is the way in which that peculiar spiritual path unfolds within him which leads from the intuitive perception of nature to art. In studying Goethe it is most interesting to follow this connection between perception of nature and artistic activity, between artistic creation and artistic imagination. One touches upon thousands of questions—which are not dry, theoretical questions, but questions instinct with life, when one studies this strange and peculiar process which always takes place in Goethe when he observes nature as an artist, but sees it on that account no less in its reality, and when he works as an artist in such a way that, to quote his own words, one feels art to be something akin to the continuation of divine creation in nature at a higher level.

A third characteristic typical of Goethe's Weltanschauung is bis conception of man. He sees him as an integral part of the universe, as the crowning achievement of the entire universe. Goethe always strives to see him, not as an isolatcd being, but imbued with the wisdom that informs nature. For Goethe the soul of man is the stage on which the spirit of nature contemplates itself. But these thoughts which are expressed here in abstract form have countless implications if they are pursued concretely. And all this constitutes the solid base on which we can build that which leads to the supreme heights of spiritual super-sensible perception in the present age. If one points out today that mankind as a whole has failed to give serious attention to Goethe—and it has failed in this respect—has failed to develop any relation ship to Goetheanism, then it is certainly not in order to criticize, lecture or reproach mankind as a whole, but simply to invite them to undertake a serious study of Goetheanism. For to pursue the path of Goetheanism is to open the doors to an anthroposophically orientated spiritual science. And without Anthroposophy the world will not find a way out of the present catastrophic situation. In many ways the safest approach to spiritual science is to begin with the study of Goethe.

All this is related to something else. I have already pointed out that this shallow spiritual life which is preached from the pulpit and which then becomes for many a living lie of which they are unconscious—all this is outmoded. And fundamentally the erudition in all the faculties of our universities is equally outmoded. This erudition becomes an anomaly where Goetheanism exists alongside it. For a further characteristic feature of Goethe's personality is his phenomenal universality. It is true that in various domains Goethe has sowed only the first seeds, but these seeds can be cultivated everywhere and when cultivated contain the germ of something great and grandiose, the great modern impulse which mankind prefers to ignore, and compared with which modern university education in its outlook and attitude is antediluvian. Even though it accepts new discoveries, this modern university education is out of date. But at the same time there exists a true life of the spirit, Goetheanism, which is ignored. In a certain sense Goethe is the universitas litterarum, the hidden university, and in the sphere of the spiritual life it is the university education of today that usurps the throne. Everything that takes place in the external world and which has led to the present catastophe is, in the final analysis, the result of what is taught in our universities. People talk today of this or that in politics, of certain personalities, of the rise of socialism, of the good and bad aspects of art, of Bolshevism, etcetera; they are afraid of what may happen in the future, they envisage such and such occupying a certain post, and there are those who six weeks ago said the opposite of what they say today ... such is the state of affairs. Where does all this originate? Ultimately in the educational institutions of the present day. Everything else is of secondary importance if people fail to see that the axe must be laid to the tree of modern education. What is the use of developing endless so-called clever ideas, if people do not realize where in fact the break with the past must be made.

I have already spoken of certain things which did not concern me. I can now teil you of something else which did not concern me. When I left the Realschule for the university I entered my name for different lecture courses and attended various lectures. But they held no interest for me; one felt that they were quite out of touch with the impulse of our time. Without wishing to appear conceited I must confess that I had a certain sympathy for that universitas, Goetheanism, because Goethe also found that his university education held little interest for him. And at the royal university of Leipzig in the (then) Kingdom of Saxony, and again at Strasbourg university in later years, he took virtually no interest in the lectures he attended. And yet everything, even the quintessence of the artistic in Goethe rests upon the solid foundation of a rigorous observation of nature. In spite of all university education he gradually became familiar with the most modern impulses, even in the sphere of knowledge. When we speak of Goetheanism we must not lose sight of this. And this is what I should have liked to bring to men's attention in my Goethe studies and in my book Goethe's Conception of the World. I should have liked to make them aware of the real Goethe. But the time for this was not ripe; to a large extent the response was lacking. As I mentioned recently the first indications were visible in Weimar where the soil was to some extent favourable. But nothing fruitful came of it. Those who were already in entrenched positions barred the way to those who could have brought a new creative impulse. If the modern age were imbued in some small measure with Goetheanism, it would long for spiritual science, for Goetheanism prepares the ground for the reception of spiritual science. Then Goetheanism would again become a means whereby a real regeneration of mankind today could be achieved. One cannot afford to take a superficial view of our present age.

After my lecture in Basel yesterday^T4 I felt that no honest scientist could deny what I had to say on the subject of super-sensible knowledge if he were prepared to face the facts. There are no logical grounds for rejecting spiritual knowledge; the real cause for rejection is to be found in that barbarism which in all regions of the civilized world is responsible for the present catastrophe. It is profoundly symbolic that a few years ago a Goethe society had nothing better to do than to appoint as president a former finance minister—a typical example of men's remoteness from what they profess to honour. This finance minister who, as I said recently, bears, perhaps symptomatically, the Christian name ‘Kreuzwendedich’ believes of course, in his fond delusion, that he pays homage to Goethe. With a background of modern education he has no idea and can have no idea how far, how infinitely far removed he is from the most elementary understanding of Goetheanism.

The climate of the present epoch is unsuited to a deeper understanding of Goetheanism. For Goetheanism has no national affiliation, it is not something specifically German. It draws nourishment from Spinoza, from Shakespeare, from Linnaeus—none of whom is of German origin. Goethe himself admitted that these three personalities exercised a profound influence upon him—and in this he was not mistaken. (He who knows Goethe recognizes how justified this admission is.) Goetheanism could determine men's thinking, their religious life, every branch of science, the social forms of community life, the political life ... it could reign supreme everywhere. But the world today listens to windbags such as Eucken¹¹ or Bergson and the like ... (I say nothing of the political babblers, for in this realm today adjective and substantive are almost identical).

What we have striven for here—and which will arouse such intense hatred in the future that its realization is problematical, especially at the present time—is a living protest against the alienation of spiritual life today from reality. And this protest is best expressed by saying: what we wanted to realize here is a Goetheanum. When we speak here of a Goetheanum we bear witness to the most important characteristics and also to the most important demands of our time. And amid the philistine world of today this Goetheanum at least has been willed and should tower above this present world that claims to be civilized.

Of course, if the wishes of many contemporaries had been fulfilled, one could perhaps say that it would have been more sensible to speak of a Wilsonianum,¹² for that is the flag under which the present epoch sails. And it is to Wilsonism that the world at the present time is prepared to submit and probaly will submit.

Now it may seem strange to say that the sole remedy against Wilsonism is Goetheanism. Those who claim to know better come along and say: the man who talks like this is a utopian, a visionary. But who are these people who coin this phrase: he is an innocent abroad—who are they? Why, none other than those worldly men who are responsible for the present state of affairs, who always imagined themselves to be essentially ‘practical’ men. It is they of course who refuse to listen to words of profound truth, namely, that Wilsonism will bring sickness upon the world, and in all domains of life the world will be in need of a remedy and this remedy will be Goetheanism.

Permit me to conclude with a personal observation on the interpretation of my book Goethe's Conception of the World which has now appeared in a second edition. Through a strange concatenation of circumstances the book has not yet arrived; one is always ready to make allowances, especially at the present time. It was suggested by men of ‘practical’ experience some time ago, months ago in fact, that my books The Philosophy of Freedom and Goethe's Conception of the World should be forwarded here direct from the printers and so avoid going via Berlin and arrive here more quickly. One would have thought that those who proffered this advice were knowledgeable in these matters. I was informed that The Philosophy of Freedom had been despatched, but after weeks and weeks had not arrived. For some time people had been able to purchase copies in Berlin. None was to be had here because somewhere on the way the matter had been in the hands of the ‘practical’ people and we unpractical people were not supposed to interfere. What had happened? The parcel had been handed in by the ‘practical’ people of the firm who had been told to send it to Dornach near Basel. But the gentleman responsible for the despatch said to himself: Dornach near Basel; that is in Alsace, for there is a Dornach there which is also near Basel ... there is no need to pay foreign postage, German stamps will suffice. And so, on ‘practical’ instructions the parcel went to Dornach in Alsace where, of course, they had no idea what to do with it. The matter had to be taken up by the unpractical people here. Finally, after long delays when the ‘practical’ gentleman had satisfied himself that Dornach near Basel is not Dornach in Alsace, The Philosophy of Freedom arrived. Whether the other book, Goethe's Conception of the World, instead of being sent from Stuttgart to Dornach near Basel has been sent by some ‘practical’ person via the North Pole, to arrive finally in Dornach after travelling round the globe, I cannot say. In any case, this is only one example that we have experienced personally of the ‘practical’ man's contribution to the practical affairs of daily life.

This is what I was first able to undertake personally in a realm that lay close to my heart—more through external circumstances than through my own inclination—in order to be of service to the epoch. And when I consider what was the purpose of my various books, which are born of the impulse of the time, I believe that these books answer the demands of our epoch in widely divergent fields. They have taught me how powerful have been the forces in recent decades acting against the Spirit of the age. However much in their ruthlessness people may believe that they can achieve their aims by force, the fact remains that nothing in reality can be enforced which runs counter to the impulses of the time. Many things which are in keeping with the impulses of the time can be delayed; but if they are delayed they will later find scope for expression, perhaps under another name and in a totally different context. I believe that these two books, amongst other things, can show how, by observing one's age, one can be of service to it. One can serve one's age in every way, in the simplest and most humble activities. One must simply have the courage to take up Goetheanism which exists as a Universitas liberarum scientiarum alongside the antediluvian university that everyone admires today, the socialists of the extreme left most of all.

It might easily appear as if these remarks are motivated by personal animosity and therefore I always hesitate to express them. One is of course a target for the obvious accusation—‘Aha, this fellow abuses universities because he failed to become a university professor!’ ... One must put up with this facile criticism when it is necessary to show that those who advocate this or that from a political, scientific, political-economic or confessional point of view of some kind or other fail to put their finger an the real malady of our time. Only those point to the real malady who draw attention to the pernicious dogma of infallibility which, through the fatal concurrence of mankind has led to the surrender of everything to the present domination of science, to those centres of official science where the weeds grow abundantly, alongside a few healthy plants of course. I am not referring to a particular individual or particular university professor (any more than when I speak of states or nations I am referring to a particular state or nation)—they may be excellent people, that is not the point. The really important question is the nature of the system.

And how serious this situation is, is shown by the fact that the technical colleges which have begun to lose a little of their natural character now assume university airs and so have Bone rapidly downhill and become corrupted by idleness.

I want you to consider the criticisms I have made today as a kind of interlude in our anthroposophical discussions. But I think that the present epoch offers such a powerful challenge to our thoughts and sentiments in this direction that these enquiries must be undertaken by us especially because, unfortunately, they will not be undertaken elsewhere.

Our present age is still very far removed from Goetheanism, which certainly does not imply studying the life and works of Goethe alone. Our epoch sorely needs to turn to Goetheanism in all spheres of life. This may sound utopian and impractical, but it is the most practical answer at the present time. When the different spheres of life are founded an Goetheanism we shall achieve something totally different from the single achievement of the bourgeoisie today—rationalism. He who is grounded in Goetheanism will assuredly find his way to spiritual science. This is what one would like to inscribe in letters of fire in the souls of men today.

This has been my aim for decades. But much of what I have said from the depths of my heart and which was intended to be of service to the age has been received by my contemporaries as an edifying Sunday afternoon sermonfor in reality those who are happy in their cultural sleep ask nothing more. We must seek concretely to discover what the epoch demands, what is necessary for our age—this is what mankind so urgently needs today. And above all we must endeavour to gain insight into this, for today insight is all important. Amidst the vast confusion of our time, a confusion that will soon become worse confounded, it is futile to ask: what must the individual do? What he must do first and foremost is to strive for insight and understanding so that the infallibility in the domain that I referred to today is directed into the right channel.

My book Goethe's Conception of the World was written specially in order to show that in the sphere of knowledge there are two streams today: a decadent stream which everyone admires, and another stream which contains the most fertile seeds for the future, and which everyone avoids. In recent decades men have suffered many painful experiences—and often through their own fault. But they should realize that they have suffered most—and worse is still to follow—at the hands of their schoolmasters of whom they are so proud. It appears that mankind must needs pass through the experiences which they have to undergo at the hands of the world schoolmaster, for they have contrived in the end to set up a schoolmaster as world organizer. Those windbags who have persuaded the world with their academic twaddle are now joined by another who proposes to set the world to right with empty academic rhetoric.

I have no wish to be pessimistic. These words are spoken in order to awaken those impulses which will answer Wilsonism with Goetheanism. They are not inspired by any kind of national sentiment, for Goethe himself was certainly not a nationalist; his genius was universal. The world must be preserved from the havoc that would follow if Wilsonism were to replace Goetheanism!

• 1. R. Hamerling (1830–89). Early work lyrical poems. Homunculus (1888) attacked the soullessness of the epoch. Philosophy opposed to monism and pessimism.
• 2. The Gymnasium prepared pupils for the Abitur and the University. Main subjects Greek and Latin; two foreign languages, usually French and English, included in the curriculum.
• T1. i.e. the war of 1914–18
• T2. i.e. Imperial Germany.
• 3. Realschule. Here emphasis an Mathematics and Natural Sciences. This type of school had a vocational bias.
• 4. Leitha and Leithania. The Leitha a tributory of the Danube. Up till 1918 formed the frontier between Austria and Hungary. The Austrian half of the Empire called Cis-Leithania, the Hungarian half, Trans-Leithania. See The Hapsburg Empire by C. S. Macartney, 1968.
• 5. Redemptorists. St. Alfonso de Liguori (1696–1787) founded the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer. Members of this congregation called Redemptionists. Undertook missionary work in the dioceses around Naples, heard confession and supervised schools. St. Alfonso beatified 1816 and canonized 1839.
• 6. The ‘Reich German’ refers to the German who was born and lived in Imperial Germany pre-1918.
• 7. Gottfried Herder (1744–1807). A seminal influence in theology, history, philosophy and pedagogy. Friend of Goethe. See any history of German literature.
• 8. Karl von Linnä or Linnaeus (1707–78). Swedish naturalist. Inventor of artificial system of plant classification.
• 9. Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929). National liberal politician. Post-1918 advocated a policy of reconciliation. Chancellor 1923. Foreign Minister 1923–9. Nobel Peace Prize 1926.
• 10. K. J. Schröer (1825–1900). Literary historian. Professor of history of literature at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna. Teacher of R. Steiner. See latter's Course of my Life.
• T3. Anthroposophical Publishing Co., London and Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1928.
• T4. Rechtfertigung der übersinnlichen Erkenntnis durch die Naturwissenschaft, 31st October, 1918 (see Bibl. Nr. 72).
• 11. R. Eucken (1846–1929). Professor of Philosophy, Jena. Pioneer of idealist metaphysics.
  
  H. Bergson (1859–1941). Professor at Collge de France. Famous for his book Creative Evolution and the idea of the elan vital as the fundamental stuff of the Universe.
• 12. Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924). Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Economy. President U.S.A. 1912–20. Author of the ‘Fourteen Points’ as basis for peace 1918. Idea of a ‘League of Nations’ stemmed from him; also of a world government to prevent future wars.

From the observations we made here the day before yesterday, and perhaps also in a broader sense from the public observations of these days, it will be seen that there is a certain necessity for humanity to develop spiritual-scientific interests, especially in the present day. For this spiritual science, in addition to its other tasks in the narrower sense for the individual human being, for his mind, his needs in life, his soul matters, is in a position to create clarity about certain things that man in the present must absolutely consider. And it is from this point of view that I have emphasized the necessity of regarding the seriousness with which spiritual science must be taken by those who approach it today, and of allowing it to appeal above all to the soul. We must try to explore in the most diverse directions how humanity could end up in such a catastrophic situation. For what this catastrophic situation means is still not considered by many people today in its full depth and with full seriousness. But the time will come when the events themselves, the facts themselves, will reveal this seriousness in a completely different way than is already the case today. But precisely on the basis of spiritual science, one should realize that it is not enough to wait until the very last moment, so to speak, to understand what one needs to understand in the face of the deeply dormant demands of the time. Above all, it is necessary to be prepared to face the fact that certain truths, which are necessary for humanity in the present and in the near future, are uncomfortable, that it is much more comfortable to sing the praises of how we have come so gloriously far in this or that respect, through the great achievements of cultural studies achievements, than to point out what is effective and alive in the relationships of human beings themselves, and what is effective and alive in particular in order to condition the character of contemporary humanity, so to speak. Contemporary humanity is challenged in many ways, it is necessarily led to understand this and that; but some things that are to be understood are just uncomfortable to understand, and require a certain unreserved, unprejudiced assessment of one's own human nature.

Certain tendencies exist in the development of time. Hypothetically, one can say that it would indeed be possible to continue to regard such things as something great, such as the so-called examination of aptitude mentioned the day before yesterday. Certain contemporary educators, namely, propagate these things, regard them as something tremendously great, and the rest of humanity disdains to form an opinion about these things, finds it inconvenient not to sleep in the face of such Ahrimanic tendencies, as they are introduced by something like the aptitude test and many other things. If such endeavors, such ideals – and of course they are ideals too – are to continue to exist, then this will have a profound influence on the whole development of the human soul, and above all a very specifically configured influence on the basic powers of the human soul: thinking, feeling and willing. One may hypothetically ask oneself, for it is not to take place, it is to be remedied by the efforts of those who profess the anthroposophical world view, but hypothetically one may ask oneself in order to know what one has to do: What configuration must the three main soul forces of man take on if such tendencies, as they are currently prevailing from the materialistic attitude, from the Ahrimanic, were to take hold alone, if they were not countered by spiritual striving, spiritual will? However great and powerful the influence of technical progress, which is fed by natural science, and of progress in other fields of natural science, may be, this very progress in natural science, this very structure of present-day thinking, will gradually impress more and more the character of narrow-mindedness, of limitation, on human imagination, on human thinking. There is no other way to characterize it, because in the broadest sense, I would say, the beginning of this narrow-mindedness, this limitation, is already apparent today, and it will consist in the fact that one will sin more and more

against something that was asserted in a public lecture yesterday: one will sin against opening up the whole soul to the world. More and more, people will limit themselves to listening theoretically and intellectually to what the concepts and ideas say. I also wanted to publicly point out that two people can say exactly the same thing with words, and one is by no means justified in thinking that what comes from both people is the same.

Today we live in the age of programs. The age of programs is precisely the age of intellectualism. What is it that people most like to do today when they devote themselves to the good of humanity? They found associations for all kinds of causes and set up programs and ideals. These can, of course, be very ingenious, very benevolent, very plausible; for the development of humanity they need not be worth a shot of powder. But one goes out of one's way to ask oneself: What does the person in question want? And if the person in question says – now, let's take something abstract, today one loves abstractions –: I want to cultivate universal philanthropy, then one thinks: What better thing could one do? Of course, one must join such an association! But we live in a time when, due to a certain oversaturation that culture has attained, it is extremely easy to come up with the most beautiful programs and the most beautiful ideas. In this regard, one can be a very limited person in terms of one's sense of and interest in the overall well-being of humanity and its true concerns. I might add that today, in the more delicate matters of culture, one can sometimes be right in the higher sense about things in which, according to the opinion of very many people, one is perhaps completely wrong. Thus, for example, today one may be led to set a higher value on poetic stammering which really and truly heralds the power of the inner soul than on perfect verses which are recognized as such simply because, as regards the outward configuration of poetry, language itself, the spirit of language, writes verses today and only employs the human soul to do so. Today, anyone can make brilliant verses in terms of the old verse style, even if they have no strong soul power. Such things must be taken into account in a time when great, eminently great questions arise for the development of mankind, as in this present time.

So it must be said: People must learn to open their whole soul to whole souls; people must learn to hold less and less to the content of what is said, and they must learn to gain more and more insight into the knowledge and power of what is brought into the world by this or that personality. We are, after all, experiencing the most terrible world-historical drama, that people all over the world worship principles such as those emanating from Woodrow Wilson, because these principles are plausible, because these principles cannot be refuted. Of course they are plausible, and of course they cannot be refuted, but they are as old as human thought; they have always been said that way. In all these things, there is nothing that is connected with the real, concrete, immediately present tasks. But people find it uncomfortable to put themselves in the position of the real, concrete, immediately present tasks, to develop the flexibility of thought. For this flexibility of thinking is part of the process of entering into the immediately concrete. Of course, it sometimes takes a long time to find one's way into this concrete; but today it is necessary to understand such things, to enter a little into the soul of the development of humanity.

There is a city in which a southern German population lives. In this city, a very important personality arose in the 18th century: Johann Heinrich Lambert. Kant, who was a contemporary of Johann Heinrich Lambert, called Lambert the greatest genius of his century; for if only Lambert's ideas had taken the place of the so-called Kant-La Place theory, something very significant would have emerged. This Lambert grew up in a city, which is now a southern German city, as the son of a tailor, and showed special talent at the age of fourteen. His father petitioned the city's council for support. After much effort, the council finally agreed to donate forty francs for the talented boy, on the condition that he never again request support. A hundred years had to pass before the city erected a monument to this man in the 1840s, the same city that had chased him out when he was fourteen. He was forced to leave the city and achieved greatness through special circumstances in Berlin. Now there is a beautiful monument, with a globe at the top to suggest that this genius was born out of this great, powerful city, which was able to harbor such geniuses, that the genius who knew how to embrace the world comes from this very soil!

Sometimes it takes even longer than a hundred years to realize what is teeming with talent. That may be, it may have been until our time. But how often has it been emphasized among us that the time has come when people must awaken to a free, self-reliant consciousness, in which people can no longer afford to be unaware of what is going on around them. This time is approaching with giant strides. People must learn to unlock their souls in order to see what is really there. Because, as I said, thinking is threatened by the peculiar configuration of materialistic culture, imagination is limited and becomes narrow-minded. Spiritual science provides concepts and ideas that do not allow one to become narrow-minded in one's thinking. One is constantly being asked, precisely through spiritual scientific concepts, to look at a thing from the most diverse sides. That is why even today many people in the spiritual science ranks are annoyed when they hear: Now a new cycle is coming, the matter will be approached from a completely different angle. — But it is inevitable that things are approached from the most diverse angles, and that we finally get beyond what I would call the absolutization of judgment. The truth, grasped in the spirit, cannot be well expressed in sharp contours because the spirit is a moving thing. So spiritual science works against narrow-mindedness in relation to thinking. Of course, it is difficult to say this to the present, but it is necessary.

The second faculty observed in the soul is feeling. Regarding feeling, regarding the world of feeling, what tendency does humanity strive towards from its materialistic culture? One can say that it has come a long way precisely in this area. In the realm of feeling, materialistic “culture” produces narrow-mindedness, philistinism. Our materialistic culture is particularly inclined to grow into the gigantic. Narrow-mindedness of interests! In the narrowest circle, people want to close themselves more and more. But today man is no longer called to close himself in the narrowest circle, today he is called to recognize how he is a tone in the great cosmic symphony.

Let us once again consider something, in order to immediately look at what is meant here from a comprehensive point of view, something that has already been mentioned here. I would like to say: you can calculate – and today people believe a lot in calculation – in what a wonderful way man fits into the cosmos. In one minute, we take about eighteen breaths. If you multiply that by twenty-four hours in a day, you get 25,920 breaths. Twenty-four hours, 25,920 breaths! Now try to calculate the following: You know that every year the vernal point, the rising point of the sun in spring, moves a little further along the vault of heaven. Let's go back to very distant times. The sun rose in Taurus in spring, then a little further in Taurus and again a little further until it entered Aries, and then again further, and so the sun goes around, apparently of course. How many years does it take for the Sun to move forward a little bit at a time in this jerky manner so that it arrives back at the same point? The Sun makes many such jerks: it takes 25,920 years to move forward in this way, which means that the Sun completes one revolution in the great cosmos in 25,920 years, in as many years as we take breaths in one day. Imagine what a wonderful coincidence that is! We breathe 25,920 times in a day, the sun advances, and when it has made the jerk 25,920 times, like our inner jerk, a breath, then it has come around the cosmos once. So we are a reflection of the macrocosm with our breathing.

It goes further: the average lifespan – this can of course go much further, but some people die earlier – the lifespan is on average seventy, seventy-one years. What is this actually, this human life? It is also a sum of breaths. Only they are different breaths. In ordinary physical breathing, we suck in the air and expel it. In a twenty-four-hour day, if we are ordinary, righteous people and do not go out at night in rags, we take a deep inhalation of our ego and the astral body when we wake up, and exhale our ego and astral body again when we fall asleep: that is also a breath. Every day is a breath of our physical and etheric body in relation to the I and the astral body. How often do we do that in a lifetime that lasts about seventy, seventy-one years? Calculate how many days a person actually lives: 25,920 days! That means that not only in one day do we imitate the course of the sun in the world by developing as many breaths as the sun makes jolts until it returns to the same point in the cosmos, but we also perform the great breath, the inhalation of the I and the astral body into the physical and etheric bodies, and the exhalation of the I and the astral body into the seventy-one years just as often as we breathe in one day: 25,920 times, which is the number of times the sun moves before it returns to the same point. We could cite many such things that show us how we, with our human lives, stand in the great harmony of the universe in terms of numbers and otherwise, and they would be no less surprising, no less magnificent, than if we feel what I have just explained. Much is hidden in the circumstances in which man stands in the world, but this hiddenness has its profound effect because it is actually the same as what was understood in ancient times as the harmony of the spheres.

This, indeed, calls forth our interest in the whole world. We are gradually learning to understand that we know nothing about ourselves as human beings if we restrict our interest in a philistine way to our immediate surroundings. But this has become more and more the characteristic of modern times, philistinism! Indeed, philistinism has become the basic tenor of the religious world view; and from there this basic tenor of philistinism radiated into many minds. Go back to the first centuries of Christianity: there was a doctrine that was grandiose. It was for that time. Today it must be replaced by our spiritual-scientific view, because different times make different demands on humanity, but at that time it was a grandiose doctrine, Gnosticism. Consider the magnificent way in which these Gnostics thought, in the research of the eons, in the research of the various spiritual hierarchies, how this small earth is aligned with the great cosmic world evolution with its many, many entities, but in whose ranks man is placed after all. It took flexibility of thought, a certain goodwill to develop one's concepts, not to let them calcify, become slimy, as one does now, in order to rise to Gnosis. Then came — not Christianity, but Christian confessionality. And ask around today what most official representatives of Christianity hate most of all: Gnosis. And they blacken anthroposophy most of all for that reason; they do not concern themselves with anthroposophy itself, they are too lazy for that, but when they glance into some book they have a dark suspicion, a dark notion: it could be some kind of gnosis too, for heaven's sake! We must take in new ideas, we must make the mind agile! We have finally brought people to simplicity of thought, especially in the religious sphere. It is said that one cannot gauge what will come of it when one soars to such lofty heights! – It is said: Man can indeed come to reach the highest divine in the simplest mind; there is no need to make an effort, but the simplest, childlike mind can reach the highest divine at every moment.

Yes, we must see through these things! It is important to really look at these things, because the prevailing mood of modern times, the philistinism, emanates from these things. That is why the religious sentiment in the various denominations has become so philistine, because what I have just described underlies it. Today it flatters people who pretend to be modest, but who are actually terribly immodest at heart, because immodesty, megalomania, is a fundamental characteristic of our time. Everything is judged, no matter how difficult it is experienced, no matter how much difficulty it bears on the forehead: it is judged, even by the one who can well know that he has not particularly endeavored to much experience, who only endeavored to arrive at the self-evident: that no effort must be made to recognize God, but that God must surrender Himself at all times to the simplest, most childlike mind if it wants Him. So one must see that philistinism must be pushed back by spiritual science before all else. But philistinism is rooted quite differently than is often assumed today, and many of those who believe that they have truly escaped philistinism are in fact mired in it up to their necks. Many “isms” and many modernisms that make it their program not to be like the philistines are actually nothing more than the most masked philistinism. That is the second point. In the realm of thinking and imagination, the encroaching narrow-mindedness must be pushed back; in the realm of feeling, the advancing philistinism. Broad-mindedness of interest must take its place, the will to really look at what is going on in the great tableau of earthly development.

The day before yesterday, we tried to characterize the effect of the folk spirits in concrete terms. These are archangels. From this you could already see that these folk spirits are connected with the places where certain people develop on earth. The folk spirit in Italy works through the air, and it works through everything liquid in the areas of present-day France and so on, as I have characterized it. But naturally these things intersect with many others, and one must be clear about the fact that people live side by side on earth, that certain phases of development are left behind in certain areas. In some cases, people advance them, in others they even cause them to decline. Now there is something tremendously significant to observe. If we regard the whole earth as an organism and ask ourselves: What is happening all over the earth? we can begin by looking at various areas of Asia, the Asian East, as it is called. In this Asian East, there are many souls incarnating today that, due to their karma, due to what they have brought with them from previous lives on earth, are still stuck in earlier peculiarities of human development. These are souls seeking bodies in which they can still be dependent on physical development up to a certain advanced age. The normal thing is that today one is only dependent up to the twenty-seventh year. This is what represents the fundamental character of our time: that one is dependent on physical development until the age of twenty-seven. This is very significant in our time. One understands much in our time when one considers these things. I have already pointed this out here.

I once asked myself: What would a person be like who was supposed to be the very type of our time, how would he have to enter this time with all his work, with all his activity? — He would have to, so to speak, exclude from himself everything that is otherwise brought to people from outside and affects them, leaving them to their own devices until the age of twenty-seven. He would have to be what is called a self-made man, a self-made person. Until the age of twenty-seven, he should be little affected by what the normal, the representative in our time, should be. Until the age of twenty-seven, he should develop entirely on his own. Then, just after he has made of himself what a modern man can make of himself, then, for example, he would have to be elected to parliament. Isn't it true that being elected to parliament is what it means to be in touch with the times today? Then, when he has been elected to parliament and after a few years has even become a minister, then he is in a sense stigmatized, then people notice later when one falls over in one direction or another and has this or that mishap. And then? How must it continue? One can no longer develop, one remains the type of one's time, one is the right representative of one's time. There are people like that today, as I said here some time ago: Lloyd George, for example. There is no one who expresses more characteristically and typically what is present in our time than Lloyd George, who by the age of twenty-seven had brought forth everything that a person can draw from the physical body. He was an autodidact, he came into life early, into socialism, and learned early on that at twenty-seven, you belong in Parliament. He was elected to Parliament and very soon became one of the most feared speakers there, even one of the most feared squinters – that's what they say: squinters – he always sat there and lurked when others were talking. There was something special about the way he looked up, that was well known to Lloyd George. Then the Campbell-Bannerman ministry came. Then they said: What do we do about Lloyd George? He's dangerous. It's best to make him a minister. And so they took him into the ministry. Yes, but to which ministerial post do we transfer him? He is a very talented person! Well, we transfer him to a position where he understands nothing. There he will be most useful, there he will be the least trouble! - He was made Minister of Railways and Shipbuilding. In a few months he acquired what he needed. He made the greatest reforms, the greatest things.

Surely, the type of man of the present cannot be better described than by portraying Lloyd George. It is as if it is concentrated, as if it is the essence of the materialism of the present, and one can understand much of the present if one is able to go into something like this. That is how it is in the middle of the world, I would like to say, between the Asian East and the American West. It is particularly the case in European culture that up to the age of twenty-seven one can extract from the bodily-physical what can also be significant for the soul-spiritual. Then a spiritual impulse must be aroused in the soul if one wants to progress, for the physical body has nothing more to give. Therefore, in a person like Lloyd George, everything that the present gives by itself is there, but he also has nothing of what is to be freely achieved. The present naturally gives much genius, many talents, but it gives nothing spiritual by itself. That must be conquered through freedom. But in Asia there is still ample opportunity to find bodies that allow the soul-spiritual development to continue beyond the twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth year. Therefore, souls incarnate there that still want to gain something from the physical body beyond this time. That is why there is still a spiritual culture, a culture that insists that the things around us be looked at spiritually, that the spiritual be recognized in the world. Of course, there is also a great deal of decadence in the East because materialism has spread, and since it is least suitable for the East, decadence has the greatest effect there. But among those who are the leading people, you can see how a natural spirituality is still present. They inwardly despise European materialistic culture in the most comprehensive sense. People like Rabindranath Tagore, who recently gave a speech about the spirit of Japan, who says: We Orientals naturally adopt European achievements for our external technical cultural conditions; but we put them in our sheds, in our stables, and certainly don't let them enter our living rooms, this European culture - because the spiritual is a matter of course for him. Today, we need to know such things, for these things are the basic forces of what is happening in the world, and on which world events depend today.

You will say: Yes, but we do have, for example, in our Central European culture, a firm foundation for a spirituality that is even based on clear, bright ideas! — We do have that too, and we can speak of this spirituality in the same way that I tried to speak of a forgotten current in German intellectual life in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Riddle of Man). In order to be imbued with a spirituality that would truly go beyond what Oriental spirituality has achieved in the development of humanity, we need only imbibe the wonderful imaginations that we find, for example, in Herder or Goethe. Oriental culture has not produced anything as great as Herder, who sees a picture of the new creation of the world in every new sunrise and describes it in a magnificent way. Those who do not want to be philistines today are still such philistines that they say: You no longer care about something that is so ancient – and if you ask people about Herder, it has long been forgotten. And the Oriental, when he judges the circumstances, naturally judges that which lives in the outer real current of Central European culture.

Read the perceptive Chinese scholar Xu Hung-Ming, who has sympathetically described Central European culture, or read the lecture that Rabindranath Tagore recently gave. Then you will see that people are asking themselves: What is the position of this Europe in the overall progress of humanity? — They have an inkling that this Central Europe would be called upon to lead people beyond what spiritualism has given them itself. But then they look to see whether this Central Europe has not failed to develop the great talents, the great seeds that are there, that it contains. People say that they had a Goethe; yes, but these honest, materialistic Germans do not know how to make use of him! When his last grandchild died, there was another opportunity to introduce Goetheanism into German spiritual life. Under the truly incomparably magnificent aegis of a German princess, the Goethe-Schiller Archive was founded. A great impulse was given in the 1880s. The Goethe Society was also founded, but they were constantly embarrassed to appoint someone to the top who would really have dealt with the spirituality of Goethe. They did not find that worthy, and in the last election they did not put a person at the head of the Goethe Society who would be steeped in the spirituality inspired by Goethe, but they appointed a former finance minister. Yes, but after such things the world must judge what is happening in Central Europe! Today, Goethe's heritage is administered by a former finance minister who, admittedly, has the symptomatic first name “Kreuzwendedich” (which means “Turn Yourself Around”). But I don't know if, if the symbolism of this first name were to be fulfilled, something better would take its place.

These things could only change if the place of narrow-minded interests were taken by great interests, if people really looked at how the impulses work across the earth, how the bodies in the east, I would like to say, make a somewhat spirituality for the souls who want to incarnate in such bodies today with a retarded spirituality, which still gives something of the physical body for the souls beyond the twenty-seventh year. In the East, people remain at an earlier stage of human development, they stop at what humanity has already gone through. Here in the middle, people have reached the point where a change must take place, where they can draw what is necessary from the physical body up to the age of twenty-seven. But for the further development of the human soul, if one does not want to grow old early and does not want to have nothing of one's youth, one must have a spiritual-soul impulse, a free spiritual impulse, not, like the Oriental, an unfree spiritual impulse.

If we go further west, to America, humanity is so constituted that it lags behind, that it does not reach this level. In the Orient, humanity has, in a sense, regressed to earlier stages; in the middle, you have the normal age; in the West, in America – I characterized it the day before yesterday – the subterranean of the earth is at work. Even on such minds as Woodrow Wilson, it has the effect of being obsessed by their own words, their own principles. They are like prematurely aged children, but the word has a slightly different connotation. They cannot achieve the full impact of what can be achieved up to the age of twenty-seven. Once we understand what makes such a strong impression on many people in the present day, we will ask ourselves, for example: How could it be that a mind like Woodrow Wilson's, which with its age never absorbed more than one absorbs up to the age of twenty-seven, could become the great world schoolmaster? — The breadth of interest to really bring such things to mind in a genuine way, you just don't have that. You don't want to get out of philistinism!

That remarkable trend in the evolution of humanity, which is characterized by the following: from the East to the West, from the preservation of an earlier time through the normal middle to the decadence of the West - this is to be found in the development of nations and the earth, not in the individual human being. Interest in it must be developed so that one knows what impulses are at work across the earth and so that one can evaluate them. And for a long time, the main influence here in the center of Europe came from the south, with the culture of Central Europe being permeated by Greco-Roman influences. The conservative nature of the south was adopted. Today we stand at a turning point. A particularly progressive element of the north must permeate the population of central Europe. And this special, I would say, favorable impulse of the Hyperborean time for today must pass through our soul. This is what must be taken into account. Otherwise, if man does not open his eyes and soul to these great impulses of human evolution, the earth will take a wrong direction of development, will not become humus for the cosmic world structure, and that which the last epoch of evolution of the earth should mean must be taken up by another planet.

There are great interests at stake. It is necessary to work one's way out of philistinism and develop towards great interests. Only by acquiring such interests can one come to evaluate certain phenomena of our present time in the right way. It can be clearly seen that human natures are bifurcating in our time. This is only the beginning today; but people are bifurcating. Some are natures that, so to speak, harden the physical body within themselves. They develop it in a certain hardening up to the age of twenty-seven, then they stop, they reject the spiritual-soul. If they do not have constant stimulation to stir up humanity, to lead humanity to disaster, like Lloyd George, then they become dull, stale, and turn into right-wing philistinism, becoming dull. In one direction lies the dulling of humanity. The others abandon themselves to all the driving, pulsating forces of the physical body until they are twenty-seven years old, drawing all spirituality out of the physical body. There is much in the physical. Do not forget, we all come into the world with tremendous wisdom; we only have to transform this wisdom into consciousness, to transform what is full of wisdom in our entire physical being. Spiritual science attempts to bring everything in the nerves, blood and muscles into consciousness in a harmonious, spiritualized way. Spiritual science rejects not only the dull-witted, but also, in many cases, those - and there are more and more of them - who, pulsating with life, feel until they reach sexual maturity and until the age of twenty-seven that which boils and seethes as genius in the nerves, blood and muscles. These overheated natures, which, so to speak, burn up human life, are becoming more and more common. They already occur extremely frequently today. They fill the lunatic asylums and so on. But it is not recognized that the real healing lies in anthroposophically 'oriented spiritual science.

A fine typical nature has indeed become a world celebrity in recent times. That is the philosopher Otto Weininger. Right, Otto Weininger was a person who, in the most chaotic way, unrefined, disharmonized, brought out what lies in the nerve, muscle, blood, and then wrote the book 'Sex and Character', which has become world-famous, and which people who fall for anything have also fallen for here. So that the Philistines were also taken in, who did not understand that, despite all the nonsense and repulsiveness, it was an idea, a revelation of an elementary fact about nerve, blood and muscle. The elemental approaches such people, out of their humanity itself, that which spiritual science would like to develop — only in an orderly, harmonious way. Such people, because they have not learned it from spiritual science — there they would learn it properly — but because their nerves, their blood, their muscles demand it, must ask a question that humanity must necessarily ask itself today. Without this question, humanity will not advance. It is: How can I, having entered the physical world through birth or conception, continue the development of my spiritual and soul existence from the last death to this birth? Such and similar questions, as we raise them in spiritual science, as we regard them as fundamental questions of progressive spiritual culture, must be raised and will be raised by those who boil up what is in nerve, blood and muscle.

You see, there is a chapter in Otto Weininger's work that is extraordinarily interesting. He asked himself: Why did I actually come into this world? — And he answered this question in his own way, out of what I have just characterized, out of the wisdom that lies in muscle, blood and nerve, but in a way that consumes and burns the human being. He asked himself: Why am I drawn out of the spiritual world, where I used to be, into earthly life? He found no answer except this: Because I was a coward, because I did not want to remain alone in the spiritual world and therefore sought the connection with other people. I did not have the courage to be alone, I sought the protection of the mother's womb. These were perfectly honest answers that he gave himself. Why do we have no memory, he asked, of what happened before birth? Because we have become that way through birth! — Literally he says: Because we have sunk so low that we have lost consciousness. If man had not lost himself at birth, he would not have to search for and find himself.

These are typical phenomena; today they still occur sporadically. They are those who, in their youth, extract from blood, nerve and muscle that which can only flourish in the whole human process if it is clarified and harmonized by that which spiritual science is to give. For this, however, the interests of general human life must be broadened. Philistinism must recede. The fact that people are locked in a narrow circle of interests must be systematically combated. Certain questions must take on a completely different form than they have done up to now. How has the religious development of the last few millennia itself structured the question that still binds people to the spiritual to some extent? A materialistically educated, witty person of the present day, who has taken a high position in a certain circle, once said to me: If you compare the state with the church, you get the opinion that the church still has it easier than the state. Well, I will not say anything about the value of this judgment, but that man thought that the church had an easier time than the state, because the state administers life, the church death, and people are more afraid of death than of life; therefore the church has an easier time. He considered this nonsense, of course, because he was a materialist.

But this chapter too has actually been brought into a rather selfish channel. Basically, people today ask: What happens to my soul and spiritual life when I have passed through the gate of death? — And there are many selfish impulses in this. Under the influence of spiritual science, the question of immortality in particular would take on a completely different form. In the future, people will not only ask: To what extent is the spiritual and mental life after death a continuation of life here on earth? But rather: To what extent is life on earth a continuation of the life I used to live in the spiritual and mental world? - Then one will be able to look at something like the following.

When a person passes through the gate of death, the imaginative presentation is very strong at first; a comprehensive world of images unfolds imaginatively. I would call this an unrolling of the world of images. The second third of the life between death and a new birth is filled mainly with inspirations. Inspirations occur in the human life in the second third of this life between death and a new birth. And intuitions in the last third. Now intuitions consist in the human being transferring himself with his self, his soul, into other beings, and the end of these intuitions consists in his transferring himself into the physical body. This transfer into the physical body through birth is merely the continuation of the mainly intuitive life of the last third between death and a new birth. And this must actually occur when the human being enters the physical plane; it must be a particularly characteristic trait in children: the ability to place themselves in the other life. They must do what others do, not what comes naturally to them, but imitate what the other does.

Why did I have to describe, when I was talking about “The education of the child from the point of view of spiritual science”, that children in the first seven years are mainly imitators? Because imitation, because putting oneself in the place of others, is the continuation of the intuitive world that exists in the last third of life between death and a new birth. If one looks at the life of the child here in a truly meaningful way, one can still see the life between death and a new birth streaming in and shining. The question of immortality will have to be posed on this basis: to what extent is life here on earth a continuation of the soul-spiritual life? But then people will also learn to take this life on earth very seriously, but not in an egotistical sense. Above all, they will adhere to a sense of responsibility, which is based on the realization that they are continuing here what is imposed on them by the fact that they have brought something with them as an inheritance from the soul-spiritual. It will mean an enormous change in the way people think when they speak from the other point of view. For that which the soul experiences between death and a new birth, this great spiritual realm, which is experienced in imaginations, inspirations, intuitions, that is the here and now for there; and what we experience here is the beyond for there. And the desire to understand and honor this Hereafter will become part of the newly formulated question of immortality, which will intervene in the spiritual development of humanity in a less egotistical way than the question of immortality has often done in the religious development of the past millennia.

I wanted to describe such things in order to show how humanity should emerge from philistinism, in order to show how one is not a philistine. You are not a philistine if you can go beyond your narrowest interest, and if you also have an interest in the fact that here on earth you take 25,920 breaths in one day, which corresponds to the number of days in an earthly life and also to the 'jerk' of the sun as it orbits in the cosmic ellipse. Our interest expands beyond what has led to the fact that there is a forgotten stream in German intellectual life; our interest expands beyond what is configured in the spirit all over the earth, what the keynote of oriental, middle, Western spiritual development: how the Asian spiritual development is dependent, so to speak, on an eastern current, which entered the West in a state of decadence, how the middle current, initially dependent on the South, will become dependent on the North in the future. These things lead us to the great plan of human development, overcome philistinism, correctly adjust our feelings in relation to human development and teach us to really feel for what lives in humanity as impulses.

And the will: the will also develops in a very specific way in the material impulses. It develops in such a way that people become more and more unskillful, and in the great classical sense, more and more unskillful. What can a person do today? The narrowest thing he is trained for puts him in a small circle. What develops in spiritual science in terms of concepts, feelings, and impulses extends to the limbs. When someone really immerses themselves in spiritual science, they become adept, adapt to their environment, and sometimes learn things in the course of their lives that, when they are still very young, show no aptitude for. If properly grasped, spiritual science will also make people adept. Today, people are not adept at even the smallest things. You meet people who do not know the simplest tasks, you meet gentlemen who cannot even sew on a button if it has come off, much less anything else. But it is important that people can become versatile again, that they can adapt to their surroundings, that this confinement to the narrowest circle and thus the becoming clumsy for the world be overcome.

However strange it may sound, humanity has this threefold task for the present and the near future with regard to thinking, feeling and willing: that narrow-mindedness be overcome and a flexible way of finding one's way into the circumstances of the world take hold, that philistinism be overcome and generous interests take hold of human hearts, that clumsiness be overcome and people become skillful and are also educated in skill in the most diverse areas of life. Learn to understand the world in the most diverse areas of life! Today, of course, we are doing the opposite of all this. We are heading towards clumsiness, philistinism, and narrow-mindedness, and these are the necessary consequences of the materialistic way of thinking. Of course, not everyone can learn to set a broken leg themselves, but there is no need to cultivate clumsiness to the point where someone no longer has any sense of how to help themselves in the simplest of cases of illness and the like. What matters is skillful understanding in order to cope with life in the most diverse situations.

With the advent of this newer time, have we not seen clearly how things have actually developed? Anyone who has asked around with discerning eyes about the phenomena of the present in the last decades has clearly seen that the sense of developing a worldview, of making impulses for a worldview the subject of consideration, was only present in those who at the same time had the will to develop purely materialistic worldview interests, namely in the field of socialism. Basically, consideration of ideological issues only occurred where people wanted to reform the world in a socialist sense. If one came up above the socialist flood, there was disinterest; at most narrow clique interests, clinging to the old, or if one thought one was grasping at something new, it was abstract words, the forerunners of Wilsonianism, as it raged particularly badly in the so-called liberal parties in the second half of the 19th century. There was no will to penetrate into the intellectual and spiritual impulses of the world, as socialism wanted to penetrate into the material; there was dullness where the bourgeoisie began – on the whole, of course; exceptions are disregarded. Those present are always excepted, that is a matter of politeness.

Now, to confront these phenomena and to answer such questions as have been raised today, also in the sense in which we have tried to answer them today, is basically one and the same thing. For great things are connected with these matters. In the East of Europe, we see something being prepared, I would say in the extract, for which Europe today has terribly little understanding. We have often pointed out the developmental germs of this European East in our field. This European East wants to learn to understand that all human life has meaning! And when the sixth post-Atlantic cultural epoch approaches, the European East is to show in the evolution of the earth that all human life has a meaning, and not just believe as true what is taught in school in one's youth. The East should show that man is in a process of development until death, that every year brings something new, and that when one passes through the gate of death, one is still connected with the earthly and brings wisdom with one even after death. What does the soul element want, which until recently could be called Russian, and which is now provisionally entering a state of chaos, but will find its way into the development of European culture and thus into the cultural development of all humanity? What does this element of the East want?

It wants to see the dawn of an understanding that all human life is in a state of development, and that the moment of death is only an especially important moment in this development. This principle must indeed find followers and confessors in Central Europe, and from such prerequisites as we have mentioned, it will find them. But until this principle is recognized, people will always believe that the younger you are, the more you can have a point of view. The youngest badgers and badger females today have their own fixed point of view, and basically have nothing of the great expectation and hope that every year new secrets will be revealed, that the moment of death will reveal new secrets. The European East is developing souls that today are still developing an understanding in the subconscious that man is wisest and can judge best about earthly, human conditions precisely when he dies. And from these souls living in the East today, there will arise those who do not merely seek advice from the young badgers, from the parliaments, on how to decide on human affairs, but who also seek advice from the dead, who will learn to establish contact with the dead and to make fruitful the contact with the dead here for earthly development. In the future people will ask: What do the dead say about it? And they will find spiritual paths if they delve so deeply in spiritual science that they ask the dead, not just the living, when it comes to deciding the great matters of people here on earth. That is what the East wants. And never has anything clashed more badly than it is happening today in the European East. For that which is the soul of this European East is the exact opposite of what, in the form of Trotskyism or Leninism, has been superimposed on it today from the purest, albeit self-misunderstanding, materialism of the present. Never before in the development of mankind have two things that are so incongruous collided as the spiritual germ of the East and materialistic Leninism, this caricature, this most grotesque caricature of human cultural progress, which has no sense or understanding of anything truly spiritual but which is so understandable in terms of the fundamental nerve of the present day. The future will learn to recognize this.

That, my dear friends, is what I just wanted to tell you in summary with regard to such things that should ignite interest in our hearts. One must have understanding for such things; one must not remain dull to what is going on in the deeper sense in the souls. That is what I wanted to put into your souls and hearts during our meeting today.

Automated Translation

Dear attendees! Today it is impossible to form an opinion about the great affairs of the time without looking at what is working as the deeper forces of labor and longing in all humanity, what has been working for decades, but what is reaching a very special culmination today. In the present situation, it is not possible to form an opinion about the significance of what is actually happening to humanity without at least glancing at the deeper foundations of all human endeavor and how these deeper foundations are expressed in the present. Therefore, in this first of my two lectures, to be followed by a continuation the day after tomorrow, allow me to at least point out some sketchy observations on such deeper-lying forces of longing in present-day humanity.

It was in July 1909 that Charles Eliot, who had been President of Harvard University from 1868 and at the time of his speech, delivered a significant speech in America. As one could see from his speech, Charles Eliot spoke from the consciousness of looking at the spiritual and intellectual matters of all civilized humanity from his point of view. He called his lecture “The Religion of the Future,” and he wanted to express what this religion of the future should not be and what it should be. But when I look back on this lecture, it seems to me that what Eliot said at the time is much less significant than the overall tenor of his words. Above all, it seems to me that the most significant thing is that at that time a representative of today's civilization was so searching for a way to healthy thinking in the great questions of world view and life view of mankind.

Now, my dear audience, when pointing out something like this, one must never forget that between what was said at that time, even by the most outstanding people of the present, and today, lies that terrible world war catastrophe, which indeed teaches more than all such words could teach – which illuminates everything that such people have designated as great world and life questions in a flash in a completely different way than they could have imagined at the time. Eliot wants to lead humanity to a healthy way of thinking about the world and life. He looks back on the state of religions in those times when science had not yet shed light on the souls of the broad masses of humanity. What disturbed him about the old religions was that they pointed to a God who, in a certain sense, lives outside of that which modern science at least purports to provide such great and powerful insights into. The man felt completely at one with his time. To him, the old ideas about the spiritual world seemed to be just those that a childish humanity had formed. And it was particularly important to him that this scientific age could no longer see demonic, spiritual entities in mountains and rivers, in trees and clouds, that even a scientific age could no longer retain the pictorial old ideas of God. He also wanted to show that the world's view of life and social conditions had suffered in many ways because the religions, which had been the guides to thinking for the vast majority of people, had driven away those who were depressed, those who were miserable, those who could could not cope with life, were expelled by the physical-sensual existence into a supernatural afterlife, so that in place of the processing of life, in place of courageous intervention in life, for many people there had to be a look beyond the immediate physical social existence.

All that the various religions have to say about the reasons why one person is affected by this or that fate, and all that the old religions have to say about divine justice prevailing in the world, also appears Charles Eliot, the modern man, the man who stands in the time that begins for him with Darwin, which has reached a particular size for him through those advances in medicine that are called to physically alleviate the pain of sick humanity, as no longer up to date. And in a way, he wants the old priest, who always referred humanity to an indefinite supernatural realm, to be replaced by the physical physician, who is able to alleviate even the pain that the mother has to endure when the child enters this physical world, he would like to replace the old priest with someone who is able to lend a hand in the work that is done in the physical world, because for him it is about shaping the physical conditions of this earth in such a way that as many people as possible derive joy and satisfaction from life. Charles Eliot believes that all this must be taken up, as it were, by healthy thinking, and he hopes that from the views which science has recently provided to mankind, it may become clear what humanity is capable of achieving in order to reach this goal it so longs for. I mention this particularly for the reason that in this short speech about the religion of the future, everything that the so-called educated, especially the learned educated, have imagined as the path to modern healthy thinking, is in a sense concentrated in a representative human being.

Now this speech about the religion of the future, which has as its content what I have just characterized, has something highly peculiar. And since I have already said something similar about this speech before the war, as I am saying now, no one will be able to accuse me of what many people are accused of today: that they now, after the war has raged for so long, have been strangely enlightened by what happened before the war. Charles Eliot speaks as a man who has certain ideas, as a man can speak who is fully immersed in modern scientific knowledge and who, from the bottom of his heart, wants to give humanity a conception of life that leads to its happiness and satisfaction from these scientific ideas. But how does he speak? If one is able to read between the lines, what must one say about how he speaks? One looks at the thoughts: they are born out of the spirit of the age, but they can only be spoken if one is surrounded by a world in which, first of all, in the social, in the immediate living conditions, these thoughts do not become reality. They can only be spoken when one is surrounded by a world whose views of life are rooted in a much older time, when one is surrounded by a world where certain ideas live in the souls of people that did not originate from what such a scientifically educated religious seeks, but which have a profound influence on the shaping of social life. In other words, it can be said of such a man: he can speak, but one senses his thought at the moment when what he says is to be realized in full consequence, in unadorned form - then, when the old traditions no longer have an effect in the environment - that then these thoughts will prove powerless after all. And anyone who can understand anything at all about the terrible events of recent years will say: These events since 1914 have significantly stepped in between what could be said then and what is before us today as the great, overwhelming questions of our time. To a certain extent, Charles Eliot also points out at the end of his speech that he cannot know how what he regards as sound thinking will be realized in the immediate practice of life; only experience will show.

Now, my dear audience, however strange, however paradoxical it may sound to you, today part of the world is in the process of providing this experience. What an educated, learned man could dare to say in the past, in the midst of an environment that had no need to draw the final consequences of these thoughts, is being tried to be realized today in a different frame of mind, in a different state of mind, in Eastern Europe and in a large part of Asia – as paradoxical as it may sound. And whereas one could express Eliot's thoughts, that is to say the final social consequences of a scientific world view, in complete safety and still be considered a good and honest citizen in the midst of an environment that did not even consider drawing the final conclusions from reality, human existence , you destroy life at the very moment when a clean sweep is made of the old conditions, when the old traditions in the environment no longer build the state, when you do not allow that which comes from the old traditions, albeit through special tyranny, to live on in the environment. If you draw the ultimate consequences of these thoughts for external reality, then you become a Leninist, then you become a Trotskyist, then you begin to realize what should arise purely from what Eliot sought as healthy thinking, from what wants to be born out of the purely scientific world view. But if one tries to realize that, then one does not build anything, but only continues that process of destruction that began in 1914 and that humanity will still have bitter, bitter experiences with. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what a review of the relatively recent past teaches us, which was put forward in 1909 by a man who was imbued with honest conviction and with all the education of the present day.

If we now ask ourselves what connection exists between what a person, I would say, as a certain materialistic Sunday sermon in an otherwise very different world, could say and what is being realized in the east of Europe and over a large part of Asia, then, in order to understand the social connections of the present and the whole situation of the present man, one must delve a little into the deeper foundations. And it is instructive to take a look at the question: How did this materialistic world view, which was supposed to bring happiness and contentment to humanity, actually come about in modern times?

If I were to characterize what precisely characterizes the most modern thinking, the thinking that is now preparing to become social reality, I would have to say that this thinking is characterized by the fact that it is unable to build a bridge between what is knowledge of the natural side of the world and what is the moral world, what are ethical ideas, what are moral forces. On the one hand, there is what constitutes the natural side of the world, firmly established in ideas that are extremely plausible for every person who is imbued with the spirit of the present, as it has developed in recent centuries and particularly in the 19th century. On the other hand, what emerges from the human heart are the moral demands and what should elevate man to contemplation is that these moral demands are rooted in a spiritual world order - a world order where the moral and the immoral can have an effect on the shaping of the world, where the moral and the immoral can intervene in world events, just as a flash of lightning intervenes in world events.

These two worlds have been pushing each other aside for decades. And there lives the newer way of thinking, which does strive for healthy thinking and wants to use it to found a natural religion. It is able to consider the one thing, which is knowledge of natural facts, and it is also able, if man is conscientious, to consider the other: that out of the depths of the human breast speaks the voice of morality, which should then point the way to religious consciousness.

But today there is no bridge between these two worlds. There is the one world of the knowledge of natural facts. It believes that it has found a fundamental law that should stand unshakable as the result of the 19th century, the law of the conservation of matter and force - the law that should tell us that everything that happens in the universe happens out of a sum of forces that may well transform, but can never be increased or diminished, that are uncaused and immortal. The interaction of these forces gives rise to the formation of the world, to the world event that presents itself externally to our senses and from which we ourselves have grown as physical human beings. If the forces in question are uncreated and everlasting, if one can speak in the absolute sense of the conservation of matter and of force, then all the views that must arise in the wake of this view cannot be dismissed either. Then we come to assume - out of the same habits of thought that have pushed humanity towards this law of the conservation and transformation of matter and force - that all the earthly-cosmic within which we stand has come into being from the famous Kant-Laplacean nebula, from which the whole solar system is said to have formed through condensation, and that in the course of this natural process, man has also developed, having passed through the various animal forms. And we come to assume that in the human soul, like inner life illusions, those things flash up that occur to this human soul as the forces that alone can guarantee man his dignity: moral ideas and that which leads to religious consciousness.

But anyone who, with all the consequences, clings to this world, which has thus emerged from the Kant-Laplacean primeval nebula, must also think in these terms about the end of the world. He must think that this world will transform into one in which everything that humanity offers, everything that has ever lived in human souls and human minds, will disappear; he must think that within a great cosmic process all human thinking of a morality, of a divinity, is merely something that is born out of the laws of nature - just as lightning and thunder, the change of day and night and so on are born out of the laws of nature. And so we look towards an unspiritual, unspiritual world coming into being, we look towards an unspiritual, unspiritual world ending. For him, [who clings to this world with all the consequences,] the best that humanity thinks, dreams, is woven into the processes that lie between these two ends - the creation and the end of the world; the best that this humanity imagines is only an episode for him, vanishing in the purely natural All.

Dearly beloved, with the best will in the world, there is no getting away from all the quackery that people are still willing to put forward for the validity of a moral and religious world, if they admit, with all the consequences, that which underlies this scientific attitude. I know how much is preached today in the direction that, despite this scientific attitude, an ideal world view is indeed possible. It is only possible for those who do not really want to go to the consequences of thinking. And today one is well prompted to ask: Why do people realize so little of what has just been indicated in the present? Why, actually? Perhaps we can gain some insight into this by remembering the, I would say, springtime of what is now also general opinion, but which people do not admit as a general opinion among the so-called enlightened, when we refer back to that springtime of theoretical materialism that befell the civilized world around the middle of the 19th century. It has indeed become fashionable today to depict those who boldly drew the last consequences of the scientific attitude, such as Moleschott, Büchner and so on, as flat – they undoubtedly are that. But then more is needed than what is put forward by scholars or unlearned people to characterize the whole relationship we have to them.

We need only recall a few facts to appreciate the full seriousness and significance of this matter for the social situation of contemporary man. I would like to mention the fact that, for example, a cultural historian much discussed in the 1870s said: One of the most important results of modern times is that scientific knowledge has destroyed everything that was born out of ancient religions as an ethical ideal. Yes, this cultural historian dryly writes that what has been characterized as truth or untruth from this point of view is only a scientific result, like the falling of rain, and is to be considered from this point of view. But a letter from a bold, inwardly bold personality to a contemporary natural scientist is particularly interesting. The letter contains the following: “The newer world view teaches us that everything that people experience is subject to the natural law of cause and effect in the same way as what we see with our senses in the external world. All the good deeds and thoughts that people produce from within themselves, all the religious ideas they produce, are nothing more than the result of purely natural processes that take place within man, just as cloud formations take place outside in nature. So, as far as I am concerned, everything that people have conceived as moral commandments is an illusion, said the personality. And I am of the opinion that someone who is born with the tendencies to be a thief, a robber, or a murderer is just as entitled to live out his murderous and thieving tendencies to the full as someone who is born to the opposite. I am convinced, writes this personality, that it would even be detrimental to the moral development of a personality predisposed to murder, that is, it would be immoral if it did not live out its inclinations. Of course people today will say: That is a paradoxical truth. But why do they say so? They say it because, on the one hand, they have tremendous respect and complete faith in authority for everything that is said to them from the kitchen of science, but because, on the other hand, they do not have the same courage as the personality who wrote this letter to draw the consequences. They stop halfway because they do not want to admit to themselves that if you draw these conclusions, the rest follows.

Now, I would like to say: Just as Charles Eliot was able to speak as he did in 1909 in an environment that did not think about translating his thoughts into social reality, so that personality was able to enthuse about the full expression of criminal instincts, since the full expression of his abilities was part of the moral worth of the personality. The time had not yet come when social institutions were to arise from what people think in this direction, although they could not arise. But then the other question arises: how are these institutions to arise, which must now take shape as a development of our declining way of life?

Dear attendees, when you consider the situation of people today and look at what is actually living within them – and after all, it is from within that that takes place in all outward, business, industrial, and practical life - when one considers all this, one comes, admittedly, to a bitter judgment about the situation of the present-day human being. For, what would it be like if a sufficiently large number of people had the courage to awaken the soul, to wake up the sleeping soul and to say to themselves: If we accept in its entirety what has flowed into thinking from scientific knowledge over the last three to four centuries , then we must shape everything that is to flow into social life according to laws that are empty and devoid of everything that arises within the human being as an impulse of morality, as an impulse of the religious world order, because such laws can then only come from the natural scientific attitude.

And the real beginning of a social order of life, which structures society only as natural phenomena are structured outside - we see it made in the east of Europe and spreading across Asia; we see it taught theoretically in Marxism for decades. It could also talk, this Marxism, as long as it did not occur to its surroundings to respond to it with reference to the shaping of reality. Now the face of the world has become more serious. Now it is a matter of raising the question in a comprehensive sense: Is what has been presented as the path to healthy thinking also a path to a possible life for humanity on earth? Because the matter is so serious, the whole way in which people are, and in particular the way those are who today believe that they can build social life on the achievements that are only good for a certain branch of knowledge of nature, must be addressed. What have these achievements brought us?

I have often and for many years pointed out here in Stuttgart the magnitude and significance of the scientific world view, and those who have heard me often will certainly not see in me a despiser of this scientific world view – within the limits in which it is justified. But what is at issue here is something else. The question is: Is a scientific world view possible if it is a matter of applying the laws of human knowledge to what is to shape social life?

To answer this question, one must look at the supposed path to healthy thinking that this scientific world view has taken. There we see that this natural scientific world view has fathomed everything in the facts of nature that can be applied in the fields of technology and industrial life. There we see that what could be realized in technology and in industrial life and in transport through the knowledge of the laws of nature has been developed on a large scale. All this had reached a high point when the catastrophe of 1914 occurred, which showed how little social observation had followed the observation that built machines, covered the world with means of transport, and so on, based on the knowledge of natural science. Yes, what we see in our technology, regardless of whether it leads to construction or destruction, is related to a certain direction of scientific thinking. This direction of scientific thinking wanted to become universal, wanted to become generally valid, wanted to mean something for all of human life.

And there we see, how isolated spirits live, I might say, who stand there like oddballs in the general development, but who had started out with the attitude of “how we have come so gloriously far”; we see how they look at what is emerging and look into the future with tremendous apprehension. One need only refer to Solowjow, the Russian philosopher who, unfortunately, is only known in Central Europe since the war years, but who died at the beginning of the century. He took a deep look at human life, but he was also enlightened enough to look at practical life and to observe this practical life with his tremendously benevolent, mild soul. This philosopher Solowjow was overcome with the most bitter concern when he said to himself: “All that the modern world view gains from the scientific basis is also spreading over my Russia through an internally rotten rule. And so Russia is covered with all the glories – he does not say this ironically – with all the glories of modern technology and modern transportation, and what should provide the basis for a healthy Russian way of thinking disappears as if stolen from the world. With every railroad that is built and every industrial plant that is established, what should be the basis for healthy Russian thought is disappearing: the land. And one hears Solowjow say that he understands that healthy human thinking is connected with the land in a different way from that kind of thinking which breaks away from this land, which exists, as it were, at an abstract level, even if in a physical reality, and appears on a natural scientific basis as modern culture. Of course, one might call this one-sided; and in a sense it was one-sided. But how can one expect the man who lives in a world that strives with all its might to bring into the world everything that can arise from a scientific attitude, how can one expect him to gain a sound and calm judgment when he wants to stand up against the materialistic dream of all mankind; how can one be reproached for one-sidedness when he expresses his concern, which in a certain way had to appear insane at a time when this modern culture had not yet embarked on its decline as much as it has now, since Solowjow has been dead for twenty years. Now, that Charles Eliot, of whom I have spoken, also indicates approximately what he imagines a kind of future religion to be, when people will no longer believe in an external God or when they will no longer believe in demonology in broad circles. He says: The view of a unified God will prevail, who is intrinsic to things, who is also intrinsic to the human soul and who is at work in all that is natural law. But it is clear from this speech, and it is indeed clearly stated in it, that even for a well-meaning person like Charles Eliot, this God is linked to what he knows about the material that is spreading throughout the world, about the eternally transforming but indestructible force. In essence, the unity of God is nothing other than the unity of matter and of power. And from such theoretical convictions he then preaches to the world that which should serve as the practical basis for human life. He says: “Ever shining will be the sentence ‘Serve your fellow man’.” Serve your fellow man — that is repeated again and again in that speech. But in the case of such a sentence, such a demand, it is truly not only a matter of saying the words, but it is a matter of whether what is demanded of people can also be fulfilled by them – fulfilled by releasing forces from the depths of their souls, which ultimately find their expression in social service to humanity, in social work according to the sentence: “Serve your fellow man”. In other words, we must ask whether a Weltanschhauung is capable of forming a basis for true human love. Is a Weltanschhauung capable of being the root of a plant which, when it grows out of the soil, blossoms and bears fruit as human love? This question cannot be answered in a one-sided, logical and theoretical way. This question can only be answered on the basis of what happens historically. And if Eliot had only waited for the experiences that are now arising and will arise through the shaping of Eastern Europe and Asia, then he would have had his doubts. For the historical result is that the socialist doctrine, which wants to build only on the same scientific premises on which Eliot wants to see the world of the future, life in general, built, that this socialist direction is not able to found social life on free love, welling up from within the human heart and bearing fruit in the world. For what would awaken human love does not sound to us from this social teaching and social tyranny. What does sound to us is the fulfillment of the saying, “Serve your fellow man because you love them.” Instead, we hear the dry, empty, and desolate words of duty to work, of how people are driven to work as if with military drill.

And I would like to say: If on the one hand you listen to Charles Eliot in 1909, when the experience of the present was not yet available, giving his paradigmatic speech from the Harvard University chair, then an echo from a later time, the speech that was recently given by the Russian Socialist Minister of War, who said: Those people who are sincere about the social order will not fail to recognize what we owe to this war. He sent our sons back to us as soldiers. They have become capable soldiers. They have learned to obey and to submit to authority. We do not want to ignore what we owe to this war in that it has trained us officers who can command, who know how to move people to the appropriate place through coercion. And we do not want to forget the leading men of the war, who are able to organize so that everyone submits to the authority of this organization. This talk of translating militarism into the social structure of life sounds like an echo of what we hear from Eliot's speech, which is only a world view because no one around him thought of realizing it. People just don't know that they have sought healthy thinking in ways that, in their ultimate consequence, result in what can now be seen so clearly today. And people do not want to admit the connection between what people have believed they had to think about the world and life for centuries, but especially for decades, and what is now presenting itself as the will to shape the world socially - but which is completely powerless to shape this world in such a way that a dignified existence is actually possible in it. It is from this unwillingness to understand that everything that is sought as a path to healthy thinking within - the life situation of the contemporary human being - emerges.

From my book “The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and Future” everything emerges that the efforts of the Federation for the Threefold Social Organism have brought into being. The aim is to seek a path to healthy social thinking without entertaining illusions, by at least keeping one thing in mind when dealing with these questions: What are the underlying thoughts of what today wants to realize itself in life-destroying structures? What were the underlying thoughts that led to the absurdity of the events that began in 1914? But anyone who does not want to form a clear and healthy judgment on these questions, no matter where they stand, cannot participate in what every person today is called upon to do, according to their abilities and position in life. What is needed today is clear and consistent thinking. But this clear and consistent thinking also leads us to raise the question: Where does that which has developed as so-called healthy thinking on a scientific basis actually come from?

Those who know the historical context know that, in terms of the development of our ideas and the creation of our concepts in public life, we have not progressed further than the Middle Ages. Much is said about the darkness of the Middle Ages, but we still think in the forms of thought of the Middle Ages. What we have brought further are the achievements of knowledge of nature, which have their counter-image in technology, the achievements of knowledge of inanimate nature, actually only of a part of inanimate nature, because only that has its counter-image in technology. What we have achieved, what can be mastered with the means of calculation, with the means of geometry, has become our world view. This has gradually conquered such a position in human thought that it appears in this thought as the self-evident basis of all views of life.

Has humanity also endeavored to further develop the inner strength of thinking, the inner strength of the soul in general? No, that cannot be said. The thought form, the way of thinking, the whole configuration of thinking, with which natural science, even the seemingly most exact and strictest natural science, works today, is the same as that used by the scholastics of the Middle Ages. In the scholastics of the Middle Ages these thoughts were great, these thoughts were ingenious. Why was that so? Because these thoughts set themselves the task of looking into a spiritual world. One may think as one likes about the content of what I have just indicated; but what emerged from the training and development of scholastic thought, when viewed calmly and objectively in the context of the development of modern culture, cannot be interpreted other than as I shall now attempt.

Who knows with what acumen, with what mastery of the technique of thinking, such ideas as those of the Trinity, the sacraments, and the incarnation of Christ were pursued - but which were then ideas in the social life of all humanity - who knows with what acumen these ideas were pursued, which have no counter have any counterpart in the world of ideas, where thought must rely entirely on itself, one will say: however one may think about the Trinity, however one may think about the Incarnation of Christ, the development of thought technique, logical consistency and inner responsibility to the forms of thought in those days was magnificent. It lives on as inheritance. Today we think with no other thinking than the scholastic Catholic scholars have thought; we have only transferred these thoughts to scientific fields. We think with the thought forms of the Middle Ages in the materially developed areas of modern times. We just do not think with the same sharpness because we do not train this sharpness of thinking. If we are enlightened people, we refrain from training this thinking with concepts such as the incarnation of Christ, the Trinity, and so on; we do not train this thinking with the vision of a supersensible world. If we ask for the reason: Why is this scholastic thinking so trained, why is it so internally sharply contoured? we must say: because — whatever the positive religions may say, which often want to cover up the fundamentals of the true facts — because this thinking has developed out of the vision of the soul, which in ancient times was still valid up to Plato, yes, even up to the Neoplatonists, because this thinking has developed out of the vision, the spiritual-soul vision of a spiritual, a supersensible world. He who wanted to arrive at thinking had to look to a supersensible world; he had to train his thoughts in such a way that they could not only master that which lies before our eyes in the gross material world, but also that which must be grasped with the same subtlety and sharpness as the things of the supersensible world. In an instinctive way, not in the conscious way that the world-picture which I have been presenting here for years represents, in an instinctive way, but still in a spiritual way, the thinking of those ancient times was grounded in the ranks of St. Augustine, the High , on a thinking that was schooled by beholding the supersensible world, because this thinking was a sprout of beholding into the supersensible world, even if this is denied by the positive theologians. This thinking had already weakened in the Middle Ages. In ancient times, people used this thinking to penetrate into a spiritual world through the inner strength of the human being. In the Middle Ages, this spiritual world was regarded as something that could not be explored, but only interpreted by the soul itself. Now, in terms of the training of thinking, we are heirs to scholastic thinking. We are still part of the same school of thought, but we can no longer perfect it. We can no longer develop the correct contours of thoughts with logical clarity because we do not train them on [spiritual] problems where thinking is left to its own devices; we can only follow what is being looked at in the experimental room.

And what is the last offshoot of Catholic, scholastic thought in the Middle Ages? Where is the last offshoot of what emerged as a social view from the theocracy of Augustine and his successors, from this tight organization, this militaristic arrangement of human coexistence? Where is the last offshoot, the last offshoot of medieval Catholic theology with regard to its thought forms? That is Marxism. That is the doctrine which is being prepared today as a socialist teaching for the masses. All the thought forms of modern socialism are nothing more than the last decrepit offshoot of the thinking that still rose to half its height in high scholasticism. It was born out of supersensible observation, but is no longer suitable for an age of natural science. We have come to describe the wide world of natural existence, to have geometrized and mechanized it - and people like Charles Eliot speak entirely out of this sense of having arrived - but we have not come to find our way into this world from thought. Therefore we had to speak, as Du Bois-Reymond spoke about the limits of knowledge of nature and the seven world riddles. What question was answered by Du Bois-Reymond in his sensational speeches “On the Limits of the Knowledge of Nature” and “The Seven World Riddles”? — The question that the legacy of scholastic thinking cannot penetrate into natural science. That is no wonder. Thomas Aquinas had the doctrine of revelation before him; he had the doctrine of the supersensible worlds before him, as it was then common practice. The newer natural science was not yet there at that time; he could not deal with the newer natural science. If one were to continue to work in his spirit - not in the sense of the Catholic revival of scholasticism, of Neuthomism - then one would have to say: This is something that has become outdated, which in the theoretical socialism of Lenin and Trotsky seeks to realize itself out of scholastic, superscholastic thought forms in the east of Europe and in Asia. All this thinking, which has become decrepit, must in turn be transformed into thinking rooted in the vision of the supersensible worlds. Just as scholastic thinking, which has now become decrepit and too weak to cope with real social conditions and cannot be the root from which love blossoms and bears fruit, was present at the beginning of that thinking, which has now become decrepit, this thinking must be replaced by a thinking rooted in a knowledge of the supersensible world.

When Charles Eliot complained that what he imagines to be healthy thinking is not really appreciated in the broadest circles of people, but that most people only want to deal with it superficially through hypocrisy, he said: On the one hand, those people who are serious about science cultivate such a natural religion and seek to establish it for the future and develop it later, but we see how some of those people, who are also among the educated, seek a substitute for the old traditions in all kinds of secret societies, in the Masonic lodges, in the Odd Fellows lodges. We see, as Charles Eliot says, how a large part of humanity, honestly seeking the supersensible, seeks a way to the spirit in spiritualism and Christian Science. We see how the broad masses, out of old habit, cling to the traditional denominations. — Charles Eliot complains about this. He sees this as the thing that stands in the way of pursuing this path to healthy thinking. But he does not realize how what he is developing actually stands outside the reality of natural science. He does not even come to realize that what has emerged must be grasped with a different kind of thinking than the thinking that is only the legacy of the scholastic Middle Ages: with a thinking that has been reborn from the spiritual world. Truly, what has emerged today as socialism is nothing other than what lived through the centuries of the Middle Ages and has not been overcome in the minds of the masses to this day, despite the influence of modern culture. And even when these people appear as opponents of the creeds, their thought forms are still entirely in the spirit of these creeds. With the same thought forms with which the medieval man wanted to penetrate the supernatural God, with the same thought forms the modern naturalist, the layman popularizing the modern world view, the theoretical socialist turns to the unity of matter and force.

What must be gained by a new way of seeing is what has been advocated from this platform for many years and in Stuttgart in general. It is a matter of realizing how what is now being cultivated as a social vision through the threefold social organism is a necessary result of this new way of seeing – the necessity of a renewal of thinking, a rebirth of thinking out of the spiritual world. Only this rebirth of thinking can lead us to build the bridge that could not be built in the last centuries up to our time: to build that bridge between the world that stands as the world of natural facts and that can be overlooked with pure natural causality, and the world that arises in the human interior, the world of morality, of religious upliftment, of religious world plan. And only by having the courage to think in terms of this world view will we come to understand what is necessary in terms of both a view of life and a social direction for the present.

My dear audience, this spiritually-oriented world view, which is based on knowledge and is so thoroughly imbued with the existence of a spiritual-divine world, is what is meant here. It is clear about the fact that in everything that lives in the knowledge of man, that which man experiences inwardly as his thoughts about the world, and also in what arises from man as human will in individual or social relationship, that in all this the divine lives just as it lives in the outer existence of nature. This is what I wanted to express in my Philosophy of Freedom at the beginning of the nineties, and what has now been expressed again by the publication of the new edition of this book. That is what anyone who wants to build a real bridge between the contemplation of nature and the contemplation of those impulses of humanity that must arise out of human freedom and that can only give a justifiable structure to social life if they arise out of freedom. But one thing is absolutely necessary: we need to summon up a little more inner courage to think than the dormant souls of the present generally have. Here it is necessary to seriously consider the question: Wherein are rooted the things we expect as the future of humanity?

The external view of nature says: That which we expect as the future of the earth, as the future of the entire solar system, must arise through the transformation of matter and of force out of what we see around us, what is already there today. We calculate, we apply mechanics, we apply the mechanics of atoms, which so many have spoken of, earlier in the absolute sense, now in the hypothetical sense or in the sense of fictions. Then you realize that what we have to regard as the end of the earth happens through the transformation of matter and energy and without what is going on in man, because that is only an episode in these facts of the world. This is a necessary consequence of a purely naturalistic view of the world. This naturalistic view of the world appears to the view of the world that I have been advocating for decades as if someone were to look at the plant root and say: everything that arises there must arise from the plant root. That is, he would assume: there is the root, it produces stem, leaf, stem, leaf, and so on. He would only see what can develop out of this root, and he would not see that this root, which he now has before him, is rotting and dissolving, but that a new germ will arise from the plant that has grown from the root, in which the new plant is already predisposed. Read what is available in the literature of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and you will see: This is how this spiritual science, which is based on supersensible vision, judges the great cosmic context, as described in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. It says: at the basis of what we now have before us as the physical-sensory world, rooted in it, arises what develops in the depths of our soul as moral impulses, as ideal contemplation, as ideal thought forms, as religious truth courage - one must only see that in the right light. There it develops, as the germ develops in miniature in the plant. When once this whole world, which surrounds us as the world of matter and of force, will have decayed, will be a corpse, will have been scattered into space, what will be the end? The end, when all around us is scattered into the world, will be that which now arises as a spiritual germ in the human soul. This atomization, this annihilation of matter, this annihilation of strength, that is what we are looking forward to. But just as the human soul rises out of the human corpse at death, so that which lives as a germ in the human soul, that which is the moral impulse, that which is the ethical idea, that which is the elevation to the Divine, rises out of out of this pulverization] that which lives as a germ in the human soul, that which is moral impulse, that which is ethical idea, that which is elevation to the divine; this is what shapes the future, this is the new world. The future of the world does not come into being through the transformation of the seemingly transforming substance and the seemingly transforming force, but through that which now lives in our soul as soul-knowledge, as spirit-knowledge. There, in the human breast, the future lives, even if only as a germ. And because we are looking at a cosmic future that has its germ in this inner being of ours, we must have the courage to fight against this law of the conservation of matter and energy. We must have the courage to lead back to its true basis that which, in the 19th century, developed out of a scientific attitude into a world and life view. We must build the bridge between what is external and sensual and what is inwardly spiritual and real. We cannot build it as long as we are hindered by the illusion of the conservation of matter and energy. We can only build it through the newly perceived spiritual world, which opens up a thinking to us that has grown with social life.

This social life, if man is able to look into his inner being, so that he says to himself with all inner conscientiousness, with all inner strength and emotion: And if everything that my eyes see, what my ears hear, what I feel in the outer world – that is, everything that science alone speaks of – then what I now awaken in my inner being will live on as a metamorphosis, then what lives is moral value, what gives man his dignity from within. Spiritual science establishes the reality of the ethical, the reality of the moral, the reality of the religious, because it does not succumb to the illusion of the eternity of force and matter. Look at the metamorphosis of power and matter as described by Charles Eliot in 1909, and you will see that a spiritual-scientific worldview, as advocated here, has within it the power to say yes to spiritual life as the seed of the future. And let us imagine a human community that lives with such souls. Let us imagine that people enter social life with this sense of responsibility - not with illusions of the causality of social life - then we may hope that from such inner conscientiousness, from such a cosmic sense of responsibility, something will arise that can bring the social organism to recovery. That which emerges from a new spiritual science is the way to healthy thinking.

It is also that which, when present in a sufficiently large number of people, can be brought into the right relationship to the situation of the present human being. But that which cannot build this bridge, to which the moral order of the world must appear as no more than an episode, that will - if it alone is to be valid, if it seeks to push aside everything else, if it is opposed to a true spiritual-scientific world view, will always be reduced to absurdity, as everything that we have gloriously advanced in has been reduced to absurdity by the terrible catastrophes of recent years. Those who cannot learn from the lessons of these last years cannot see what social forces lie in the idea that seeks a new way of thinking based on observation – a way of thinking that can only be mastered by a sufficiently large number of people, and that only when it is equipped with the great ideological issues that confront us today.

Dear attendees! I have thus basically expressed, albeit only in sketchy terms, what I want to say today as an introduction to what I will say in more detail and in more specific terms the day after tomorrow. And now that my task has been fulfilled, I would like to briefly return to some of the things I said here last time, because otherwise the wrong conclusions are always drawn when certain things are not mentioned at all.

In connection with Mr. von Wrangell's description of the materialistic-mechanical world view, I spoke yesterday of the poet Marie Eugenie delle Grazie as an example of someone who really took the materialistic world view seriously, I would even say at its word. One could indeed ask: How must a person who has elementary, strong feelings for everything human that has been instilled in people through historical development, how must such a person feel when they assume the materialistic-mechanical worldview to be true? That is more or less how Marie Eugenie delle Grazie – it was now 25 to 30 years ago – faced the materialistic-mechanical world view. She called Haecke/ her master and assumed that, to a certain extent, Laplace's head with its world view is right. But she did not express this world view in theory, but also allowed human feeling to speak, on the assumption that it is true. And so her poems are perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the way in which the human heart can relate to the materialistic-mechanical world view in our time, what can be sensed, felt, and perceived under her premise. And so that you may have a vivid example of the effect of the materialistic-mechanical view on a human heart, we will first present some of these poems by Grazia Deledda.

[Recitation by Marie Steiner]

At midnight

When tired and half intoxicated
From the day's colorful changing life
In blessed rest the earth dreams,
The moon's bluish glow
The desolate streets flood
And sacred forgetfulness
The gentle wings lifts
In these blessed hours,
So full of bliss and slumber
Why, heart pounding loudly,
Can only you not find any rest?
Why, forehead burning with fever,
Do you so sleep-robbing
And dream-scaring only yourself
Through the tormenting host of thoughts?

Calm change draws
The stars in the sky above,
And motionless lies the city,
The wide, wide city - for behold,
It is midnight and poor as rich, happy
Without distinction of the dream god's enticing cup,
The heavy, poppy-wreathed...

You only moan
And whimper into your pillows at midnight,
Unsel'ge, and weep and brood - because
It is a demon, dark and yet enchanting,
That floats around your bed and chases demon whispers
The dream fairy tale messengers from your proximity,
So that their lovely dance fades away lackluster
And the night fiends of madness encircle you.
And even if the enchantress Phantasie beckons to you with shining eyes,
With her golden wings,
The poppy dance and the rejuvenating fire potion
of enthusiasm – satanically grinning, And longingly, slavishly breathe towards him,
A sacrifice that willlessly surrenders itself.
Then he spreads the black demon wings
And shakes his curls nocturnal splendor,
Kiss frosty love and faith from your soul,
Gently drips the poison of despair into your chest,
Mauls your heart with convulsively twitching predator claws,
Encircles you like a vampire in a rut
And whispers, smiling icily: “My name is knowledge!”

2.

With brazen bands, And chains of dust and decay, Nature, thy witness, holds thee fast;
Nature, the enticing monster,
Sometimes smiling and sun-gilded,
To furious joy of existence inspiring thee, sometimes
Dread and distress giving birth,
Whipping you with the rod of sorrow, But always devastating and enigmatic, always Medusa and sphinx at the same time! Dutch your pulse chases And races in feverish beats Her ruthless law, The eternal law of destruction; She gave you will and strength
To destroy yourself – yourself
But you can never save yourself!
On her triumphal chariot we all pull
– panting, drenched in sweat, and yet
Also blissful: for as a mirage rocks
Hope before us and happiness and every illusion,
Which they created to mock us,
And we, the slave army poisoned by longing,
Call ideals! - So we rush in thirsty haste
And mad chase, until treacherously
The power leaves us, the breath fades and further
For ever our goal on golden clouds floats,
Until helpless and panting we
Break down - then she exults demonically,
Then she cries out her cruel: “Evoe!” and steers
Crushing over a thousand victims away
The brazen spokes of her biga!

3.

What cruel demon
The tormenting urge of love
Written in our throbbing hearts?
What treacherous hellish delusion
It is to tremble longingly and foolishly
To crave and thirst for divine bliss,
To an infinite
Consume itself in feverish heat
And over the seething swamp
The most enticing fairytale realm of dreams
Build – alas! plaintively and unresolved
This anxious question fades away into eternity...

Enchantingly, it smiles and beckons
In those moments of mystery
The divine to us
Alone, we want to grasp it,
And also captivate it, even in the garb of transience
And call, a second, foolish self
Chaining ourselves to our destiny: “Found - found!”

Only gods and fairy-tale heroes are refreshed by
the nectar of eternal folly,
little people are guided by reason,
and reason, the ravenous giantess,
she feeds and strengthens herself only
from shattered ideals!
Demystified and shivering, the heart and the sober everyday soul,
She smiles at the dream that once intoxicated her...
The shining star of divinity,
Not proud and titanic could
She tear it from heaven – no, she reached
And, more foolish than a foolish child,
Reached for its murky reflection
In the puddle of its own kind...

In the circle of the living goes
And wanders from mouth to mouth
A word whispered in terror
Its brazen sound, it makes
The rosy cheeks turn pale,
The jubilant anthems of madness,
The dazzling tales of lies
Of existence are torn apart for him, and
Fade away with him into eternity.
The crown of thorns of suffering,
The rosaries of happiness
And tiaras of glory
They all, all entwined,
Entwined and overgrown
With pale death's asphodel!
He whose wings change color,
Who trembles, and he whose hollow voice is heard,
Has lied for the last time...

Decay and mold ferment
In our veins, decay guides us
According to its law, and what lives and breathes there,
Decay has created it,
Decay destroys it too!
A dirty vortex of mystery and madness circles the glittering lie of existence away
and speaks, for all eternity
pointing to dust and decay,
the only eternal truth: “There is nothing!”

I believe that it is precisely in such an example that one can see where the materialistic-mechanical world view must lead. If this world-view had become the only one prevailing and if men had retained the power of feeling, then such a mood as that expressed in these poems must have seized men in the widest circle, and only those who would have continued to live without feeling, only these unfeeling ones could have avoided being seized by such a mood.

You don't get to know and understand the way of the world in the right way through those merely theoretical thoughts with which people usually build worldviews, but you only get to know the strength of a worldview when you see it flow into life. And I must say that it was a profound impression when I saw, now already a very long time ago, the mechanistic-materialistic worldview enter the ingenious soul – for she may be called an ingenious soul – of Marie Eugenie delle Grazie.

But one must also consider the preconditions that led to a human heart taking on the mechanistic-materialistic worldview. Marie Eugenie delle Grazie is, after all, by her very background, I would say a cosmopolitan phenomenon. She has blood of all possible nationalities in her veins from her ancestors. She got to know the sorrows of life in early childhood, and she also learned in early childhood how to rise to find something that carries this life to a higher power through a higher power; because her educator became a Catholic priest who died a few years ago. The genius of Delle Grazie revealed itself in the fact that she had already written a book of lyric poems, an extensive epic, a tragedy and a volume of novellas by the time she was 16 or 17. However much one might object to these poems from this or that point of view, they do express her genius in a captivating way. I came across these poems back in the 1880s, when they were first published, and at the same time I heard a lot of people talking about Delle Grazie. For example, I heard that the esthete Robert Zimmermann, who wrote an aesthetics and a history of aesthetics and was an important representative of the Herbartian school of philosophy (the Herbartians are now extinct), and who was already an old man at the time, said: Delle Grazie is the only real genius he has met in life.

A series of circumstances then led to me becoming personally acquainted with and befriending delle Grazie, and a great deal was said between us about worldviews and other matters. It was a significant lesson to see on the one hand the educator of delle Grazie, the Catholic priest, who, professionally immersed in Catholicism, had come to a worldview that he only expressed with irony and humor when he spoke more intimately, and on the other hand, delle Grazie herself. From the very first time I spoke to her, it was clear that she had a deep understanding of the world and life. As a result of her education by the priest, she had come to know Catholic Christology from all possible perspectives, which one could get to know if one was close to Professor Mäüllner - that is this priest - who, for his part, had also looked deeply into life. All this had taken shape in the delle Grazie in such a way that the world view she had initially been given by this priest – you have to bear in mind that I am talking about a seventeen-year-old girl – that life brings in the way of evil and wickedness, pain and suffering, so that the idea of a work of fiction arose from this, which she explained to me in a long conversation: she wanted to write a “Satanide”. She wanted to show the state of suffering and pain in the world on the one hand, and on the other hand the world view that had been handed down to her.

Now the materialistic-mechanical worldview fell into such a soul. This worldview has a strong power of persuasion, it unfolds a huge power of logic, so that it is difficult for people to escape it. I later asked Delle Grazie why she had not written the Satanide. She told me that, according to the materialistic-mechanical view, she did not believe in God and thus also not in the opponent of God, Satan.

But she had an enormous power of human experience and that is what shaped her in the great two-volume epic “Robespierre”, which is permeated throughout by such moods as you have heard. I heard her read many of the songs myself while she was still writing it. Two women became sick at one point. They could not listen to the end. This is characteristic of how people delude themselves. They believe in the science of materialism, but if you were to show them the consequences, they would faint.

The materialistic worldview truly makes people weak and cowardly. They look at the world with a veil and yet still want to be Christians. And that, in particular, seemed to Marie Eugenie delle Grazie to be the worst thing about existence. She said to herself something like the following: Everything is just swirling atoms, atoms swirling around in confusion. What do these whirling atoms do? After they have clumped together into world bodies, after they have caused plants to grow, they clump together people and human brains and in these brains, through the clumping together of atoms, ideals arise, ideals of beauty, of all kinds of greatness, of all kinds of divinity. What a terrible existence, she said to herself, when atoms whirl and whirl in such a way that they make people believe in an existence of ideals. The whole existence of the world is a deception and a lie. That is what those who are not too cowardly to draw the final consequences of the materialistic-mechanical world view say. Delle Grazie says: If this world of whirling atoms were at least true, then we would have whirling atoms in our minds. But the whirling atoms still deceive us, lie to us, as if there were ideals in the world.

Therefore, when one has learned to recognize the consequences that the human mind must draw when it behaves honestly in relation to the materialistic-mechanical world view, then one has again one of the reasons for working on a spiritual world view.

To those who always say, “We have everything, we have our ideals, we have what Christianity has brought so far,” it must be replied, Have we not brought about the powerful mechanistic-materialistic worldview through the way we have behaved? Do you want to continue like this? Those who want to prove the unnecessaryness of our movement because this or that is presented from other sides should consider that despite the fact that these other sides have been working for centuries, the mechanistic-materialistic worldview has grown. The important thing is to try to grasp life where it actually occurs. It does not depend on what thoughts we entertain, but on our looking at the facts and allowing ourselves to be taught by them. I have often mentioned that I once gave a lecture in a town on the subject of Christianity from the standpoint of spiritual science. There were two priests there. After the lecture they came to me and said: That is all very well and good what you say there, but the way you present it, only a few understand it; the more correct way is what we present the matter, because that is for all people. — I could say nothing other than: Excuse me, but do all people really go to you? That you believe it is for all people does not decide anything about the matter, but what really is, and so you will not be able to deny that numerous people no longer go to you. And we speak for them because they also have to find the way to the Christ. — That is what one says when one does not choose the easy way, when one does not simply find one's own opinion good, but lets oneself be guided by the facts.

Therefore, as you could see yesterday, it is not enough to simply read the sentences of a work like the Wrangell book in succession, but rather to tie in with what can be tied in. I would like to give you an example of how different writings in our branches can be discussed, and how what lives in our spiritual science can clearly emerge by measuring it against what is discussed in such brochures.

The next chapter in Wrangell's brochure is called:

Forming Concepts

The world around us is multifaceted. Each thing is different from every other. Even if several things have some of their properties in common, i.e., evoke the same or similar sensations, they differ in at least one attribute: each thing that I perceive through my senses currently occupies a certain part of space.

To make this multiform world more manageable, man groups similar things, i.e. things with similar properties, under common designations. He forms words for these concepts that he has created in his mind. He also uses words to describe the same or similar properties, such as red, hard, warm, hot, etc.

Here, Mr. von Wrangell expresses himself on the formation of concepts in a way that is very popular and is very often given. One says to oneself: I see a red flower, a second, a third red flower of a certain shape and arrangement of the petals, and since I find these the same, I form a concept about them. A concept would thus be formed by grouping together the same from different things. For example, the concept of “horse” is formed by grouping a number of animals that have certain similarities in a certain way into a single thought, into a single idea. I can do the same with properties. I see something with a certain color nuance, something else with a similar color nuance, and form the concept of the color “red”.

But anyone who wants to get to the bottom of things must ask themselves: is this really the way to form concepts? I can only make suggestions now, otherwise we would never get through the writing, because you can actually always link the whole world to every thing.

To illustrate how Mr. von Wrangell presents the formation of concepts, I will choose a geometric example.¹ Let us assume that we have seen different things in the world and that we find something limited one time, something else limited the next time, and something else limited the third time, and so on for countless times. We often see these similar limitations and now, according to Mr. von Wrangell's definition, we would form the concept of a “circle”. But do we really form the concept of a circle from such similar limitations? No, we only form the concept of a circle when we do the following: Here is a point that is a certain distance from this point. There is a point that is the same distance from that point, and there is another point that is the same distance and so on. I visit all the points that are the same distance from a certain point. If I connect these points, I get a line, which I call a circle, and I get the concept of the circle if I can say: the circle is a line in which all points are the same distance from the center. And now I have a formula and that leads me to the concept. The inner elaboration, the inner construction actually leads to the concept. Only those who know how to conceptualize in this way, who know how to construct what is present in the world, have the right to speak of concepts. We do not find the concept of a horse by looking at a hundred horses to find out what they have in common, but we find the essence of the horse by reconstructing it, and then we find what has been reconstructed in every horse.

This moment of activity, when we form ideas and concepts, is often forgotten. In this chapter too, the moment of inner activity has been forgotten.

The next chapter is called:

Concepts of Space and Time

The sense of touch in connection with seeing produces the idea of space. The direct experience of the succession of sensations leads us to the idea of time. Space and time are the forms of thought in which our ideas of the world outside us are formed, insofar as we perceive them through our five senses.

The concept of movement, as the change of the position of a thing in space within a period of time, is also an original concept, initially given by the movement of one's own body.

When the things we perceive with our senses evoke the same sensory impressions in us within a certain period of time, we gain the notion of “being” or “existence.” If, on the other hand, the impressions received from the same thing change, we gain the notion of “happening” or “occurrence”.

Thus, in a very neat way, as they say, Mr. Wrangell seeks to gain ideas about the concepts of space and time, of movement, being and happening. Now it would be extremely interesting to study how, in this chapter, everything is, I might say, “slightly pursed” despite everything. It would be quite good for many people - I don't want to say just for you, my dear friends, but for many people - if they would consider that a very astute man, an excellent scientist, forms such ideas and goes to great lengths to form ideas about these simple concepts. At the very least, a great deal of conscientiousness in thinking can be learned from this. And that is important; for there are so many people who, before they think about anything, the cosmos, do not even feel the need to ask themselves: How do I arrive at the simple ideas of being, happening and movement? - As a rule, that is too boring for people.

Now, a deeper examination would show that the concepts, as Mr. von Wrangell forms them, are quite easily linked. For example, Mr. von Wrangell says so offhand: “The sense of touch in connection with seeing creates the idea of space.” Just think, my dear friends, if you do not use the writing board to draw a circle, but draw the circle in your imagination, what does the sense of touch have to do with it, what does seeing have to do with it? Can you still say: “The sense of touch in connection with seeing creates the idea of space”? You cannot. Someone might object, however, that before one can draw a circle in one's imagination, one must have gained the perception of space, and that one gains this through the sense of touch in combination with seeing. Yes, but here it is a matter of considering what kind of perception we form at the moment when we touch something through the sense of touch. If we imagine ourselves as endowed only with the sense of touch and touching something, we form the idea that what we touch is outside us. Now take this sentence: “What we touch is outside us.” In the “outside us” lies space, that is, when we touch an object, we must already have space within us in order to carry out the touching. That was what led Kant to assume that space precedes all external experiences, including the experience of touching and seeing, and that time likewise precedes the multiplicity of processes in time; that space and time are the preconditions of sensory perception.

In principle, such a chapter on space and time could only be written by someone who has not only thoroughly studied Kant but also is familiar with the entire course of philosophy; otherwise, one will always have carelessly defined terms with regard to space and time. It is exactly the same with the other terms, the terms of “being” and “happening”. It could easily be shown that the concept of being could not exist at all if the definition given by Mr. von Wrangell were correct. For he says: “When things that we perceive through our senses evoke the same sensory impressions within a certain period of time, we gain the idea of ‘being’, of existence. If, on the other hand, the impressions received from the same thing change, we gain the idea of 'happening'. You could just as easily say: If we see that the sensations of the same thing change, we must assume that this change adheres to a being, occurs in a being. We could just as easily claim that it is only through change that being is recognized. And if someone wanted to claim that we can only arrive at the concept of being if the same impressions are evoked within a certain time – just think! – then if we wanted to arrive at the concept of being in this way, it would be quite possible that we would not be able to arrive at the concept of being at all; there would be nothing at all that could be connected to the concept of being.

In this chapter, “Concepts of Space and Time,” we can learn how to find concepts that are fragile in all possible places with great acumen and extraordinarily honest scientific rigour. If we want to form concepts that can survive a little in the face of life, then we must have gained them in such a way that we have at least to some extent tested them in terms of their value in life.

You see, that is why I said that I had only found the courage to talk to you about the last scenes of “Faust” because for more than thirty years I have repeatedly lived in the last scenes of “Faust” and tried to test the concepts in life. That is the only way to distinguish valid concepts from invalid ones; not logical speculation, not scientific theorizing, but the attempt to live with the concepts, to examine how the concepts prove themselves by introducing them into life and letting life give us the answer, that is the necessary way. But this presupposes that we are always inclined not merely to indulge in logical fantasies, but to integrate ourselves into the living stream of life. This has a number of consequences; above all, that we learn to believe that if someone can present seemingly logical proofs for this or that – I have mentioned this often – they have by no means yet presented anything for the value of the matter.

The next chapter is called:

The Causality Principle

The principle of causality on which our thinking is based forces us to assume that if something happens, i.e. a change occurs, a cause must have brought it about. All rational thinking is based on the “principle of sufficient reason”. Every thing has a reason why it is; every change in what exists is caused by a cause.

This proposition is not an empirical proposition; it precedes all experience, indeed, it is the very condition for experience, because without the premise expressed in it, coherent thought is impossible.

Mr. von Wrangell is taking the standpoint of the so-called principle of causality here. He says: All rational thinking must assume that everything we encounter is based on a cause. In a sense, one can agree with this principle of causality. But if you want to measure its significance for our vital world view, then you have to introduce much, much more subtle concepts than this formal principle of causality.

Because, you see, to be able to indicate a cause or a complex of causes for a thing, it takes much more than just following the thread of cause and effect, so to speak. What does the principle of causality actually say? It says: a thing has a cause. The thing that I am drawing here [the drawing has not been handed down] has a cause, this cause has another cause and so on; you can continue like this until beyond the beginning of the world and you can do the same with the effect. Certainly this is a very reasonable principle, but you don't get very far with it. For example, if you are looking for the cause of the son, you have to look for complexes of causes in the father and mother in order to be able to say that these are the causes of the child. But it is also true that although such causes may be present, they have no effect, namely when a woman and a man have no children. Then the causes are present, but they have no effect. With the cause, it just depends on whether it is not just a cause, but that it also causes something. There is a difference between “being the cause” and “causing”. But even the philosophers of our time do not get involved in such subtle differences. But if you take things seriously, you have to deal with such differences. In reality, it is not a matter of causes being there, but of their effecting something. Concepts that exist in this way do not necessarily correspond to reality, but they allow us to indulge our imagination.

Goethe's world view is fundamentally different. It does not go to the causes, but to the archetypal phenomena. That is something quite different. For Goethe takes something that exists in the world as an appearance, that is, as a phenomenon - let us say that certain color series appear in the prism - and he traces it back to the archetypal phenomenon, to the interaction of matter and light, or, if we take matter as representing darkness, to darkness and light. In exactly the same way, he deals with the archetypal phenomenon of the plant, the animal and so on. This is a world view that faces facts squarely and does not merely spin out concepts logically, but groups the facts in such a way that they express a truth.

Try to read what Goethe wrote in his essay “The Experiment as Mediator between Subject and Object” and also what I was able to publish as a supplement to this essay. Also try to read what I my introductions to Goethe's scientific writings in Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur, then you will see that Goethe's view of nature is based on something quite different from that of modern natural scientists. We must take the phenomena and group them not as they exist in nature, but so that they express their secrets to us. To find the archetypal phenomenon in the phenomena is the essential thing.

This is what I also wanted to imply yesterday when I said that one must go into the facts. What people like us think of the mechanistic-materialistic world view is of little consequence. But if one can show how, in 1872, one of its representatives stood before the assembled natural scientists in Leipzig and said that the task of natural science was to reduce all natural phenomena to the movements of atoms, then one points to a fact that also points to a primal phenomenon of historical development. The reduction of historical development to primal phenomena is demonstrated by pointing out what Du Bois-Reymond said, because that is a primal phenomenon in the materialistic-mechanical worldview process.

If you proceed in this way, you no longer learn to think like in a glass chamber, but to think in such a way that you become an instrument for the facts that express their secrets, and you can then test your thinking to see whether it really conforms to the facts.

I will relate the following not to boast but to tell of my own experiences as far as possible. I prefer to speak of things I have experienced rather than of various things I have thought out. If anyone absolutely insists on believing that what I am about to say is said to boast, let him believe it, but it is not so.

When I tried to describe Goethe's world view in the 1980s, I said, based on what one finds when one immerses oneself in it: Goethe must have written an essay at some point that expresses the most intimate aspects of his scientific view. And I said, after reconstructing the essay, that this essay must have existed, at least in Goethe's mind. You can find this in my introduction to Goethe's scientific writings. You will also find the reconstructed essay there. I then came to the Goethe Archive and there I found the essay exactly as I had reconstructed it. So you have to go with the facts. Those who seek wisdom let the facts speak. This is, however, the more uncomfortable method, for one must concern oneself with the facts; one need not concern oneself with the thoughts that arise.

The next chapter is entitled:

Application of the Idea of Arbitrariness to the Environment

Since our sensation is that from which we, as the directly given, start in all thinking, we also judge what we address as the external world, initially according to what is going on in us.

If I were to read you “Truth and Science,” I could show you the correct thought and the correct understanding, and show you how this is another example of superficial thinking. First of all, I would like to know how there could ever be a mathematics if we were to start from our sensations in all our thinking. Then we would never be able to arrive at a mathematics. For what should our sensation be when we ask: What is the magnitude of the sum of the squares of the two legs of a right-angled triangle in relation to the square of the hypotenuse? But Wrangell says: “Since our sensation is that from which we, as the directly given, start in all thinking, we also judge what we address as the external world, first of all, according to what goes on in us.” - You can't do much with this sentence. We want to see further:

We are aware that those changes in the environment that we ourselves consciously bring about through movements of our limbs are caused by internal processes that we call volitional impulses. Therefore, the unbiased person also initially assumes similar causes for other changes in the environment, i.e. he assumes that they too are caused by volitional impulses of beings similar to himself. The mythologies of all peoples are expressions of this anthropomorphic animation of nature, and the belief in spiritual entities, which even now serves many people to explain many events in their environment, has the same origin. Finally, the observation of the child shows that it even ascribes a will to inanimate objects, similar to its own. It bumps into the table and scolds the table for this bad habit.

I have said before: the child pushes against the table and beats the table because it attributes a will to it. It judges the table as its equal because it has not yet developed the idea of the table in itself. It is exactly the opposite, and the next chapter also suffers from this confusion:

Observation of regular phenomena

Therefore, although man initially attributes many events to free impulses of will, daily observation shows him that he can count on a regular repetition of some phenomena. He knows, for example, that the sun, after setting in the west, will appear again in the east the next day; that light and warmth are connected. He knows that the seasons influence the life of plants in their regular course, etc. This knowledge enables man to organize his actions accordingly. He soon finds that the more closely he observes nature, the more regularities he discovers in it, and the better he can harmonize with nature.

If we wish to speak of the regularities in nature in this way, then we must not forget that we speak of such regularities in quite different ways. I pointed this out in “Truth and Science”. Let us suppose, for example, that I get dressed in the morning, go to the window and see a person walking by outside. The next morning I get dressed again, look out the window again, and the person passes by again. The third morning the same thing happens, and the fourth morning as well. I see a pattern here. The first thing I do is get dressed, then I go to the window; the next thing is that I see the person walking outside. I see a pattern because the events repeat themselves. So I form a judgment, and it should be: Because I am getting dressed and looking out the window, that's why the man is passing by outside. Of course, we don't form such judgments, because it would be crazy. But in other cases it seems as if we do; but in reality we don't even then. But we do form concepts, and from the inner construction of the concepts we find that there is an inner lawfulness in the appearances. And because I cannot construct a causality between my getting dressed, looking out the window and what passes by outside, I do not recognize any causality either. You can find more details about this in “Truth and Science”. There you will find all the prerequisites, including the one presented by David Hume, that we can gain knowledge about the laws of the world from repetition.

The next chapter is called:

The Nature of All Science

This is probably the beginning of all science, the essence of which consists in summarizing facts of experience in a clear and concise way in order to extract rules from them that enable people to know in advance what will happen. Therefore, every science contains a descriptive part, the clear compilation of facts, and a theoretical part, the extraction of rules from these facts and the conclusions to be drawn from these rules.

Goethe objected to such conclusions: Did a Galileo need to see many phenomena like the swinging kitchen lamp in the dome of Pisa to arrive at his law of falling bodies? No, he recognized the law after seeing this phenomenon. That's how he understood it. It is not from the repetition of facts, but from the inwardly experienced construction of facts that we learn something about the essence of things. It was a fundamental error of modern epistemology to assume that we can gain something like the laws of nature by summarizing the facts. This so obviously contradicts the actual gaining of natural laws, and yet it is repeated over and over again.

The next chapter:

Astronomy, the oldest science.

If we take a look around at the vast realm of what we perceive through our senses, we find that the apparent movement of the stars is the group of phenomena in which the laws of what happens are most striking, most easily discovered and expressed. It is therefore understandable that astronomy is the oldest of all sciences based on sensory perception.

Above all, it is the regular apparent movement of the stars, repeating itself day after day, that captivates the attentive observer, inspiring him to observe and forming a vivid imagination. In the cloudless regions of the Near East and North Africa, the external conditions were particularly favorable for the study of celestial phenomena. Following their direct sensory impressions, the astronomers of antiquity assumed that the countless fixed stars, which remain unchanged in their mutual position, are attached to a transparent but firm celestial sphere, at the center of which the Earth rests. The celestial sphere, rotating evenly around an axis, provided a vivid representation of the perceived process.

The chapter is therefore called “Astronomy, the oldest science”. Now one would actually first have to go into what the oldest astronomy was like. Because the main thing to consider is that the oldest astronomy was such that people did not look at the regularity, but at the will of the spiritual beings that cause the movements. However, the author has today's astronomy in mind and labels it as the oldest science. Sometimes it is really necessary to pursue the truth in one's method quite unvarnished, that is, with no varnished method. And when the chapter here on page 13 is called “Astronomy, the oldest science,” I compare it - because I stick to the facts and don't worry about them - with what is on page 3. It says there, “that according to my studies I am an astronomer.” Perhaps it could be that someone who is a mathematician or a physiologist would come to a different conclusion; so one should not forget what is written on page 3. It is of great importance to point out a person's subjective motives much more than one usually does, because these subjective motives usually explain what needs to be explained. But when it comes to subjective motives, people are really quite peculiar. They want to admit as few subjective motives as possible. I have often mentioned a gentleman whom I had met and who said that when he did this or that, it was important for him not to do what he wanted to do according to his personal preference, but to do what corresponded least to his personal preference, but which he had to regard as his mission imposed on him by the spiritual world. It was of no use to make it clear to him that he must also count licking his fingers as part of his spiritual mission when he says to himself: I do everything according to my mission imposed on me by the spiritual world. — But he masked that, because he liked it better when he could present what he liked to do so much as a strict sense of duty.

The next chapter:

Uniform motion

When we speak of uniformity of motion, we mean that the object in question passes through equal portions of space in equal intervals of time.

Do you remember the lecture on speed that I once gave here? [In this volume.]

But to determine this, mere perception is not enough; one must be able to measure both spatial parts and time intervals. Only when we can express both spatial parts and time segments in numbers by measuring, i.e. by comparing with an unchanging, homogeneous size chosen as a unit, only then can the actual uniformity of a movement, as well as the effect of a certain cause, which is always the same in size, be proven by experience.

This is where the learned scientist begins to speak. You only need to look around a little to see what a desire for objectivity permeates scientists, to strive for what is independent of the subjective human being, to strive to apply objective standards. The most objective way to do this is to actually measure. That is why what is gained through measurement is considered real science. That is why Mr. von Wrangell talks about the measurement itself in the next chapter.

Measuring

Every measuring operation is based on the assumption that the unit chosen, for example a meter, a gram, a second, etc., is unchangeable. We cannot prove this unconditionally about our units, but we can be sure that our measuring operations are correct within certain limits that we can recognize. Let us cite a vivid example to illustrate what has been said: We want to compare the length of two objects and measure them with the same meter rule, assuming that it retains its length. However, we know that all bodies change under the influence of temperature, humidity, etc., so our meter rule may also have become longer or shorter. Without knowing the magnitude of the presumed change, we have, however, the well-founded conviction that the change in such a short time cannot have reached the magnitude of, say, 1 mm. We can therefore be sure that we have not made a mistake in this measurement that exceeds 1 mm for each meter measured. Through such a measuring operation, we have obtained an empirical fact – in our case, the ratio of two lengths – which is valid for us within the limits of accuracy established by the Dutch critics.

This is a very nice little chapter, which vividly demonstrates how, through measurement, something can initially be said about size ratios.

The next chapter:

The principle underlying clocks

The situation is similar when measuring periods of time. The instruments used for this purpose, the clocks, are essentially based on the conviction that the same causes produce the same effects. The ancients mostly used water clocks (clepsydras) for this purpose, in which the outflow of water from a container was made under conditions that were as uniform as possible (the water level was kept at the same height, the outflow tube was of a certain shape, etc.), and the amount of water that flowed out was used to determine the length of the time period. Our pendulum clocks are based on the realization that the speed of a pendulum swing depends on the length of the pendulum, all other conditions being equal. By ensuring that the length remains as constant as possible, that the resistance is as low as possible, and that the force that overcomes it acts evenly, a clock will run smoothly. There are methods for testing this, whereby one can precisely determine the maximum extent to which the clock has run too fast or too slow over the course of a day, for example.

You see, this chapter is so good because it allows us to visualize in simple terms how we take shortcuts in life. We can easily see this if we start with the old clocks, with the water clocks. Suppose a man who used the water clock had said, “It took me three hours to do this work.” What does that mean? What does that mean? You would think that everyone understands this. But you don't consider that you are already relying on certain assumptions. Because the person concerned should actually have said, if he had expressed facts: While I was working, so and so much water flowed out from the beginning to the end of my work. Instead of always saying: from the beginning to the end of my work, so and so much water has flowed out, we compared the outflow of water with the course of the sun and used an abbreviation, the formula: I worked for three hours. We then continue to use this formula. We believe we have something factual in mind, but we have left out a thought, namely, so and so much of the water has flowed out. We have only the second thought as an abbreviation. But by giving ourselves the possibility that such a fact becomes a formula, we distance ourselves from the fact. And now think about the fact that in life we not only bring together work and a formula, but that we actually talk in formulas, really talk in formulas. Just think, for example, what it means to be “diligent”. If we go back to the facts, there is an enormous amount of facts underlying the formula “to be industrious”. We have seen many things happen and compared them with the time in which they can happen, and so we speak of “being industrious”. A whole host of facts is contained in this, and often we speak such formulas without reflecting on the facts.

When we come back to the facts, we feel the need to express our thoughts in a lively way and not in nebulous formulas. I once heard a professor give a lecture who began a course on literary history by saying: “When we turn to Lessing, we want to look at his style, first asking ourselves how Lessing used to think about the world, how he worked, how he intended to use it, and so on. And after he had been asking questions like this for an hour, he said: “Gentlemen, I have led you into a forest of question marks!” Now just imagine a “forest of question marks,” imagine you want to go for a walk in this forest of question marks; imagine the feeling! Well, I also heard this man say that some people throw themselves into a “bath of fire.” I always had to think about what people look like when they plunge into a fire bath. You often meet people who are unaware of how far they are from reality. If you immerse yourself in their words, in their word-images, and try to make sense of what their words mean, you find that everything disintegrates and flies apart, because what people say is not possible in reality. So you can learn a great deal from these perceptive chapters on 'Measuring' and on 'The Principle Underlying Clocks', a great deal indeed.

I cannot say with certainty when I will be able to continue discussing the following chapters of this booklet. Today I would just like to note that, of course, I only wanted to highlight examples and that, of course, this can be done in a hundred different ways. But if we do this, we will ensure that our spiritual-scientific movement is not encapsulated, but that we really pull the strings throughout the world. Because the worst thing would be if we closed ourselves off, my dear friends.

I have pointed out that thinking is of particular importance and significance, and therefore it is important that we also take some of what has been placed before our souls in recent weeks, so that we think about it, understand it in the most one-sided way and implement it in life. For example, when people have spoken of “mystical eccentricity,” then that has happened for a good reason. But if people now think that one should no longer speak of spiritual experiences, that would be the greatest nonsense. If spiritual experiences are true, then they are realities. The important thing is that they are true and that we remain within spiritual boundaries. It is important that we do not fall from one extreme to the other. It is more important that we really try not only to accept spiritual science as such, but also to realize that spiritual science must be placed within the fabric of the world.

It would certainly be wrong to believe that one should no longer do spiritual science at all, but only read such brochures in the branches. That would also be an incorrect interpretation. One must reflect on what I meant. But the great evil that I have indicated, that many people write instead of listening, is prevented by the fact that we listen and do not write. Because if only the kind of nonsense that really happens when lectures are transcribed is produced when they are rewritten, and we believe that we definitely need transcribed lectures, then, my dear friends, I have to say, firstly, that we place little value on what has appeared in print, because there is actually plenty of material that has already been printed; and secondly, it is not at all necessary for us to always chase after the very latest. This is a quirk of journalism that people have adopted, and we must not cultivate it here. Thoroughly working through what is there is something essential and meaningful, and we will not spoil our ability to listen carefully by copying down what we hear, but will have a desire to listen carefully. Because scribbling something down rarely results in anything other than spoiling the attention we could develop by listening. Therefore, I believe that those of us who want to work in the branches will find opportunities when they think they have no material, but they do have such material. They no longer have to go to each person who has copied down the lecture to get rewritten lectures, just so that they can always read the latest one aloud. Really, it depends on the seriousness, and the fact that work in this direction has not been very serious has produced many phenomena, albeit indirectly, from which we actually suffer.

So, my dear friends, I don't know yet exactly; but when it is possible again, then perhaps on Saturday I will continue the discussion of the excellent, astute brochure by Mr. von Wrangell, which I have chosen because it was written by a scientist and has a positive and not a negative content.

• 1. This was apparently demonstrated on the blackboard; the drawing has not been handed down.

You have to go back to the founding of Christianity if you want to find a point in the history of human development that seems as significant as the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We are immeasurably closer to everything that has happened in the last four centuries than to what happened before. We feel that our own cultural life forms a whole with the events of this age, and that everything that has gone before seems like something complete.

Gutenberg's invention stands there like the great landmark that separates this completed era from the cultural epoch that still continues today. If we take a closer look, Gutenberg appears to us as a contributor to everything that has happened in the last few centuries. Our material and spiritual life fully confirms what Wimpheling said soon after Gutenberg: "Of no invention or intellectual fruit can we Germans be so proud as of the printing press. What a different life is stirring in all classes of the people, and who would not gratefully commemorate the first founders and patrons of this art?" But it can also be said that no art entered history at the right time like letterpress printing. It is as if the whole world had been waiting for Gutenberg's deed in the middle of the fifteenth century. A change in social coexistence, in people's ideas and feelings had been in the making for a long time. German mysticism, which brought about the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, is the herald of the new epoch. The mystics wanted to free themselves from the ideas handed down to man by an old tradition, which could only be believed on the testimony of authorities. They wanted to seek the source of all spiritual life within their own souls. An urge for the liberation of personality, of individuality, took hold. The individual wanted to examine for himself the thoughts to which he had to adhere in his cultural tasks. The need for a new means of acquiring human knowledge had to arise from such an urge. He who has the will to surrender himself unreservedly to authority can do no other than go and have the views of this authority conveyed to him orally. Those who want to seek truth and knowledge for themselves, based on their own thinking, need a book that makes them independent of authority. Gutenberg put the book in people's hands at a time when they had the greatest need for it. Luther translated the Bible into the native language of the Germans. Gutenberg paved the way for this now comprehensible Bible to travel all over the world. The Reformation is inconceivable without the prior invention of printing.

The way in which the spiritual treasures made accessible to all people through the art of printing initially had an impact clearly demonstrates the immense importance of this art. Before its invention, knowledge of scientific laws was a mystery to a few. The great masses of the people had to rely on the worst superstitions if they wanted to explain the natural phenomena that took place before their eyes every hour. The book gave these masses the opportunity to form ideas about the natural course of what was happening before their eyes and ears. But the masses, who for centuries had relied solely on belief in authority, were ill-equipped to form truly factual ideas. The books conveyed ideas that people had never heard of before. People therefore believed that there must be more to these ideas than the simple, plain letters of the new art conveyed. Such beliefs paved the way for all kinds of "secret sciences" and arts, for the charlatans who claimed to possess a special higher knowledge and whom the people willingly believed, allowing themselves to be beguiled by them because they were slow to form their own independent judgment.

We can still observe the inability, nurtured over centuries, to explain natural facts simply in the profound books of such an exquisite mind as Jacob Böhme (1575-1624). This simple man is truly great in his depiction of all things that can be gained through contemplation of one's own heart and mind. However, he becomes highly adventurous when he wants to explain physical or other natural occurrences.

Such phenomena show how Gutenberg's deed contributed to the expansion of Western mankind's horizons. It was through the art of printing that insight into nature was first gained for the majority of mankind.

This conquest of knowledge of nature gave the intellectual life of the modern age a completely different character. As unworldly and hostile to nature as the life of the Middle Ages enclosed in monasteries was, all education before the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was essentially unworldly. What could be the subject of such an education? Nothing other than what man could draw from himself. One did not allow oneself to be instructed by natural phenomena; one only sharpened the logical weapons of the mind. Scholasticism is the result of such an unworldly educational system. It is fair to say that scholasticism could only be decisive for intellectual life as long as there were only written books that were inaccessible to most people. The educational path that someone who wanted to get hold of these books had to go through beforehand was such that it brought the whole human mind in a direction that was receptive to scholasticism. The printing press made it possible to attract entirely new forces to participate in intellectual culture. People could participate in the promotion of education who had not been forced into a particular path. This also changed the whole physiognomy of education. Instead of merely dealing with unworldly scholasticism, the focus was directed towards experience, towards real life. Gutenberg can also be seen as a silent participant in all the achievements associated with the names Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei, Baco of Verulam. For Copernicus' influential book, which showed astronomy new paths, Kepler's discoveries of the movement of celestial bodies: they could only become truly fruitful for the world if they met a generation that sought a world-friendly, not a world-alienated education.

Gutenberg made it possible for the great pathfinders of science and art in modern times to speak to a wide circle of people. The prosperity of a scientific world view depends on the participation of as many people as possible in education. As long as truth was sought in the human mind alone, it was enough for a few people to devote themselves to this search and communicate their findings to others. But since truth has been sought in the immeasurable number of facts of the external world, it is necessary that the circle of those interested in enriching education be as large as possible.

But not only intellectual culture, but also social and economic life in the fifteenth century was virtually waiting for a new means of disseminating human thought, established facts and experiences. The growth and developing independence of the merchant class placed higher demands on the personal efficiency of the individual than earlier conditions. Previously, the activity of the: Previously, the activities of the individual had been strictly determined by the whole to which he belonged, by the social organism in which he was integrated, and within very narrow limits. In the fifteenth century, all these things underwent an expansion. The individual detached himself from the associations which had formerly prescribed his aims. The whole of life became more complicated. The fixed cooperatives had loosened. The individual had to make his own way through life. It was not the guild that now determined what had to be done, but the personality. The large merchant could now only look at the personal efficiency of his clerks and authorized signatories. Family considerations and class affiliation, which had previously been the deciding factors as to who should be appointed to a particular position, were now completely eliminated. The need arose for the individual to have a broad view of the world. People had to find out what was going on in the world. Again, it was Gutenberg's invention that made this possible. Printed information took the place of the primitive means of communicating about world conditions that had been used in the Middle Ages. The first "newspaper" appeared as early as 1505, bringing news about Brazil.

Printed communication made possible what we call public opinion. The whole of humanity was, as it were, drawn into the great consultation that steered the course of world events. In pamphlets, tracts and pamphlets, the individual spoke to the whole. The seventeenth century saw the development of the newspaper and with it the influence of the popular spirit. Alongside the cabinets and the individual statesmen, the people appeared on the world stage and had their say when it came to major political and cultural issues. And the individual statesman is forced to adapt himself to public opinion if he wants to be successful. We see that statesmen disseminate the motives for their actions through the press in order not to be powerless; we see the respect for public opinion growing more and more among leading personalities. Wallenstein's officers send reports of their military exploits to the Munich newspapers; the Austrian government complains to the Brandenburg government that the Berlin newspapers have an anti-Austrian bias. It is thanks to the art of printing that the popular spirit gradually had to be reckoned with as a fully justified element within the world movement.

It is not going too far to say that the Age of Enlightenment was essentially influenced by printing. Gutenberg's workshop in Mainz laid the foundation for the attitude to which the philosopher Kant gave monumental expression with the words: "Have the audacity to use your own reason." For this reason first had to be gradually developed into such boldness. It could only do so if it constantly knew how to obtain information about what was going on in the world. And anyone who wants to benefit from using his own reason must also be able to count on his voice being heard. The eighteenth century was allowed and able to be enlightened because the seventeenth developed public opinion and established its value.

What the publicity of opinion means was soon learned by those in power, but also by those who wanted to contribute their mite to the progress of intellectual life. We can follow how power and education were linked to the art of printing, because successful work depended on it. Book printing found its best nurturing grounds in the vicinity of educational establishments, and scholars fraternized with the new art, even becoming book printers themselves in order to make their works known to the world. The papal envoys no longer merely sent their own weekly reports to Rome, but also the newspapers in which the popular voice was expressed.

It has a deeply symbolic meaning that the art of printing was met with a similar distrust as knowledge, knowledge itself. And it is significant that Gutenberg's comrade Fust or Faust was associated with the most culturally and historically interesting legend of modern times. Because man has seized knowledge, knowledge, he has fallen away from God. This is the meaning of the Fall of Man. Man's thirst for knowledge could only be attributed to the intervention of the devil. And the "black art", the great ally of the thirst for knowledge, was portrayed as nothing less than a work of hell. It was said of Faust: "He no longer wanted to be called a theologian, became a man of the world, called himself a Dr. Medicinae". The fact that science and the art of printing were followed by a similar formation of legends shows their deep inner relationship.

With the spread of the art of printing, we also see poetry and all literature becoming popular. The scholarly veneer that intellectual life had until then made way for a completely new spirit. The cheerful joke, the amusing prank, enters the art of storytelling. One knows that one can now speak to the people, and one therefore endeavors to offer them things that are connected with their own sentiments, with their feelings and imaginations. And from the people themselves, who are now taking part in spiritual life, new forces are growing. One must not underestimate how much the art of printing has contributed to the fact that personalities such as Hans Sachs were able to rise to a significant height of creativity. How much would never have come before his eyes had it not been for the printing press.

Gutenberg created the bridge between two worlds that are called to work together, which can only bring about a prosperous process of development for mankind through constant interaction. In his "Speeches to the German Nation", Fichte described it as a serious detriment to culture when a scholarly community is confronted with a people that is dependent on itself, that does not understand it and from which it is not constantly supplied with new, fresh driving forces. In the full sense of the word, such a judgment can only be made about the culture of the Middle Ages. The last four centuries have brought about a complete change in it through the printing press. The participation of the people in their work also had the most favorable effect on the scholars. The latter had lost all contact with the other classes. This can best be seen in the first books on natural history that were handed down to the people. These were interspersed with all kinds of miracle stories. It was believed that the people were not ready for real natural truths. In this, too, they soon changed their ways. On the contrary, people were driven to clarify their own thoughts, to give them a better form, because they wanted to be understood. The need to communicate knowledge led to a clarification of knowledge itself. People began to think about the art of how best to make education accessible to the widest circles. Cormenius' great pedagogical thoughts on the tasks of popular education presuppose the need for a lively interaction between the people who desire knowledge and the bearers of the entire intellectual life.

In this way, we can trace the influence of Gutenberg's deed into the whole of modern life. If other intellectual heroes have created the content for this life, he has provided the means to bring this content to full fruition and effect. That is why we are so at home in everything that the last four centuries have produced; and that is also why everything that we historically appropriate about the times that lie before the invention of the art of printing is so foreign to us. How a person thinks depends more than one is usually inclined to assume on the way he relates to his fellow human beings, how he interacts with them. Just as language itself, which builds a bridge from person to person, is a creator of culture, so the printed word, this powerful mediator, this appointed representative of the spoken word, is a co-creator of modern culture. Man took possession of this printed word in the age in which he began to place the highest value on his individuality, on personal efficiency. By emphasizing his personality, he turned away from the old cooperatives, within which the space became too narrow for him. The art of printing has given him a new means to seek a new association in place of the old limited one, which corresponds to the broader horizon of life. The more man individualized himself, the more he needed a means detached from his immediate personality in order to return to the whole. Thus the art of printing proved to be the unifying bond at the point in history when life made the imperative demand on the individual and also on the individual nation to separate themselves in order to make themselves fit for the great struggle for existence.

Since the art of printing was invented, it has shown itself to be the appointed ally of human progress. Where the latter reaches a certain height, the art of printing favors it; where progress is hindered, the art of printing also suffers. The beneficial effect of the Dutch association of the "Brothers of the Common Life" is a clear example of this. It was founded by Gerhard Groote (1340-1384) from Deventer and set itself the task of transforming education from a scholarly monopoly into a source of public welfare. This association developed a significant educational activity. The establishment of a large number of schools can be attributed to this activity. With the advent of the printing press, the cultural work of the Brothers of the Common Life took on a whole new life. It became possible for them to ensure the widest possible distribution of good educational books. They took the printing of these books into their own hands and thus became promoters of the new art in Holland and throughout north-western Germany. If this fact shows that progress and book printing went hand in hand, the regression that occurred in this art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries after an initial period of great prosperity and rapid dissemination is no less indicative of this relationship. The Peasants' Wars, the unfortunate religious turmoil with its bloody, devastating aftermath, the Thirty Years' War, dealt a series of heavy blows to culture, which had reached a wonderful height at the beginning of the modern era. And the art of printing now participated in the decline of intellectual and material culture, just as it had previously contributed to its prosperity.

The interaction between a lower level of general education and the art of printing is also unmistakable in the difficulties the latter encountered in Spain. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, clerical censorship and the paternalism of the people on the part of the clergy were greater here than in Central Europe. For this reason, the art of printing spread only slowly; and even the little that it achieved here was due to the influence of individuals with an interest in science. And because this art had no real foundation in Spain, it was subsequently possible for the subjugation of intellectual life by the Jesuits and the Inquisition to find a special home here. Turkey is the most glaring example of the fact that only those who are also patrons of Gutenberg's art can play a role in modern cultural life. The Turks proved to be complete enemies of this art right up to the eighteenth century. The Sultan Bajazet threatened printing with the death penalty in 1483, and his son renewed the ban. This people had to pay for such anti-cultural measures by losing all significance in the intellectual life of Europe. It is interesting to follow the relationship between intellectual life and the art of printing in Hungary. King Matthias Corvinus ruled there in the second half of the fifteenth century. He had a profound interest in the sciences and arts. For this reason, the art of printing was already being cultivated in the Hungarian capital from 1473 onwards. A lively intellectual life therefore prevailed in this country, which had to contend with "the greatest difficulties in terms of culture due to its geographical location.

Man is a being who can only achieve truly purposeful work in the future by recognizing the past. History is his great teacher. Now compare how much more precisely and intimately we know the last four centuries than the earlier times, when printing was not yet the companion of all culture. With the latter, we are all too often dependent on mere conjecture and bold hypotheses, because historical tradition leaves us in the lurch for large areas. The art of printing is therefore not only an eager contributor to all culture, it is also the best, the most faithful guardian of the treasures of the past, which mankind needs so much for the future.

In the nineteenth century, the age of scientific knowledge and technology, the art of printing did not lag behind other cultural factors in its progress. With its great technical advances, it can stand worthily alongside the other achievements of our time. And if we are not without optimism today as we approach the dawning century and look joyfully into the future of human development, we owe this mood in no small part to the genius of Johannes Gutenberg.

[ 1 ] As we have seen in the preceding chapters, an epistemological investigation must begin by rejecting existing knowledge. Knowledge is something brought into existence by man, something that has arisen through his activity. If a theory of knowledge is really to explain the whole sphere of knowledge, then it must start from something still quite untouched by the activity of thinking, and what is more, from something which lends to this activity its first impulse. This starting point must lie outside the act of cognition, it must not itself be knowledge. But it must be sought immediately prior to cognition, so that the very next step man takes beyond it is the activity of cognition. This absolute starting point must be determined in such a way that it admits nothing already derived from cognition.

[ 2 ] Only our directly given world-picture can offer such a starting point, i.e. that picture of the world which presents itself to man before he has subjected it to the processes of knowledge in any way, before he has asserted or decided anything at all about it by means of thinking. This “directly given” picture is what flits past us, disconnected, but still undifferentiated.¹ In it, nothing appears distinguished from, related to, or determined by, anything else. At this stage, so to speak, no object or event is yet more important or significant than any other. The most rudimentary organ of an animal, which, in the light of further knowledge may turn out to be quite unimportant for its development and life, appears before us with the same claims for our attention as the noblest and most essential part of the organism. Before our conceptual activity begins, the world-picture contains neither substance, quality nor cause and effect; distinctions between matter and spirit, body and soul, do not yet exist. Furthermore, any other predicate must also be excluded from the world-picture at this stage. The picture can be considered neither as reality nor as appearance, neither subjective nor objective, neither as chance nor as necessity; whether it is “thing-in-itself,” or mere representation, cannot be decided at this stage. For, as we have seen, knowledge of physics and physiology which leads to a classification of the “given” under one or the other of the above headings, cannot be a basis for a theory of knowledge.

[ 3 ] If a being with a fully developed human intelligence were suddenly created out of nothing and then confronted the world, the first impression made on his senses and his thinking would be something like what I have just characterized as the directly given world-picture. In practice, man never encounters this world-picture in this form at any time in his life; he never experiences a division between a purely passive awareness of the “directly-given” and a thinking recognition of it. This fact could lead to doubt about my description of the starting point for a theory of knowledge. Hartmann says for example:

“We are not concerned with the hypothetical content of consciousness in a child which is just becoming conscious or in an animal at the lowest level of life, since the philosophizing human being has no experience of this; if he tries to reconstruct the content of consciousness of beings on primitive biogenetic or ontogenetic levels, he must base his conclusions on the way he experiences his own consciousness. Our first task, therefore, is to establish the content of man's consciousness when he begins philosophical reflection.”²

The objection to this, however, is that the world-picture with which we begin philosophical reflection already contains predicates mediated through cognition. These cannot be accepted uncritically, but must be carefully removed from the world-picture so that it can be considered free of anything introduced through the process of knowledge. This division between the “given” and the “known” will not in fact, coincide with any stage of human development; the boundary must be drawn artificially. But this can be done at every level of development so long as we draw the dividing line correctly between what confronts us free of all conceptual definitions, and what cognition subsequently makes of it.

[ 4 ] It might be objected here that I have already made use of a number of conceptual definitions in order to extract from the world-picture as it appears when completed by man, that other world-picture which I described as the directly given. However, what we have extracted by means of thought does not characterize the directly given world-picture, nor define nor express anything about it; what it does is to guide our attention to the dividing line where the starting point for cognition is to be found. The question of truth or error, correctness or incorrectness, does not enter into this statement, which is concerned with the moment preceding the point where a theory of knowledge begins. It serves merely to guide us deliberately to this starting point. No one proceeding to consider epistemological questions could possibly be said to be standing at the starting point of cognition, for he already possesses a certain amount of knowledge. To remove from this all that has been contributed by cognition, and to establish a pre-cognitive starting point, can only be done conceptually. But such concepts are not of value as knowledge; they have the purely negative function of removing from sight all that belongs to knowledge and of leading us to the point where knowledge begins. These considerations act as signposts pointing to where the act of cognition first appears, but at this stage, do not themselves form part of the act of cognition. Whatever the epistemologist proposes in order to establish his starting point raises, to begin with, no question of truth or error, but only of its suitability for this task. From the starting point, too, all error is excluded, for error can only begin with cognition, and therefore cannot arise before cognition sets in.

[ 5 ] Only a theory of knowledge that starts from considerations of this kind can claim to observe this last principle. For if the starting point is some object (or subject) to which is attached any conceptual definition, then the possibility of error is already present in the starting point, namely in the definition itself. Justification of the definition will then depend upon the laws inherent in the act of cognition. But these laws can be discovered only in the course of the epistemological investigation itself. Error is wholly excluded only by saying: I eliminate from my world-picture all conceptual definitions arrived at through cognition and retain only what enters my field of observation without any activity on my part. When on principle I refrain from making any statement, I cannot make a mistake.

[ 6 ] Error, in relation to knowledge, i.e. epistemologically, can occur only within the act of cognition. Sense deceptions are not errors. That the moon upon rising appears larger than it does at its zenith is not an error but a fact governed by the laws of nature. A mistake in knowledge would occur only if, in using thinking to combine the given perceptions, we misinterpreted “larger” and “smaller.” But this interpretation is part of the act of cognition.

[ 7 ] To understand cognition exactly in all its details, its origin and starting point must first be grasped. It is clear, furthermore, that what precedes this primary starting point must not be included in an explanation of cognition, but must be presupposed. Investigation of the essence of what is here presupposed, is the task of the various branches of scientific knowledge. The present aim, however, is not to acquire specific knowledge of this or that element, but to investigate cognition itself. Until we have understood the act of knowledge, we cannot judge the significance of statements about the content of the world arrived at through the act of cognition.

[ 8 ] This is why the directly given is not defined as long as the relation of such a definition to what is defined is not known. Even the concept: “directly given” includes no statement about what precedes cognition. Its only purpose is to point to this given, to turn our attention to it. At the starting point of a theory of knowledge, the concept is only the first initial relation between cognition and world-content. This description even allows for the possibility that the total world-content would turn out to be only a figment of our own “I,” which would mean that extreme subjectivism would be true; subjectivism is not something that exists as given. It can only be a conclusion drawn from considerations based on cognition, i.e. it would have to be confirmed by the theory of knowledge; it could not be assumed as its basis.

[ 9 ] This directly given world-content includes everything that enters our experience in the widest sense: sensations. perceptions, opinions, feelings, deeds, pictures of dreams and imaginations, representations, concepts and ideas. [ 10 ] Illusions and hallucinations too, at this stage are equal to the rest of the world-content. For their relation to other perceptions can be revealed only through observation based on cognition.

[ 11 ] When epistemology starts from the assumption that all the elements just mentioned constitute the content of our consciousness, the following question immediately arises: How is it possible for us to go beyond our consciousness and recognize actual existence; where can the leap be made from our subjective experiences to what lies beyond them? When such an assumption is not made, the situation is different. Both consciousness and the representation of the “I” are, to begin with, only parts of the directly given and the relationship of the latter to the two former must be discovered by means of cognition. Cognition is not to be defined in terms of consciousness, but vice versa: both consciousness and the relation between subject and object in terms of cognition. Since the “given” is left without predicate, to begin with, the question arises as to how it is defined at all; how can any start be made with cognition? How does one part of the world-picture come to be designated as perception and the other as concept, one thing as existence, another as appearance, this as cause and that as effect; how is it that we can separate ourselves from what is objective and regard ourselves as “I” in contrast to the “not-I?”

[ 2 ] We must find the bridge from the world-picture as given, to that other world-picture which we build up by means of cognition. Here, however, we meet with the following difficulty: As long as we merely stare passively at the given we shall never find a point of attack where we can gain a foothold, and from where we can then proceed with cognition. Somewhere in the given we must find a place where we can set to work, where something exists which is akin to cognition. If everything were really only given, we could do no more than merely stare into the external world and stare indifferently into the inner world of our individuality. We would at most be able to describe things as something external to us; we should never be able to understand them. Our concepts would have a purely external relation to that to which they referred; they would not be inwardly related to it. For real cognition depends on finding a sphere somewhere in the given where our cognizing activity does not merely presuppose something given, but finds itself active in the very essence of the given. In other words: precisely through strict adherence to the given as merely given, it must become apparent that not everything is given. Insistence on the given alone must lead to the discovery of something which goes beyond the given. The reason for so insisting is not to establish some arbitrary starting point for a theory of knowledge, but to discover the true one. In this sense, the given also includes what according to its very nature is not-given. The latter would appear, to begin with, as formally a part of the given, but on closer scrutiny, would reveal its true nature of its own accord.

[ 13 ] The whole difficulty in understanding cognition comes from the fact that we ourselves do not create the content of the world. If we did this, cognition would not exist at all. I can only ask questions about something which is given to me. Something which I create myself, I also determine myself, so that I do not need to ask for an explanation for it.

[ 14 ] This is the second step in our theory of knowledge. It consists in the postulate: In the sphere of the given there must be something in relation to which our activity does not hover in emptiness, but where the content of the world itself enters this activity.

[ 15 ] The starting point for our theory of knowledge was placed so that it completely precedes the cognizing activity, and thus cannot prejudice cognition and obscure it; in the same way, the next step has been defined so that there can be no question of either error or incorrectness. For this step does not prejudge any issue, but merely shows what conditions are necessary if knowledge is to arise at all. It is essential to remember that it is we ourselves who postulate what characteristic feature that part of the world-content must possess with which our activity of cognition can make a start.

[ 16 ] This, in fact, is the only thing we can do. For the world-content as given is completely undefined. No part of it of its own accord can provide the occasion for setting it up as the starting point for bringing order into chaos. The activity of cognition must therefore issue a decree and declare what characteristics this starting point must manifest. Such a decree in no way infringes on the quality of the given. It does not introduce any arbitrary assertion into the science of epistemology. In fact, it asserts nothing, but claims only that if knowledge is to be made explainable, then we must look for some part of the given which can provide a starting point for cognition, as described above. If this exists, cognition can be explained, but not otherwise. Thus, while the given provides the general starting point for our theory of knowledge, it must now be narrowed down to some particular point of the given.

[ 17 ] Let us now take a closer look at this demand. Where, within the world-picture, do we find something that is not merely given, but only given insofar as it is being produced in the actual act of cognition?

[ 18 ] It is essential to realize that the activity of producing something in the act of cognition must present itself to us as something also directly given. It must not be necessary to draw conclusions before recognizing it. This at once indicates that sense impressions do not meet our requirements. For we cannot know directly but only indirectly that sense impressions do not occur without activity on our part; this we discover only by considering physical and physiological factors. But we do know absolutely directly that concepts and ideas appear only in the act of cognition and through this enter the sphere of the directly given. In this respect concepts and ideas do not deceive anyone. A hallucination may appear as something externally given, but one would never take one's own concepts to be something given without one's own thinking activity. A lunatic regards things and relations as real to which are applied the predicate “reality,” although in fact they are not real; but he would never say that his concepts and ideas entered the sphere of the given without his own activity. It is a characteristic feature of all the rest of our world-picture that it must be given if we are to experience it; the only case in which the opposite occurs is that of concepts and ideas: these we must produce if we are to experience them. Concepts and ideas alone are given us in a form that could be called intellectual seeing. Kant and the later philosophers who follow in his steps, completely deny this ability to man, because it is said that all thinking refers only to objects and does not itself produce anything. In intellectual seeing the content must be contained within the thought-form itself. But is this not precisely the case with pure concepts and ideas? (By concept, I mean a principle according to which the disconnected elements of perception become joined into a unity. Causality, for example, is a concept. An idea is a concept with a greater content. Organism, considered quite abstractly, is an idea.) However, they must be considered in the form which they possess while still quite free of any empirical content. If, for example, the pure idea of causality is to be grasped, then one must not choose a particular instance of causality or the sum total of all causality; it is essential to take hold of the pure concept, Causality. Cause and effect must be sought in the world, but before we can discover it in the world we ourselves must first produce causality as a thought-form. If one clings to the Kantian assertion that of themselves concepts are empty, it would be impossible to use concepts to determine anything about the given world. Suppose two elements of the world-content were given: a and b. If I am to find a relation between them, I must do so with the help of a principle which has a definite content; I can only produce this principle myself in the act of cognition; I cannot derive it from the objects, for the definition of the objects is only to be obtained by means of the principle. Thus a principle by means of which we define objects belongs entirely to the conceptual sphere alone.

[ 19 ] Before proceeding further, a possible objection must be considered. It might appear that this discussion is unconsciously introducing the representation of the “I,” of the “personal subject,” and using it without first justifying it. For example, in statements like “we produce concepts” or “we insist on this or that.” But, in fact, my explanation contains nothing which implies that such statements are more than turns of phrase. As shown earlier, the fact that the act of cognition depends upon and proceeds from an “I,” can be established only through considerations which themselves make use of cognition. Thus, to begin with, the discussion must be limited to the act of cognition alone, without considering the cognizing subject. All that has been established thus far is the fact that something “given” exists; and that somewhere in this “given” the above described postulate arises; and lastly, that this postulate corresponds to the sphere of concepts and ideas. This is not to deny that its source is the “I.” But these two initial steps in the theory of knowledge must first be defined in their pure form.

• 1. Differentiation of the given, indistinct, world picture into distinct entities is already an act of thought-activity.
• 2. Hartmann, Grundproblem

Dr. Steiner: I am sorry I could not be here at the end of school. It was not possible, though I thought we would be able to meet at that time. You have told me there are a number of things we need to discuss, so I would like to begin there.

A teacher reads a letter from F.R.’s father. The boy had stolen sixteen silver spoons, and his father wants to keep him home.

Dr. Steiner: This story about the spoons is old. The boy’s relationship to his father was never any different. The father would like to take him out if he will go. We need to find a way to work with the boy. We can certainly not throw him out. The boy needs a little moral support at these times. We have to give him some moral support. He is only in the ninth grade, and the children in that class need some moral support. They need a certain relationship to the faculty. They need to love the faculty. I think you have lost contact with the whole ninth grade. The boys immediately see that is very wrong. I think this whole theft problem has caused an enormous amount of remorse in F.R. We need to help him. Under no circumstances can we allow the boy to be taken out. We should not give any cause for removing him from school. We need to work with him.

Doesn’t G.T. have a little tendency to fool himself? He seems to play the part of a pleasant boy.

You need to avoid expressing subjective judgments. If you use such expressions, you will have a subjective relationship. Even when the boys do the worst things, you need to stick to the facts and never relate them to the person. If you reprimand the boys, you can achieve nothing more.

Certainly old R. is someone who cannot control his anger. His treatment of the boy is such that you can almost understand when he exhibits such behavior. When the situation is like that at home, we can only feel sorry for the boy.

We need to have more contact with the students in the upper grades. At that age students cannot stand going through a whole morning of class without any personal contact. They want you to be interested in them personally. They want you to know them, to be interested in them, that is what they want. In those grades this is still a school, not a college; the class is too much like a college, like a seminar, and not enough like a school. They want some contact with the teacher.

I already said it was five, but these five are not just some boys we can throw out into the street. If we threw them out into the street, it would be an unnecessary loss for humanity. We cannot allow that to happen. F.R. is not nearly so talented as T.L.

The father can do what he wants, and we can only try to help. It is crazy to say we should try to force him. The father can do what he wants during the holidays. I think we need more personal contact with the students in the upper grades. It is important that we attempt to have a more personal relationship with them.

One of the ninth-grade teachers says that he would like to visit the class of the previous teacher.

Dr. Steiner: You could make some interesting observations if you visited, but it is very important that you have no difficulties when you stand before your class. During your free time, you should have worked through the material so completely that it causes you no effort while you are teaching, so that you can give all your attention to how you are teaching. The material should be second nature. This whole discipline question is primarily a question of good, methodical preparation. That is true for all the subjects in all grades. It is a question of preparation. Perhaps a basic question is whether there is enough time for preparation. Many of you have told me that there is not enough time for proper preparation. It is obvious that here in the Waldorf School we must do what is necessary to prepare thoroughly, so that the material itself gives us no difficulty when we stand before the class. The students notice very quickly when that is not the case. Then they feel themselves to be above authority. That’s when the problems start.

I can see nothing more than that these five boys are really very good. F.R. is a little weak. He is quite dependent upon being treated such that he feels that you mean what you say honestly. This is a feeling he does not have with his father. He is always wondering subconsciously whether things at school will be the way they are at home. He wants to be understood, but he thinks he is treated without any understanding. His father does not know he is so angry. Everything depends upon the interest the boys have for the content of your teaching. They all pay attention in algebra. They have not been so bad. I have often observed how you can work quite well with them.

It is silly that the father wrote this letter. He did so even after I told him that the way to avoid such problems is for no one to speak about them, not to anyone, and that we have to teach the boy that he should also not speak about them to anyone. Then the father did this anyway. The old man is less well behaved than the boy. This is all very difficult. The boy does not lie to anyone, even when he has to admit some misdeed, but the old man lies all the time. The problem is that the boy knows his father lies every time he opens his mouth. He knows that from his own experience. It would have been best if the boy had seen that, as bad as his action was, we still have so much sympathy for his moral situation that we will cover it up. He can only lose more if we hang it from the bell tower. It would be best if we could remove F.R. from his parents.

All kinds of problems are coming up. I have a new student to enroll, S.T. He is sixteen and will go into the ninth grade. The boy is very well versed in philosophy, knows Plato and Kant and also Philosophy of Freedom. He is good in mathematics, but poor in Latin and German, poor in history, knows a little about geography and natural history, and is horrible in drawing. We need to take all of that into account, but we cannot put him in the eighth grade, since he has already attended the ninth grade at another school. He would also be too old. We must find a place for him to stay, somehow we need to find one. Since there is no room with the teachers, we need to see if we can’t find somewhere else where he can stay.

A teacher mentions there is always so much noise in the eighth grade. She wants either to teach two students separately, or to divide the class.

Dr. Steiner: Taking them aside is not a particularly good method. You need to try to stop their running around. You could give them some extra help, but it is not good to teach them separately. You can divide the class if that is possible. The class is too large for the situation as it is. It would be quite good if you were to give them some extra help, but do not take them away from the class. Such things will always arise, that you have students who are difficult to handle. In normal schools you would not have such students, but with us, they need to move with the class. I think, however, that things would go better if you were better friends with them.

A teacher asks about B.B. in the eighth grade.

Dr. Steiner: Such people exist, and your task is not simply to rid yourself of them, but to really work with them. I do not believe we should try to influence them. What the mother wants to do is another thing. Just because we see there are some difficulties, we cannot simply remove a student from school. You need to interest him. You can work with him if you give him some reason. B. said he didn’t take any of the plums, but when Mr. S. asked him if they were ripe or not, he said Mr. S. was really very sly. He gave the impression that he was defeated.

You must give him some reasons for turning inward, otherwise his thinking will always be like nailing a box shut with a hammer that is always falling off the handle. There are clumps of fat between the various parts of his brain, so that he cannot bring them together. If you get him to really think, he withdraws, but in that way he can get through the fat. I am convinced that he is a good boy, and that you can work with him.

You need to try to move him on so he can move to the next class. You still have five weeks. You can learn to be sly also.

Nettle baths would be useful for him. It might also be useful to add some lemon juice to the bath; in any event, bitter things, bitter plants. I could even say sauerkraut. If possible, use a mixture of all three, but no licorice. Do this three times a week, but not too warm. He should not eat too many desserts. If he has bread, try to toast it, so it has as little water as possible. He has a tendency to form fat, and we must eliminate that. He is also lazy. You could also do the standard curative eurythmy exercises for fat with him. You can also give him some coffee.

A teacher: How can I learn to be sly?

Dr. Steiner: Did you read the issue of Das Goetheanum that contained Brentano’s riddles? Try to get the book and then solve all the riddles. I am serious about that. I selected the four most difficult for the article. That is all there is to say about being sly with B.

A teacher: The Association for School Reform has invited us to participate in a pedagogical conference.

Dr. Steiner: The question is whether you have any interest in going there and speaking. It is senseless. Anyone who would write such a letter was not born to be a school reformer. This is all just nonsense. On the other hand, though, our perspective could be that we would just say something. We could take the standpoint that we would say as much as possible about the subject. Someone who is not afraid of doing that could go and speak about our work, although what you would say would serve no real purpose. Someone who would write such a letter has not been called to that task. It is all just show. That is immediately clear from the letter.

A teacher asks about participating in the art conference in Stuttgart.

Dr. Steiner: Only the things we initiate under our full control have any real purpose. Participation in such a conference would make sense only if you took the standpoint that you wanted to go and talk about our work. Someone could become aware of our Waldorf School method in nearly every kind of gathering. Of course, it would have to be people with whom you could achieve something, as at the English conferences. We need to see them in a different way. This stuff here is just garbage, so we need to view it without any great expectations. If you have no particular desire to go, then simply write that in the near future we are so occupied with developing the Waldorf School and its methods that we need to devote our entire attention to it. That would be more useful than such a conference. We need to be careful to look at what people’s real interest is, otherwise we would degrade the Waldorf School. We can easily reply that we have no time because we need to further develop our methods. I don’t think it is very pedagogical simply to put children’s paintings on display.

We cannot discuss any principle questions today. Perhaps there are still some questions about the material to be taught or how to treat the children.

A teacher asks about algebra in the eleventh-grade curriculum.

Dr. Steiner: What I said was that you should go far enough for the children to have an understanding of Carnot’s theorem and how it is used. That essentially describes the whole curriculum. A great deal of algebra is involved. They will need to understand a lot of algebra, series and functions. The curriculum can stay with that. They should be able to solve problems requiring the use of Carnot’s theorem in all its aspects.

(Speaking about a new teacher) I have made the whole faculty responsible for his education as a human being. You need to be careful that he does not deviate.

A religion teacher: What should I use as examples for folk religions?

Dr. Steiner: The Old Testament. The Hebrew people.

Teachers ask about art class, Goethe’s poetry in the tenth grade, and metaphors.

Dr. Steiner: That material is included in almost all the grades. Of course you can teach them about metaphors and similes. You can teach them a feeling for poetic forms. We cannot say that Goethe could do that only after a certain age, that he could write a verse only after the age of forty. If we do, the students will ask themselves why they should do it when Goethe could do it only at the age of forty. Such things cause reactions, and you need to be very careful. Nevertheless, you can do it. In art, the problem is the material. You can, however, be guided by what the students understand.

A teacher asks about King Henry II.

Dr. Steiner: What I said was that it was his desire to found an ecclesia catholica, non Romana. That is a well-known story. You can certainly find a description of Henry II. Lamprecht is not a historian, he is a dilettante.4 He is interesting as being characteristic of the 3. See lecture of March 13, 1924, in Die Geschichte der Menschheit und die Weltanschauungen der Kulturvölker (GA 353, not in English). development of historical science. You will need to find some source book about Henry II. It is all written down. It is not some phrase, but something he really felt. Henry II introduced the Breviary as something holy. In that connection, we can always say that at that time it was possible for someone to come to the Divine Office who wanted a catholic, but not a Roman Catholic, church.

Lamprecht is more appearances, he has no real feeling. He is always speaking so smugly.

A teacher: What do Parzival’s words lapsit exillis mean as the name for the Grail?

Dr. Steiner: No one knows that now.

A teacher makes a comment.

Dr. Steiner: The main thing is that you recover, refresh yourself. It is important that your enthusiasm blossom during the holidays, and that the flower will have become a fruit when you return again, particularly where the class is not so good. The children are already happy to know you will be here again.

The situation in Germany has become increasingly worse, and it will be complete chaos.

The lectures from Oxford should be printed. We are considering one thing. This morning Leinhas said to me that, in his view, there are so many people who have so much to say, but who write nothing. Why don’t they write anything? Even Das Goetheanum is slowly beginning to suffer from a deficiency of material.

A teacher asks how the pedagogical lectures should be prepared for publication.

Dr. Steiner: The pedagogy should be published independently, much as Steffen reproduces my lectures. Those working with the material should prepare it. You should speak about your personal experiences. Support and describe those areas of the Waldorf School that you have as an ideal, so that what results is a living discussion of the pedagogical principles of the Waldorf School. You could write some beautiful essays about art instruction. Das Goetheanum needs some real essays. There must be a real desire to do something independent, even if it is only an independent honoring of things already begun. But do something.

Where do all these useless manuscripts come from? Are they also coming from the Society? Sometimes they print really useless things. It would be good to present the things that arose in the art conference in a more universal way. Why shouldn’t that be the occasion for giving special presentations.

There is also a possibility of discussing very interesting questions of method, for example, questions like those I spoke about in Dornach. There is too little literature about the Waldorf School available to the public. Couldn’t you write something about your principles of teaching? We have forty-two teachers, almost enough that four could write something for each issue. These things need to develop here. We need to develop a feeling for how to present things from various perspectives. I wanted to give an example of that in the introductions to the various eurythmy performances, when I attempted to present something from various points of view. That is what I tried to do with the eurythmy introductions.8 When I gave such an introduction recently, people stood outside and did not come in to listen. That was during the General Meeting, after a session where the German delegates had distinguished themselves so much by saying that the Goetheanum was already in ruins before it burned. Four hours of pure rubbish were spoken during that session. It was just dirty garbage, four hours long.

I hope you will refresh yourselves in every way. In all the various areas of the anthroposophical movement, we need a renewal of our strength. It is really so that we should give consideration to renewing our strength, just as plants renew themselves each year. We need a new inner enthusiasm, a new inner fire. Of course, living conditions are difficult, and they become more so each week. Now the Mark has no value whatsoever; it is only a means of computing. There is no way to foresee what chaos we will slide into. Our monthly budget is now about DM 400,000,000. By August, it could easily be two billion, perhaps even more.

A man in Austria wrote me that he had completed a business transaction for which he will be paid in dollars. He wants to keep only six hundred dollars for himself, and what he receives beyond that he wants to give us. That will apparently happen. I asked him to contact the Waldorf School. That is about DM 500,000,000, but it is really only a drop in the bucket. It is totally crazy, the situation. I think that for a while, it will be just as necessary to have outside money for the Waldorf School as it is for the Goetheanum. This is something we should present properly. It was not done properly in Dornach. Now we need to close.

I have often spoken to you of how the human soul has altered in the course of mankind's development, how short-sighted it is to believe that the constitution of the modern soul can be understood if one will not look back to the different changes it has passed through. We look back—I do not need to recapitulate it—to the most varied epochs of earthly evolution; we have in particular often characterised the post-Atlantean epochs in order to show how the constitution of man's soul continually altered. In speaking of such things one must advance from the abstract to the concrete. One must try to give as clear an answer as possible to the question: What was the nature of the human soul in the ages of antiquity? We look back to a far-off age in which—and this may be stated in more than a figurative sense—divine teachers themselves instructed men about the sacred mysteries of existence. We know that from this ancient epoch onwards men have come to learn of these mysteries of existence in most manifold ways. From epoch to epoch the conceptions of the human soul have actually become more and more different. The concepts and ideas which we have today, which live in us and which we put every moment into words, these lived too in earlier conditions of our soul but in an utterly different way. Many of our most ordinary ideas lived quite differently. Today I will speak of what are apparently the most ordinary concepts, two concepts living in man's soul. People denote them at every moment from their word-store, but they lived in the human soul in earlier times in an entirely different way. I will speak of the two concepts: Space and Time.

Space for modern man is the most abstract thing conceivable. What do men mostly picture as space? Three dimensions standing at right angles to each other—or if one reads philosophical text books: the state of extension of physical objects—or there are still other definitions of space. But all that—think how prosaic, cold, abstract, that all is! Three dimensions standing at right angles to one another, or even all that geometry has to say about space,—how frightfully abstract, how prosaic and poverty-stricken, so poverty-stricken that the whole of space—with time as well—has become for Kant subjective shadow, merely a form of conceiving sense-phenomena. This abstraction, space, of which modern man knows little more than that it has length, breadth and height, this abstraction, space, was a very different conception in the far past, of which, however, something still exists today for especially sensitive people—though indeed it is only a trace. One need not go back so extremely far; in the 6th, 7th, 8th pre-Christian centuries one may definitely say that space, as it was then experienced, was very different for the human soul from the prosaic abstraction that it is for man today. Even in the early Greek ages when the soul experienced space, it felt it to be something with which it was livingly united. It felt itself placed into a living Something, in feeling itself placed into space.

Today man has at most a vestige of the sense of standing with his personality, his human self within space. But the man of antiquity expressed a significant relation of himself to the universe, if he distinguished above and below, right and left, in front and behind. The living feeling that one expressed when in ancient times one spoke of above and below, of right and left, of before and behind, has terribly little to do with our abstract three dimensions, which have no other occupation at all than standing at right angles to each other. What a very monotonous occupation it would be through eternity, if one did nothing else at all but stand at right angles to one another like the three dimensions of geometry.

Above and below: it was something living when in ancient times man still experienced how he was first a little child and raised himself from below upwards, when he felt how the course of life consists in an unfolding in the direction of above and below. The course of life consisted in the experience of the direction of above and below. One only travels a tiny distance from the earth (unless one lives in the Ahrimanic age of aeroplanes, or in the Atlantean age but there it was not very high above the earth—you know of this from my description of Atlantis), only a very little distance in normal life does one travel upwards from the earth in growing, and thus experience the above and below, the opposition of above and below. But this opposition was felt in antiquity as the contrast of the world of consciousness and the objective world,—of the conscious and the unconscious world. How subject is related to object—that was a deep experience when one felt above and below. Above, and ever farther and farther upwards come the divine worlds, downwards the worlds which are opposed to the Gods, and the human being is placed within the Above and Below.

As late as to such men as Goethe (you only need study his “Faust”) you still find remains of the consciousness of above and below. In addition to the above and below men felt the right, and left. Today we must use abstractions if we speak of right and left. To the man of antiquity a living in right and left was an actual experience, one might say a genuine world of observation. The Above and Below is the line from infinity to infinity or from the conscious to the unconscious. Right and left: in experiencing right and left one experienced the connection in the world between mind and figure, between wisdom and form. You only need draw a symmetry-axis, what is left and right of it gives together the form and you cannot combine the right and the left without doing it purposefully, without relating the one to the other.

If above and below is pointing to man's mysterious relation to the spiritual and material worlds, then the experience of right and left is his relation to the worlds spreading out in form. And by relating the form in the right and left to one another, by letting wisdom prevail in the forms arranged symmetrically right and left, he experiences himself in the second element of space. This experience of sense in the shape, of wisdom in the form in all possible variations, this feeling of oneself within this harmony of sense and shape, of wisdom and form, was experienced by the man of old as what today is the abstract second dimension. The above and below, the right and left belonged to the flat plane, to the surface which can have no existence for the senses, which requires thickness, needs before and behind if it is to exist in the element of the sense-perceptible.

And in this third, in the before and behind, ancient mankind felt the entrance of the material into the spiritual. (See diagram) Above and below, left and right he experienced as something still spiritual. It can have no material existence if something is merely above and below, and right and left—it is pure picture, must be pure picture in space; it becomes material only through thickness. In ancient times man felt vividly that in growing he made a few steps upwards from the earths surface in the direction of the above and below. He felt that in walking, he could move freely that he was in the element of his will: before and behind. In between stood the completely free self-movement to right and left while standing still.

Ancient man experienced in his being this threefold contrast as placed into the All; the remaining still with regard to right and left, the striding into the world with regard to before and behind, the gradual movement from below upwards in the direction of the above-below. This was the experience of the man of old. In experiencing the above and below he felt weaving in the universe all that today we call the intelligence, the reasoning of the universe. All that rules in the universe as intelligence was interwoven in space with his idea of the above and below, end since he could share in this intelligence of the world through his growth from below upwards, man felt himself to be intelligent. The participation in the above and below was at the same time a participation in cosmic intelligence. And participation in the right and left, in the interweaving of sense and shape, of wisdom and form, was for him the feeling that weaves through the world. And his restful remaining still, surveying the world, was to him a uniting of his own feeling with the universal feeling. His striding through space in the direction of forwards or back was the unfolding of his will, the placing of himself, with his own will, into the universe, the universal will, He felt his own life to be interwoven with the above and below, the right and left, the before and behind. The conscious and the unconscious: above and below; wisdom and form: right and left; spirit and matter: in front and behind. Such was the experience of the man of antiquity.

At the same time, however, he experienced the indefinite—if I put it crudely—when one stands on one's head then the under is above and the above under. So too is it for the antipodes, and if one counts oneself in with the earth, the below is above and the above underneath. One can imagine too through some circumstance or other that what is normally right is in front, what is normally left is behind. These directions are just as living and weaving in space as in a certain respect they are indistinguishable, weaving into one another. Ancient man felt as he thus experienced himself in the three-divisioned space that the Divinity ruled in the threefoldness. The divine ruling in space directed man then to the divine in duration.

He experienced—and what I am saying now was actually experienced—he experienced in space the divine manifestation, ruling in threefold manner. It was the image in him of the threefold God: Father, Son and Spirit or by what other terms the three-membered God was known. Threefoldness is truly not thought out in the mind, is not an invention. The threefoldness with all its qualities was experienced in its reflection when ancient man experienced livingly the three dimensions of space.

And just as in a certain respect want of clearness can prevail about the above and below, just as right and left can also be before and behind, so in certain circumstances an uncertainty can also enter into the reciprocal relationships of God, Son, Spirit. In the sphere of the transitory, the sphere of space, man experienced the three dimensions concretely, not abstractly or geometrically as we do. And as he experienced concretely how the divine expressed itself in space, in the transitory, he therefore related the transitory to the element of duration; the three-dimensioned space became for him the reflected image of the three-dimensioned spirituality.

The idea of ancient man was approximately: If I live here below on earth I live in the threefoldness of space, but this is to me the reflected proof of the threefold nature of the divine origin of the world.

Today space has become an abstraction and only a few people perceive the depth-dimension, the thickness-dimension, that is, the above and below, the in front and behind, or the plane-dimension of right and left. Even among philosophers little of this experience is to be found. But yet some few who reflect on things and are not entirely asleep come to realise that the depth-dimension really arises in the unconscious observation lying not so very far below the consciousness. Men still feel the depth, but that is the last shadowy relic of space-experience. In the evolved religions an understanding for the Oneness of God has taken precedence of the real understanding of the threefoldness. The understanding for the unity of God has an origin similar to that for the threefold nature of God through space.

My dear friends, spiritual science seeks its information out of the divine facts themselves. Simple-minded people that come and say that no external proof for this or that is given. Well, we have gone into a great deal. I could still relate many things, but it shall not occupy our time today. I will only point out that it is largely the unscientific nature of modern science, so-called, if the verification cannot be found. Just this one thing I will say, and it is as it were an external proof of the fact that the man of antiquity felt in the same way I have described today. Why have the ancient Rabbis called God also Space? Because in earlier time, even in Judaism, they felt what I have shown you today concerning mankind. If science could really think in different domains it would find countless riddles which at the same time, however, are true proof, external proof of what spiritual science has at any rate to find out of the spiritual facts. One of the names for God among the Rabbis is Space; Space and God denote the same.

The unity of the divine has an origin similar to that of the threefoldness of the divine. It is connected with the living experience of Time. Time too was not the abstraction to the man of old that it is to us today. But the concrete experience of time was lost still earlier than the concrete experience of space. If one reads Plato or Aristotle today with a real understanding, and not in the way many schoolmasters read—well, I have often quoted the note written by Hebbel in his diary where the reincarnated Plato sits before the schoolmaster as a pupil, and the teacher reads a dialogue of Plato's with his class and the reincarnated Plato is given very poor marks. Hebbel noted this in his diary. One who reads Plato and Aristotle today, not as is often done by a schoolmaster, but with really deep understanding, finds that this feeling for space was still fully in existence in the 6th, 7th, 8th pre-Christian centuries. It was however already shadowy in Plato and Aristotle, and the living experience of time was lost still earlier than those pre-Christian centuries. It was strongly alive in the second post-Atlantean epoch the ancient Persian, where a cold shiver would have been produced among, for instance, the pupils of Zarathustra, if one had spoken to them of time as a line running from the past to the future. It runs quite uniformly, but does nothing else than run its course from the past to the future.

Again in the Gnosis there existed a more shadowy feeling—but scarcely still to be recognised—for the living nature of time. They did not speak of a line running from past to future but they spoke of Aeons, the creators who were there earlier and from whom the later proceeded, where one Aeon always passed on the impulse of creation to others. Time was so imagined pictorially that in the hierarchical succession the preceding Being always gave the impulse to the one following; the following was ever, as it were, brought forth by the preceding, the preceding Being enclosed the next following. One looked up to the preceding Being, as more divine than the one succeeding. “Later” one experienced as more non-divine, “earlier” one experienced as more divine. This looking towards the change in evolution from the divine to the non-divine was contained in the living experience of time. Everything would fall apart if one were not to weave the divine and the non-divine to a unity. That is identical with our modern abstractions of past and future.

But in this picture of time, looking right back to the “Ancient of Days”, and encompassing the ever more and more encompassing, one experienced the image of God as Unity. Just as the three-divisioned, threefold Space was experienced as the image of the threefoldness of God, so was Time experienced as the image of the oneness of God. The basis of monotheism lies in the ancient time-experience, the basis for perceiving the Trinity lies in the ancient space-experience. Thus has the constitution of man's soul changed, thus has what was once alive became abstract and dry. However paradoxical this may sound: modern man most certainly has an abstract picture when he speaks of space, and he pictures or so I believe—a living relationship when he speaks of a friend. But that concreteness, that elementary experience, which today speaks from friend to friend, that is still abstract in comparison with the intensive experience of the universe which ancient man had when he experienced space and time, which to him were the images of the Unity and Trinity of the Divine.

Thus have we become dry and abstract in respect of space and time, and something else must take their place, something that we must again experience, that must be more and more inwardly realised. We must learn to feel that duality, that contrast in the world of which I have spoken during recent weeks. My dear friends, think for once that someone were to see only the rippled surface of water. This crinkly, rippled water-surface is in fact an abstract line. What is the concrete? There below, the water; there above, the air. And out of the duality air and water, in the co-operation of their forces, there arises the maya, the rippled surface. But so is our world the rippled surface, so too are we as men if we behold ourselves only as we look within maya; if we behold ourselves in reality then here too we must see: below, the water; above, the air.

Below the water—we see it if we observe transitory evolution, as I have brought it before you recently, where man develops in such a way that what he can conceive as a child he would grasp only as an old man. What he conceives in the age of puberty, he knows somewhat earlier, but still only towards old age. I depicted the course of human life, where it is only in old age that one grasps in oneself what one has been in childhood and youth. Life runs thus not apparently, but in reality on the surface, I have said that perhaps one does not need such a perspective today for life on the surfaces but for dying one needs it.—That the conception of the below; and belonging to it, the conception of the real above the region of duration. I spoke of this region in a recent lecture,¹ where man does not evolve, but has that which belongs to duration his whole life through from birth to death. But we cannot consider today how the below and the above interweave, if we do not realise the below, there where it threatens to become fixed, where it threatens to harden; and if we do not realise the above there where it threatens to dissolve, to spiritualise itself—if we do not develop the feeling for the contrast: the Divine—the Luciferic the Ahrimanic. Man of old had something alive in his soul when he spoke of his space-experience, his time-experience; the man of the Earth-future must develop inner concepts, inner impulses representing: Divine—Ahrimanic Luciferic.

• 1. 15th September 1918