The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

Of course it will be especially necessary for the student body not only to work in the sense of spreading the given anthroposophical problems in the narrower sense, but also to work out general problems and the like in the sense that Dr. Stein just meant. Of course, it will not be so necessary at first to work towards dissertations with such things. It has often, really quite often, happened that I have been asked by younger students in recent times along the following lines: Yes, we actually want to combine anthroposophy with our specific science. How can one act so that one works in the right way towards one's goal after graduation, after the state examination? What should you do? How should you organize your work? — I always gave the following advice: Try to get through the official studies as quickly as possible, to get through them as quickly as possible, and I am always very happy to help with any advice. Choose any scientific topic that seems to emerge from the course of your studies, as a dissertation or state examination paper or the like. Whichever topic you choose, each one is of course diametrically opposed to the other approaches in anthroposophical terms; there can be no doubt about that. Each is diametrically opposed. But now I advise you to write your dissertation in such a way that you first write down what the professor can censor, what he will understand; and take a second notebook, and write down everything that arises for you in the course of your studies and that you believe should actually be worked in from anthroposophy. You then keep that for yourself. Then you write your two pages — that is how long a dissertation must be — and you submit them. And try to complete them. Then you can really help anthroposophy energetically with what you have acquired in addition to this one in the second notebook. For one only really realizes what significant problems arise, specialist and specialized problems, when one is put in the position of having to work scientifically on a certain topic and the like. But there is a danger of unclear collaboration with the professors. And submitting dissertations to the professors that are written “in the anthroposophical sense” – these are usually not suitable for professors – I do not consider this to be favorable because it actually slows us down at the pace that the anthroposophical movement should be taking.

We need as many academically trained colleagues as possible. If there is anything that is seriously lacking in the anthroposophical movement today, it is a sufficiently large number of academically trained colleagues. I do not mean the externality of needing, let's say, stamped people. It is not meant that way. But first of all, we need people who have learned to work scientifically from within. This inner scientific work is best learned in one's own work. Secondly, however, we need co-workers who come from the student body as soon as possible, and who are no longer held back by considerations for their later professional studies. — You see, it is not at all surprising that it is as difficult as it is in Switzerland, for example. As a student, of course, it is easy to join such an association in the first few semesters if you are free-minded enough to do so. Then come the last semesters. You are busy with other things, and it becomes more difficult. And so, one by one, the threads you have pulled are torn away. This has just been emphasized.

So I would like to say, especially for scientific collaboration: During such a transition period, the topics must be dealt with in two ways: one that the professor understands and the other that is saved for later. Of course, I am not saying that very special opportunities that arise should not be seized, and that these opportunities, which are there, should not be vigilantly observed by the student body in the most eminent sense and really exploited in the sense and service of the movement. On the one hand, I hope, and on the other hand, I fear almost silently, that our dear friend, Professor Römer in Leipzig, will now be inundated with a huge number of anthroposophical dissertations! But I think that would also be one of the things he would probably prefer. And such a document of student trust would show that he is not one of the professors just mentioned. That would come from the foundation.

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

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

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

The “struggle problems”! Yes, you see, the point is this. The Anthroposophical Society, even if it was not called that in the past, has existed since the beginning of the century, and it has actually only ever worked positively, at least as far as I myself am concerned. It let the opponents rant and rave, do all sorts of things. But of course the opponents then come up with certain objections. They say, this has been said, that has been said, yes, that has not even been refuted. It is indeed difficult to find understanding for the fact that it is actually the person making the claim who has the burden of proof, not the person to whom it is attributed. And we could really experience it, again and again, that strange views emerged precisely among academics, I now mean lecturers, professors, pastors and those who had emerged from the ranks of academics. Just think, for example, of the things said against anthroposophy, anthroposophists and so on by professors who are, I would say, 'revered' by the outside world (but I say this only with caution) – things that are so well documented that following up the evidence is a mockery, a bloody mockery, of all possible methods of making a claim in science. and so on, which are so documented that if one follows these documents with reasons, it is a mockery, a bloody mockery of all possible methods of asserting something in science. Therefore, with someone like Professor Fuchs, I simply had to say: It is impossible that this person is anything other than a completely impossible anatomist! Am I supposed to believe that he conscientiously tests his things when, after all that has been presented, he tests my baptismal certificate in the way he has tested it? You have to draw conclusions about the way one person treats one area from the way they treat another. Such things simply show – through the fact that people step forward and show their particular habits – the symptoms of how science is done today. Even the things that are presented at universities and technical colleges today are basically no better founded than the things that are asserted in this way; it is only that the generally extremely loose habits in scientific life are emerging in this way. And that is what is needed: to raise the fight to a higher level, so to speak.

And here it is not necessary, as my fellow student wished, for example, and as I very well understand, to play the game as a “fighting organization.” That is not necessary. Rather, only one thing: to avoid what has occurred so frequently in the Anthroposophical Society. In the Anthroposophical Society, this always came to the fore, as incredible as it is – not in everyone, of course, but very often: one was obliged to defend oneself against a wild accusation, and then to use harsh words, for example, say, in the case when a gentleman of Gleich invents a lecturer “Winter” by reading that I myself have held winter lectures, then invents a personality “Winter” and introduces it into the fight in a very evil way. Yes, you see, I don't think one would say too harsh words in this case if one were to speak of foolishness! Because here, even when it occurs in a general, we are dealing with a genuine, pure-bred idiot. And in the Anthroposophical Society, it was usually the case that one was not wronged by the one who acted somewhat like Mr. von Gleich, but by the one who defended himself. Until today! We have learned from experience that one must not become aggressive in this way. In the eyes of many people, to become aggressive means to defend oneself in this way. It is necessary to follow things with a watchful eye and to reject them, without emphasizing that one is a fighting organization or the like. You have to be positive about it. And then the others must stand behind them, behind the one who is obliged to defend himself. It is not a matter of us becoming fighting cocks ourselves; but it is a matter of the others standing behind us if it should become necessary to defend ourselves. And it is a matter of really following the symptoms of the world-descriptive, scientific, religious and so on in this respect in our time, taking an interest in them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would also like to say: I recently read an article from a feature page, and I can assure you that what recently took place in Stuttgart is not the slightest bit an end, but only a beginning, and I can assure you that things will get much, much worse. I have often said this to our friends here – a very, very long time ago already. I recently read a piece from a feature article in which it says: “Spiritual sparks, which flash like lightning after the wooden mousetrap, are thus sufficiently available, and it will take some of Steiner's cleverness to work in a conciliatory way so that one day a real spark of fire from the Dornach glory does not bring about an inglorious end.

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

Welcome: First of all, I would like to thank Dr. Steiner on behalf of everyone for the meeting that he has granted us despite his many commitments. The suggestions that Dr. Steiner gave us at Easter have continued to work in us in the meantime. We have not heard much from each other in the meantime, but when we came together again and talked, we realized that we had all made some progress. Some things that were still a problem at Easter are no longer a problem today. We have already come to specific things today. We believe that special tasks arise for us from our special position between anthroposophy and the youth movement, tasks on two sides: towards the youth movement and towards the anthroposophical movement. We want to bring anthroposophy to the youth movement. This is probably best done on a person-to-person basis. However, this work should be supported and promoted by more “official” work from the community. Therefore, a network of trusted people should be set up throughout Germany, with a center in Tübingen. The task of the trusted people should be to connect with young anthroposophists in their area, to attend conferences of the youth movement, to distribute writings by taking advantage of personal relationships. An article on the youth movement and anthroposophy can be published in an anthroposophical journal for this purpose. The work should be carried out in close contact with the main association. We regard the Catholic youth movement as our most determined opponent. We would ask Doctor to perhaps elaborate on this. We see our work in the Anthroposophical Movement as follows: we know that we have to become richer in knowledge. But we see our particular task as being to work to build community. We want to continue our community life as before with evenings together, hikes, festivals and so on. But we want to gradually let it be permeated and transformed by the Anthroposophical spirit. Here we ask the doctor for some specific suggestions. We are thinking of inviting younger members of the Anthroposophical Society, students and others, to our communities first. I would like to add one more practical question here: is it possible for a young person from the youth movement to also be a sponsor for admission to the Anthroposophical Society?

Rudolf Steiner: Perhaps I may first deal with the last point, the question of how to bring Anthroposophy into the youth movement. To do that, you need to have a real insight into the conditions that prevail there, not only externally but also internally. You see, the anthroposophical movement – you are familiar with most of its history – could not work any differently than to consider the real possibilities from the very beginning. At the beginning of the formation of the Anthroposophical Society, humanity was not yet ripe for the anthroposophical movement. But one could not wait for general maturity to get the movement off the ground at all. There were certain people who had been searching for something for a long time, something from the depths of their souls. People who had not yet found theosophy and mysticism were there, and some of them did not even know that there was such a thing as anthroposophy. People who had a certain longing for something deeper than life offered.

I was invited, for example, to an association where the most diverse people in terms of talent and education were united and had such a longing. And I went because I had more time then than I do now. Among these people, I found something curious. At the time, I was a teacher at the Workers' Education School in Berlin and had my audience there. There, in that place, I was really only invited and a newcomer, but to my surprise I found a small number of my listeners from the Workers' Education School. You see, this longing I spoke of was everywhere, and one had to take it into account, otherwise the anthroposophical movement would not have progressed at all. What one can do today could not be done at all back then. The difficulty was to make those who had this longing understand the things. Many could not go along, they wanted something different. But nevertheless there were always individuals who joined in, and so the movement grew. But as a result, the movement still has the consequences of its teething troubles: unclear, mystical striving, all sorts of things of this kind, as you could also notice here.

Now, for example, the most diverse people want to hear something about what suits them. So someone makes the acquaintance of an anthroposophist. He may ask for an answer to a medical question and end up with someone who says: “You have to read such and such a saying from Dr. Steiner's ‘Calendar of the Soul’. It is true that Steiner has a habit of always giving you something other than what you are looking for, but what you are looking for you would find anyway; it would then pass over into you from the saying.

This had to be reckoned with. And we should not forget that the anthroposophical movement, in its starting point, has something almost edgy and angular about it, which can come across as highly unappealing. But all this had to be reckoned with. You can't go charging headlong into anything. That is part of it, and you should have no illusions about it. You had to reckon with this longing that is in today's youth. But you must not lose sight of the fact, especially at the moment when you want to approach the anthroposophical movement, that the anthroposophical movement has come so far as to break with all old prejudices itself. It will of course work without the prejudices; it is quite possible to break with all philistinism.

That is what I wanted to say at the outset, so that you do not come from your point of view and say that anthroposophists are such terrible people.

The other thing is that community building, hiking together, is by no means excluded; on the contrary, it should be encouraged. Community building, if it is supported by the anthroposophical spirit, can take all kinds of forms. You must not forget that when you talk about the fact that community building is something completely new today, you must not forget that we old people were also young once, and that back then there were always people who formed such communities. I still remember a circle that we had formed in Berlin, which was perhaps nothing more than a clique, in doctrinal terms. But even cliques had good intentions, because every community is, of course, based on such a clique. Of course, the formation of the community also had all kinds of add-ons that were related to the character of the individual people. Even the title of our community in Berlin was actually intended to annoy the philistines. I say this in quotation marks: this community was called “Der Verbrechertisch” (The Criminal Table). Otto Erich Hartleben was also one of them. This is not to say that we broke in and so on. I am only telling you this so that you can get a complete picture that today's youth movement is not the first community to be formed. You have already expressed that.

But then there is absolutely no objection to members of the youth movement being able to act as guarantors for those in the youth movement who want to become members of the Anthroposophical Society. That is something that can absolutely be realized. And that brings me to the other question.

The question of the Catholic youth movement has just been thrown into the debate, and quite rightly so. You must be extremely careful with regard to this youth movement and not lose sight of the possibility of being influenced in one direction or another. There are a great many people in the Catholic youth movement who are hopeful and hardworking. On the other hand, it would be a serious mistake if you were to fall prey to the Catholic youth movement as a Catholic youth movement. Your youth movement arises from the needs of young people themselves. What I would like to mention briefly is that the whole difficulty lies in the following. The entire youth movement has arisen from the needs of the individual, and it is held together only by the cement that resides in the hearts of individuals. This is not the case with the Catholic youth movement. All movements that really want to move towards the future do not have the same opportunities as the Catholic youth movement, which guards something that has been established through the development of humanity, through tradition and so on, with tremendous purpose. The youth movement must be decentralized. The Catholic youth movement is thoroughly centralized. And the greatest danger that exists is falling into the Catholic fundamentals. You must not imagine this to be so easy! Do you think a movement is emerging that says: We want to be good Catholics, we want to do everything to lead people back to a living Christianity, we want nothing to do with the Jesuits. — To the one who hears this, it might seem tolerable. But only those who know that such a movement can be well set up with all the programs against the Jesuits can gain a point of view, but that all of this can be done well by a Jesuit priest. Because it is absolutely in the program of the Jesuits that they set up their opponents themselves. You will hardly believe that many fall for it. But look at the young Catholic movement, which was formed against Jesuitism many years ago, and after only fifteen years it was taken in. This is something that does not need to be left out of the program.

If you do not pay attention to the fact that the Jesuit is reckoning with the most powerful of his opponents and is thus, in a sense, generous, you will never be able to see clearly. Otherwise you would see that one cannot be careful enough against the Catholic youth movement as such, so as not to slip into it. I had good acquaintances who were on the same ground as me at the time. But when I meet someone from them again today, I can see that a large part of them has fallen under the spell of the Catholic Church. The spell of the Catholic Church is so great, and the Catholic Church has an enormous power of attraction. And when you consider all this, you always have to be on your guard against a trap. Therefore, I think that you will only make progress if you maintain the absolute independence of the Catholic youth movement. You must be aware that all strength depends on your finding absolutely uninfluenceable people, of whom you are sure that they have nothing in ambush. You will not find any Jesuit stamp on them; you will not find that they keep everything straight with you. I am telling you this only to characterize the matter and to make you aware that you could get into trouble if you were to give in to the Catholic youth movement, which is now also crying out against Jesuitism. But you have to look at people again in fifteen years, and then you will see which side they have ended up on.

And with the essay on the anthroposophical youth movement, one would achieve even more. It is something very important that emerges from what I have often spoken to you about, that much of what emerges from the youth movement lies deep in the soul. Most of it can only be understood if one grasps what the youth movement is. I can well imagine that such an essay can have a very favorable effect, and it would certainly be good if this were done by young people. If this were to come about, then of course one would have to be prepared for the special opposition that can be connected with individuality in a favorable or unfavorable way. One must necessarily take this into account, even if it does not appear so on the surface. Although many say that anthroposophists only do what they are told, in practice the individuality is nowhere as pronounced as in the Anthroposophical Society. There, everyone only does what they really want. This actually has its disadvantages.

It is true that something must be present uniformly where one is dealing with a movement. And if you now elect representatives, it is necessary that you take care that they do not start disputes, but that they really are people who put the whole above the personal. This will always be necessary in the youth movement. So I think you have to look at your people, because you have to know your people if you want to have confidence in them. That is all I wanted to say in response to your questions.

Question: How should community be cultivated?

Rudolf Steiner: You see, once you have grasped the spirit of anthroposophy, you will think that the way in which the individual community is to be formed comes into consideration only in the second instance. It may well be that the individual communities that already exist will continue to be cultivated entirely out of their own nature and will do what they have always done. It is not a matter of now making a programmatic decision to do this or that. Anthroposophy can only work in such a way that it can be incorporated into every form. It is best if you do not approach it from the outside, changing the existing arrangements, but rather you should think of carrying Anthroposophy into it as such. Anthroposophy is a secret power that could gradually enter everything.

A participant: Anthroposophists always say that hiking will lead to enthusiasm.

Rudolf Steiner: Well, that is not true, the walks as such do not belong to the areas that promote enthusiasm. Walks are enthusiastic when the members are enthusiastic.

A participant: One is always reproached, especially from the anthroposophical side, that the youth movement can do nothing but walk and celebrate festivals.

Rudolf Steiner: That is connected with what I have assumed, which also applies to the Anthroposophical Movement. It also came into being among human beings, and the people who have proven themselves in it from the beginning are naturally more of the kind that are not so attuned to hiking, but are involved in completely different types of work. Therefore, you cannot expect them to have much time for the migratory birds. I think it is natural to understand that you are confronted with all sorts of things. Now you can keep the migrations quiet. All this is something you don't need to worry about. The anthroposophical movement could just as easily have been created among migratory birds. In all these matters, one must speak in such a way that one really has to consider the whole breadth and comprehensiveness of anthroposophy and not limit oneself to some little details. One cannot demand of the anthroposophical movement that it accommodate every wild fanaticism. I can imagine that one could say that one does not need to think at all, but only to wander. This is not to say that all community-building must take on this wild form, but it is the case with many. The anthroposophical movement was brought to fruition by people who naturally had very different feelings from those of today's youth; it did not arise from youth. It will be appropriate when it can be cultivated by young people. But it arose somewhat decrepitly; from the beginning it had nothing youthful about it. I always had to take this old age into account. What confronted me in the first lectures is characteristic of old age. I spoke as I am accustomed to speaking, and an old man approached me and said: If you speak so loudly, you drive away the spiritual essence. You must not talk so loudly, you must also say occult science. Incidentally, this man was later one of the most loyal supporters of anthroposophy until his death. It is best not to be offended by this old man. There is no need to be offended, just stick to the matter at hand.

Question: What do you think of summer solstice celebrations? Could you perhaps say something about them?

Rudolf Steiner: You see, I have already said at Easter that you have to stick to what is a fact for those who are involved in anthroposophy, but which can be experienced everywhere. I said that something is emerging in the development of humanity at the end of the 1980s that is particularly shaping the background of today's youth movement, that is emerging as a longing and so on, as something that is actually emerging from the deeper layers of the soul, and that we can see in its effect.

People of earlier times regarded things that existed as very real powers, and these powers were such that they worked in people until the year: effects that were set at the summer solstice. You will understand what I have said fully if you imagine yourself in ancient times. Man was then quite differently connected with the laws of nature. Man was so connected with the whole of nature, that the thoughts conceived at the summer solstice were the most fruitful for the assimilation of the laws. One must resort to somewhat radical expressions if one wants to form one's own thoughts about what then lived in man. People said to themselves, just as the bull is brought out to fertilize at certain times of the year, so the human soul must expose itself to be fertilized at certain times of the year. Now there is the fact that the earth sleeps in summer, that is, the earth is in a state like that of man when he sleeps. The earth sleeps in summer and wakes in winter. And just as the etheric body is most active during sleep, so is the earth in this state. In the past, people felt most connected to it then. You know how they held their greatest festivals around the summer solstice. In contrast, in the south, in Africa and so on, it was the winter solstice that people regarded as the greatest festival. They wanted to come into contact with what emanated from the awakening etheric body of the earth; this is based on a polar contrast in the human spirit. And ultimately, all customs of the time can be traced back to this.

All this emerged as a feeling in people at that time. For him, it all comes down to the fact that it contains a certain lawfulness. It is absolutely right that things come up again. I suffered pain when a professor came up with the idea that Easter should no longer take place after the sky, should no longer be based on the sky, but should always be moved to April 1st. He thought this was such a clever idea that one should no longer have a movable festival, but that it should always be celebrated on April 1. However, this completely tears man and his feelings out of the whole process in the universe. This human feeling would indeed be corrupted if it were to be removed from the process in the universe, whereas this coexistence in the universe has something in it that also keeps man alive and young. If there is an inclination to experience the spirit of the solstice, so that one knows that one acted out of the highest feelings at that time, then it would be good to promote that. But one should be immersed in concrete life, so that one knows that there is something different about the summer solstice than about the winter solstice. This thinking should be cultivated on such occasions.

Question about the way of life.

Rudolf Steiner: This can only be done if the anthroposophical movement as such is lucky with what is to intervene in the whole of social life. Of course, as long as the anthroposophical movement still has something sectarian in it, it will always be called a sect.

Anthroposophy has found healing methods today. People will come and want to be healed; but then people stand up in the name of a party and rail against the law that something like the anthroposophical movement allows at all. I am giving a specific example! People want to cultivate Anthroposophy in secret, but they shrink from public appearances. But anthroposophy can and must work on a large scale; only then can it prevail. But people must also have the courage to bring the anthroposophical spirit to the general public. From the very beginning, I always tried to realize that we founded a therapeutic institute, a research institute and so on. Work must be done in such a way that it is truly based on anthroposophy. If things continue as they are, this will not be possible. Of course, the effectiveness of the matter always depends on the will of those who work in the public sphere on anthroposophical principles. And of course, if you always speak in abstract terms, you can say that this is not possible in the next few years.

When I presented my threefold social order idea, people said: It could take another hundred years for that to happen, the time frame is poorly chosen. — I can only say that if people thought this through in everything they did, nothing would get done. That is not the right attitude. Instead, the question for me is: What should one do? I must say that the anthroposophical movement would not have come as far as it has if I had not repeatedly asked myself this question. If you stand on anthroposophical ground, it is also a matter of developing the will. The more people we have who unreservedly stand on this ground, the better it is. Our task now is not to reflect on how long it will take for people to be ready for our ideas, but to work on making people ready. Therefore, we must do everything possible as if readiness already existed. We must act as if readiness were already a reality. People always think: Can one do that? This is a certain fear. One is afraid to do it, as if then, when one reflects, whether one can approach the “thing in itself” with thinking. I can imagine it like this: there is a plate of soup and next to it is a spoon. The spoon is thinking, the plate of soup is the thing in itself. If you now think about whether the spoon that was brought to you is now in a real relationship to the soup, or if you wonder what will happen if I now take the spoon in my hand and eat? Then you will not be satisfied, but you just have to grab it!

Question about the adult education movement.

Rudolf Steiner: I have been able to convince myself that improvement cannot be expected from adult education centers. Teachers accept everything that has developed from the older culture without reservation, and then it is taught in adult education centers. Will it be better if adult education centers are founded with the content of contemporary culture? Of course one can only say and think that one should do it in a similar way to the way I have done it when I have been called upon. One should bring into it as much of the living element as one can. But it is a waste of energy. It is true that one cannot withdraw completely. But one must realize that one is not working into a movement of ascent but into one of descent.

I did not just object to this because the lecturers themselves choose a topic for their lectures that is not sustainable. It was important to me to show that we must overcome the method by which it is taught. The spirit that must be behind it is more important than one might think. One can say that the adult education efforts also have high principles. But principles have no effect. People believe that if ten or twelve people get together and work out an ideal school program, something good will come of it. These people are all clever, terribly clever. The most beautiful programs are made of how the adult education center can become a reality. But, you see, that is not what is important. When someone founds something, it is not a program that is important, but rather achieving the greatest possible success with the people involved. Don't you think so? People come to me with ideal programs all the time. But in a school, you have to start with the people who are in it, with whom you can't stick to the program. We have to see that we get out of this way of thinking and get down to the real world.

Now one can say: Yes, fine, I just want to work somewhere. I have a mission area, and I want to bring that to people with whom I can achieve a level of culture, let's say, A. Now, however, everyone can see that A is not the highest that one can achieve, but one must achieve A and B. But now one does not have the people with whom one can achieve that. Then it is better, so they say, to achieve only A. If you reason in this way, you not only fail to achieve A, but you achieve A minus B.

A sense of the real in life must be taken from spiritual science. One must not live in programmatic concepts. One must express oneself in concepts, but the concepts are not what matters. What matters is that what life is, is really carried into everything, not that what is dead is brought into the adult education center.

Question about Muck-Lamberty.

Rudolf Steiner: These things recur in all places. I need only remind you of the Häußer who is up to his tricks here. This man has been wandering around here to the horror of various people, appearing in the Siegle House and also saying all sorts of fierce things in front of people. But I would like to warn against this, especially against those who do not work in a healthy way through their minds, but who work in a suggestive way. These people have a strong power, but it cannot come from a healthy person, but from a madman. And that must not be overlooked. Things must be healthy if they are to embrace broader areas. And if the youth movement is to serve humanity, it must remain healthy. Here we come to things that develop power. But this one is a power of the mad that animals also have. It is not the power that counts, but rather what is expressed through this power. The fact of the matter is that we can only truly penetrate into a matter from an anthroposophical spirit if we eliminate all suggestion. One must not let oneself be overcome by this power. Because I must say, I have seen that very limited people have done colossal things out of this power. One must be careful of spiritual drunkenness, especially in a youth movement. One should behave in this way towards these things.

You see, I believe that there is something that, as simple as it may seem, can give you a great deal of protection, and I would like to point this out to you. In all movements, including the anthroposophical movement, there are people who are terribly mystical. An old Roman friend of mine once said to me: Oh, anthroposophists are all so “sublime”, they all have a face “all the way to the stomach”. — And there are people of that ilk everywhere. That is one extreme. The other is the boundless superficiality with which many people pass over everything. But not true, in order not to be unjust, it is a matter of not placing oneself too strongly in the power of others, but of keeping one's humanity together. And for that there is only one remedy, but it is necessary for everyone, and that is humor. All faces up to the belly and all superficiality are harmful. What is needed to arrive at the right opinion is humor. One can judge such phenomena correctly if one can laugh at them. This is not meant to be ironic, but to allow what they have to have its effect. Humor is needed everywhere for judgment. The youth movement should not become like the one with the face up to the belly, but should really cultivate a healthy sense of humor. I know a strangely large number of pessimists in the youth movement who, because of their pessimism, are exposed to everything. The present generation is so clever that it does not even notice how the whole culture is going crazy. If you ask real “mystics”, they describe the influence of the external world on man as dangerous, as man is dependent on every breath of air. If that were really the case, all human beings would be the most terrible hysterics. If human beings were really so dependent, only hysterical people would live. They would be powerless in the hands of every breath of air. But thank God that is not the case with human beings. There you have it. So it really is important to educate ourselves in such a way that we can also feel more highly, that we can feel every breath and that it does not knock us over.

Question about Fidus and Gertrud Prellwitz.

Rudolf Steiner: People write books and go out into the world without any real experience. Fidus and Gertrud Prellwitz are the archetypal phenomena for this. Such people know absolutely everything. For example, they also know what it is like to be a true anthroposophist. They are simply the type of intellectual of the present time. Gertrud Prellwitz is no different from the rest, so you have to take the matter with humor.

Likewise, the other thing, that one has experienced that people come every moment and say: Oh, something terrible has happened! My child is developing quite unnatural sexuality. — If you then ask about the age of the child, you learn that it is only five years old. Do you believe that sexuality only comes out when you are mature and that it really makes no difference whether a child tickles its nose or scratches itself elsewhere. Don't interpret eroticism into everything, so that you don't pour out terrible theories. If you look at a five-year-old child for eroticism, that's nonsense. In this question, it is much more important to think healthily than to come up with many theories. Because most of what is being developed about it now is simply nonsense. Really, people just need to consider how terribly short-sighted these things are. There have been cultures where eating was accompanied by feelings of shame. Similar theories about eating could now arise from this. You will learn: If you really concern yourself with the comprehensive questions of life, then you will have no time left for such theorizing. |

A participant: These things should be grasped more seriously.

Rudolf Steiner: You asked the question as a question, which one must say: It is asked as if one wanted to build a house and does not yet have the ground for it.

A participant: Muck-Lamberty brings the ground into his craft with art and so on. And then they - the “new crowd” - want to transform life from the ground up.

Rudolf Steiner: But reality is what matters. You can't grow backwards in the world, only forwards. You can't move forward by thinking about eroticism. If you develop healthy foundations, the erotic life will become healthy by itself. The erotic life is such that it must be properly placed in life. As it appears in a person and at a certain age, it also develops in a certain cultural context. You can only let it emerge. If the other things develop healthily, a healthy eroticism will also develop. The greatest harm is done by taking a programmatic approach in this area. In social life, too, things will develop as they must under healthy conditions. Healthy conditions are needed everywhere. Countless people have come to me and asked me about prenatal education. The theories that have been put forward about this are something terrible. Because it is a very hothouse kind of thinking that comes to light. What is needed is for the mother to be healthy and to live properly. The child's organism is dependent on the mother. If the mother keeps herself healthy, the child will automatically be born in good order. There are certain questions that it makes no sense to ask. Just because we live today in an age of intellectual abundance, these questions are asked out of season. People need to have topics. They do not want to await experience. They write, and as a result movements can arise that lead nowhere.

A participant: The movement did not come about through thinking, but quite unconsciously. People live together in small circles and seek a certain naturalness.

Rudolf Steiner: What do you mean by a certain naturalness? — Suppose you have a circle here, a circle there, and a circle there; here a circle of peasant boys, here decadent aristocrats, here healthy people. Each circle lives out itself in a completely different way. You can't say that some theory is useful! — It is really a matter of certain things only being able to develop when a foundation is there. I do not want to be ironic about this. We cannot reflect on how a newborn child cultivates its sexuality. We must have the courage to find the right thing at the right moment. Therefore, we must try to develop humor in this area, to really walk the middle road between philistinism and licentiousness, as already pointed out by Aristotle.

A participant: There must be a strict distinction, because Muck-Lamberty and Gertrud Prellwitz are quite different. What humanity has learned about this, it has learned from older people. Stammler and Fidus have spread false things about Muck. Muck sought young people with whom he wanted to show that there is something between people that is equal. They brought dance, folk dance, as one of the external forms. People flocked to it, but left just as quickly. The suggestive effect quickly faded. Those who remained represent a real spiritual power. The artisan community is one of the healthiest movements. The people of Naumburg are trying to build up all economic activities in a fraternal way and want to be independent of what they negate. In doing so, an erotic life has developed that was healthy until Gertrud Preilwitz introduced her theories into it. But the crisis has now been overcome. The people there have now moved beyond Gertrud Prellwitz. Their spiritual movement is now merging with anthroposophy.

Rudolf Steiner: Things are such that everything can be treated from its good side, and that need not be doubted. But it is important to have the necessary perspective here. For example, it is indisputable that some of the people who supported the anthroposophical movement came from spiritualist circles, and yet something substantial came of it later. But that is no defense of spiritualism. Regarding the events in Naumburg, one must consider how it came about that the matter developed in Naumburg as it did. There were always movements in Naumburg that went backwards at any time. A strong one-sidedness can be brought into something like this. The Naumburg case is no more conclusive than the fact that the people ended up in a student movement. Although I am not going to defend spiritualism, capable people have emerged from it. Of course, something can arise from anything. So you can't take the material for an opinion from such factors. Muck-Lamberty wanted to make humanity happy; he stood up for purity and craftsmanship, and so on. The traveling teachers he set up had a circle of boys around them with whom they lived. He stood up for purity and had two illegitimate [but wanted] children.

[There follows a confusion of voices that could not be written down. ]

Rudolf Steiner: It is therefore certainly necessary that we pursue anthroposophy as such, and that we cannot then expect that something like this is to be feared. The beginnings, of which was spoken today, will have to be the beginnings.

Question: A pedagogical question. How does anthroposophy and the Waldorf school relate to existing independent school communities and country boarding schools where teachers act as friends and human beings? I got the answer from anthroposophists: These schools should be avoided because they want to realize an outdated educational ideal, because they are snobbish.

Rudolf Steiner: The matter is this. The Waldorf School is based on a pedagogy that emerges entirely from the anthroposophical understanding of the human being, in that it places the main emphasis on the fact that the human being is only treated as he wants it in the deepest interior. The Waldorf school is based on this, without programs being made. It is built on knowledge of human nature and the child is not asked, but in a certain sense it is asked what it wants. The main thing is that the Waldorf school is truly a democratic school. It puts proletarian children next to children from the highest levels. It fulfills to a high degree what can be called a democratic comprehensive school. Otherwise, one takes the view that we live in a world that can only recover by absorbing great, comprehensive cultural impulses, but that cannot be acquired through antidotes that remain exceptions. So it is a matter of accepting what exists. I adapt my approach to the educational situation as it arises from the circumstances of the place in question, for example a city. If I have the opportunity to found an anthroposophical school in a city, I found it based on the realities of that city.

As for the educational method, it goes without saying that one cannot say anything against a country education institute that introduces this pedagogy. On the other hand, I believe that this does not represent a social act because young people are led away from the life in which they are placed; they are educated away from it. This is not taken into account. I know an excellent medical practitioner who came to me and said: This person's heart is not normal, something must be done. I said: If you make the man's heart healthy, he can no longer live because his whole organism is attuned to it. Because you always have to have an eye for the whole. Taking young people to the country may well foster a good sense of community, which can be cultivated in seclusion, but these institutions would only prove their worth if these people later proved themselves in the entire social organism. I have certain reservations about this. It is important to make the whole organism healthy. It cannot be a matter of discussing how one discusses in general on anthroposophical ground; that cannot be our concern. I have appointed an excellent teacher from a landerziehungsheim (a land-based school) to Stuttgart. He likes it better here; he must find something here that goes beyond that; the man must be able to compare the two. From this you can see at the same time that one is not one-sided, because otherwise I would not have appointed the teacher. The point is to find the good everywhere. You must not think that you have to push through your program everywhere.

A participant: In these schools, where young people live together, a life should develop that is not unworldly.

Rudolf Steiner: But an individual! The individuals must later work as individuals again. If you were to pursue this, you would find that selfish natures easily develop in the country education homes, and they think it should be like that everywhere. They become terrible critics, terrible busybodies, for whom nothing in the world is right. There is something in it, like a social eccentric spirit. You have to see that you are not asking for the impossible.

What should I have done? If I had started with an abstraction, I would never have founded the Waldorf School. Residential schools in the sense of Wyneken and Lietz, where everything can be created, are basically easy to implement. A landerziehungsheim can basically only be created on the basis of what is taken out of society. Besides, not many proletarian children will be in landerziehungsheims.

A participant: I myself taught at an independent school that has now closed. But we had more free places than others. The rich paid a surplus in school fees, which meant that places could be given to poor children.

Rudolf Steiner: But that is the unsocial thing about it, even with the Waldorf School. It also has to be capitalized. This can only be improved if we implement the threefold social order.

A participant: In boarding schools, a family life is led, while the form of the present-day family is not always the most favorable.

Rudolf Steiner: These are realistic judgments. For example, boarding school life has always existed in English circles. There, boarding school life with its light and dark sides is well known.

Rudolf Steiner concludes the discussion.

Address in Dornach after the fire of the Goetheanum on New Year's Eve 1922/23.

My dear friends! Esteemed attendees! I would have to read you a book if I wanted to share with you all the extraordinarily kind words and the words of heartfelt connection with what has been lost here as a result of the terrible catastrophe; I will therefore take the liberty of just sharing the names of those who have signed such words of sympathy and devotion to the cause. Some of them are a sign of how deeply the hearts of many people have been touched by what may be communicated from here to the world. Some of them are also signs of truly heartfelt desires and energetic resolutions of will to regain what we have lost. The widespread sympathy for our work and for our loss will certainly be a source of strength for many of you, and for this reason alone I am allowed to communicate all this here. For our cause should not be merely a theoretical one; our cause should be one of labor, of philanthropy, of devoted service to humanity, and therefore, what should be said from here should also include the communication of what is being done or intended to be done. I will only take the liberty of mentioning those names that do not belong to personalities who are here, because what the hearts of those who are here have to share has been expressed more silently, but no less deeply and clearly, in these days, in these days of truly painful togetherness. So you will allow me not to mention the dear friends of the cause who have expressed their sympathy in writing. You know them, of course. [The names are read out.]

We may assume that what has been attempted here is deeply rooted in many hearts, and I would like to fill this evening's lecture by interrupting the reflections of these days, as it were, and remember that it was a course that brought a large number of friends from outside to join the friends who otherwise try to work on the anthroposophical matter here at the Goetheanum. And in particular, I would like to turn first in thought to the young, to the younger friends who have come here for this course and who, to the greatest satisfaction of all those who are serious about anthroposophy, have recently found their way into this movement in such a beautiful, deep and heartfelt way.

We must be absolutely clear about the significance of young souls, souls that are striving to acquire all that can be acquired by a young person today in the way of science, art and so on, finding each other to work within the anthroposophical movement. These younger friends who have come to this course here are among those who came here recently, saw the Goetheanum, saw it again and probably thought that they would leave it in a different state than they are now on their return journey. And if I turn first to these younger friends in my thoughts, it is because everyone who cares about the anthroposophical movement must feel that everything that concerns any group or individual within the movement is their direct concern. Most of our younger friends are people who want to find their way into anthroposophical work through what is today called spiritual life. And I would particularly like to speak first to those who belong to academic life and have felt the urge — but hardly generated by it — to join with others within the anthroposophical movement for further striving.

Above all, it is the holy earnestness of the striving for the fulfillment of the human soul with spiritual life that has driven these young people. Within anthroposophy, however, there is talk of a spiritual life that cannot be acquired in direct contemplation in the easy way that is particularly loved today. And it is made no secret of the fact – not even in the literature, from which everyone in the broadest circle can see for themselves what they will find within the anthroposophical work – that the paths to anthroposophy are difficult. But difficult only for the reason that they are connected with the deepest, but also with the most powerful, of human dignity, and because, on the other hand, they are also connected with what is most necessary for our age, our epoch, what may be said that the discerning person, who correctly appreciates the phenomena of decline in our time, must recognize the necessity of such progress as is at least attempted by the anthroposophical movement.

Now it should certainly not be forgotten that the anthroposophical cause can be of value to the modern man in many ways. He can indeed benefit from it if he tries with true inner devotion to gain a direct insight into the spiritual worlds, and thereby convince himself that everything that is communicated from the spiritual worlds is absolutely based on truth. But I must emphasize again and again that, however necessary it may be for individuals, or perhaps for an unlimited number of people, to take this serious and difficult path in the present day, anyone with unbiased, common sense can gain an insight into the truth of anthroposophy that is based entirely on real inner reasons.

This must be emphasized again and again, lest the objection, which is quite invalid, seemingly gains validity: that actually only the one who clairvoyantly looks into the spiritual world can somehow gain a relationship to what is proclaimed as truth in the anthroposophical movement. Today's general intellectual life, general civilization and culture, they indeed bring forward so many prejudices that it is difficult for man to come to full consciousness in the healthy human mind, to convince himself of the truth of the anthroposophical cause without clairvoyance.

But it is precisely in this area that the Anthroposophical Society should lead the way and focus its work, so that the prejudices of contemporary civilization are increasingly overcome. If the Anthroposophical Society does its duty in this direction, then one can hope that those inner powers of knowledge will arise even without clairvoyance in those who, for whatever reason, cannot strive for the exact clairvoyance that is being spoken of here, but that they can still come to a fully-fledged conviction of the validity of anthroposophical knowledge.

But there is another very special path that younger academics can now find for themselves to anthroposophy. Consider what academic study should and could actually provide today as a solid starting point for coming to one's own view – and I say this expressly: for coming to one's own view – of the anthroposophical spiritual knowledge, if science and knowledge and inner life within our school system were present in the way that the possibility for this is actually available today.

But consider how little younger people today are inwardly connected with what they are supposed to strive for as their science, as their knowledge, within the present civilization. Consider how it cannot be otherwise today, for the most part, than that the individual sciences approach younger people more or less as something external. They approach with a system that is not at all suited to letting the often extraordinarily significant, so-called empirical knowledge speak for itself in its full value. Yes, my dear friends, today within every science that is cultivated, there are harrowing truths, sometimes harrowing truths in details, in specialties. And there are, in particular, such truths that, if properly presented to young people, would act as a kind of mental microscope or telescope, so that, if properly used by the soul, they would unlock tremendous secrets of existence.

But precisely those things that would be tremendously revealing if they were properly cultivated, that would carry hearts and minds away if they came from the depths of humanity and personality within academic life to the youth, precisely those things must be said today in many cases are often brought to young people within a spun-out, indifferent system, often with indifference, so that the relationship of young people to what our empirical science has produced in the most diverse fields of information remains a thoroughly external one. And one would like to say: many, indeed most, of our young academics today go through their studies without any inner interest, letting the subject pass by more or less as a panorama, so to speak, in order to be able to take the necessary repetitions for the exams and find a permanent position.

It almost sounds paradoxical to say that the hearts of academic youth should also be involved in everything that is presented to them. I say that sounds like a paradox, although it could be so. For the possibility exists, because for those who have a subjective disposition for it, sometimes even the driest book or lecture can be enough to be deeply moved, if not by the power of the writer or lecturer, then perhaps by one's own strength, even in one's heart. But I must say that sometimes it goes quite deeply to the soul when one notices, perhaps even in the best of the young friends who come to the anthroposophical movement, that through no fault of their own, but through their destiny within today's civilization ization life, not only have they received nothing for their hearts from the current knowledge base, but — perhaps some will not forgive me for saying this, but most of the young academics here will probably understand — they have also received nothing for their minds.

Today, in this age, as a result of the development of science, which I have tried to characterize during this scientific course, we have reached a point in the development of civilization where it is possible that, without any Anthroposophy, through the mere practice of the life of science and knowledge by fully human beings, young people would have to experience what I would call a kind of deep mental oppression from ordinary natural science. Yes, contemporary science is such that precisely those who study it diligently and earnestly and take its things seriously feel something like a mental oppression, can feel something of what comes over the human soul when it wrestles with the problem of knowledge. For anyone who looks around a little from this or that point of view, which is available within natural science today, is confronted with great world problems, world problems which, however, are often clothed, I might say, in small formulations of facts. And these formulations of facts urge one to seek something in one's own soul, which, precisely because these scientific truths exist, must be solved as a riddle; otherwise one cannot live, otherwise one feels oppressed.

Oh, if this oppression were the fruit of our scientific studies! Then not only the longing for the spiritual world would arise from this oppression, which takes hold of the whole person, but also the gift to look into the spiritual world. Even if one takes knowledge that cannot satisfy the human being, it is precisely through the unsatisfactory, when it is brought to the soul and heart in the right way, that the highest striving can be kindled.

That, my dear friends, is what is sometimes felt as so terrible, so devastating, within the realm of knowledge in the present day, that no claim is made to allow people to feel how the things that are present in the present in such a way that he is prevented in his young life from even approaching what is most human in nature, if he does not, precisely because of a particularly strong yearning, free himself from that which only afflicts him with the obstacles that are placed in his way.

And if we look away from the natural sciences to the humanities, we see that during the age of natural science they have reached a state in which, if a young person were to be given instructions that would treat these humanities from a fully human point of view, they would be able to devote themselves to them in such a way that they would at least receive what I would call a spiritual sense of urgency. All the abstract ideas, the results of documentary research and all the other things that are contained in the humanities today, if they were at least presented to young people with a human element, could pursue the goal of awaken in him the urge to ascend into the fresh air that is to be brought into the field of today's spiritual contemplation through anthroposophical world view.

Anyone who has followed the spirit of my lectures on the scientific development of modern times will certainly not be able to say that I have criticized this natural science of the present unnecessarily. On the contrary, through my lectures I have proved its necessity, have tried to prove that natural science and, finally, also spiritual science of the present time can be nothing but foundations, for they served and must serve as the foundations of civilization, which must be laid once so that further building can be built on them.

But man cannot help it, being human, being full of humanity in body, mind and soul. And since today's young people have to live in an age in which they are inevitably confronted with something that does not include the human being at all, the noblest and most powerful human striving could nevertheless be aroused if only that which is necessary but not humanly satisfying were to be offered to them today in the highest sense of the word, out of full humanity. If that were to happen, our young people would need nothing more than to hear about the achievements of today's physical science and today's spiritual science at the academies themselves; and from this they would receive not only the innermost urge but also the ability to absorb spiritual science in full humanity. And from what would then live in young people, it would arise of its own accord that the anthroposophical form of science would also become that which is necessary for us to progress in human civilization.

I believe that our younger friends, if they reflect on the words I have spoken, which may sound somewhat paradoxical, will find that they go some way to characterizing the main difficulties they have had to endure during their academic years. And I can assume that this difficulty is the reason why they have come to us. But for many of them, this difficulty belongs to the past, a past that can no longer be made up for. For what one should actually have in a certain period of youth can no longer be had in the same form later. But nevertheless, I believe that one thing can serve as a substitute. What should be a substitute for what one can no longer have is the realization of the task that younger people in particular have among us to cultivate anthroposophical life in the present. |

Set yourselves this task: to do for the anthroposophical movement what you already know, from your own conviction, can be done for it, or what you can, in the course of time, become convinced of in your innermost being, in your very individual innermost being, that it is necessary for the further civilization of mankind: then you will be able to carry something in your heart for longer than this earthly life lasts: then you will be able to carry the awareness of having done your duty to humanity and the world in an age of greatest human difficulties. And that will be a rich reward for what you may rightly lose.

If you have a true sense of the situation of young people in our age, you will also look in the right way at the fact that academic youth has found its way into our circles, and then, if I may may say so, the talent will gradually arise within the Anthroposophical Society to gain a relationship with this youth, on the part of those who, let us say, do not belong to it as youth in this or that respect.

But I believe that there is a word that can come from our present mourning, that I can also speak to the oldest members of the Anthroposophical Society, and that is this: that the human being who today can truly understand himself as a human being within the Anthroposophical Society, and that this, in turn, must be taken seriously if civilization is to continue for humanity, if the forces of decline are not to gain the upper hand over the forces of ascent. It has almost come to this within general culture and civilization of the present day, that it almost sounds funny when someone says: When a person is in his spiritual-soul life between falling asleep and waking up, he should have ensured that his spiritual-soul life can behave in the right way during this time. But within the anthroposophical movement, you learn that this spiritual-soul, as it lives between falling asleep and waking up, is the germ that we carry into the eternity of the future. What we leave behind in bed when we sleep, what is visible to us when we perform our daily work from morning to evening, that we do not carry out through the gate of death into the spiritual, into the supersensible world. But we do carry out into the spiritual, supersensible world that which is subtlest in our natures and exists outside the physical and etheric bodies when we are between falling asleep and waking up. We shall not concern ourselves here with the significance of the life of sleep for man here on earth. But it can be made clear to man through anthroposophical spiritual science that this fine, substantial something, imperceptible to ordinary consciousness, , lives between falling asleep and waking, is precisely what he will carry within him when he has passed through the gate of death, when he has to fulfill his task in other worlds than this earthly world. But the tasks he has to perform there, he will be able to perform them, depending on how he has cultivated these spiritual and mental abilities. Oh, my dear friends, in that spiritual world, which is around us just as the physical world is, those human soul beings also live a present existence who are not in a physical body right now, but may have to wait for decades, centuries, for their next embodiment on earth. These souls are there just as we physical people are there on earth; and in what happens here among us physical people, what we later call historical life, not only do the earthly people work in it, but also those forces that reach out from people who are currently between death and a new birth. These forces are there. As we stretch out our hands, so these beings stretch their spiritual hands into the immediate present. And it is a desolate historiography when only the documents are recorded that deal with the earthly, while the true history that takes place on earth is also influenced by the spiritual forces from the spiritual world of those who are between death and a new birth. We also work together with those who are not embodied on earth.

And just as we commit a sin against humanity if we do not educate young people in the right way, we commit a sin against humanity, a sin against the noblest work to be done from invisible worlds by not embodied human beings, we commit a sin against the evolution of humanity if we do not cultivate our own spiritual nature so that it passes through the portal of death in such a way that it can develop there more consciously and more consciously. For if the soul and spiritual aspects are not cultivated on earth, it happens that this consciousness, which in a certain way immediately and then more and more between death and a new birth begins to shine, remains clouded in all those souls who do not cultivate a spiritual life here. When a person becomes aware of his full humanity, then the spiritual belongs to it.

Those who truly understand the impulses of the anthroposophical movement should take it seriously, knowing that what has been acquired through anthroposophical spiritual science is a world-life treasure, a world-life force. It is a sin in the higher sense to neglect to cultivate that which must be there in order to further develop the earth, in order to further develop mankind on earth, because its absence must lead to the downfall of the earthly. And in many ways, it depends on feeling the deep seriousness of connecting with a spiritual and comprehensive human cause, in addition to what one may more or less accept in theory from spiritual science.

And that, my dear friends, is something that does not apply to a particular category of people, it is something that most certainly applies to young and old alike. But that also seems to me to be the one thing in which young and old can come together, so that one spirit may prevail within what is the Anthroposophical Society.

May the younger people bring their best, may the older people understand this best, may understanding on one side find understanding on the other: only then will we move forward. Let us, from the sad days we have gone through, from the painful suffering we have been imbued with, let us let resolutions enter our hearts that are not mere wishes, not mere vows, but that are so deeply rooted in our souls that they can become deeds. Even in a small circle, we will need deeds if we want to make up for the great loss.

Youthful deeds, if they are in the right direction, are deeds that can be used around the world. And the most beautiful thing that one can want as an older person is to be able to work together with those people who can still perform youthful deeds. If one knows this in the right way, oh, my dear friends, then youth will indeed come to meet you with understanding. And only then will we ourselves be able to do what is necessary to compensate for our great loss, when young people, who can offer us what was once necessary for the future, can see – and most certainly then to their own satisfaction – beautiful examples of what older people can do to compensate for this loss.

Let us endeavor to see the right and powerful in each other, so that strength may be added to strength, for only in this way will we make progress.

Rudolf Steiner: We have now reached the point where at least a draft of a circular letter to the Anthroposophical Society has been made. This has created a kind of basis on which negotiations would be possible. I believe that it would perhaps be good now if you were to negotiate what you yourselves want in joint negotiations with the committee that will be in place until the delegates' assembly. This committee has been put together purely on the basis of the issues, so purely that, unlike the 30-strong committee you are familiar with, it is not made up of members of the individual institutes but of those who represent the existing institutions. This committee is composed in such a way that of the old central board, Mr. Leinhas for the “Kommenden Tag”, Dr. Unger as the rest of the old central board, Dr. Rittelmeyer as a representative of the movement for religious renewal, then Wolfgang Wachsmuth, Mr. von Grone, Dr. Palmer, Dr. Kolisko, Miss Mücke for the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press and Mr. Werbeck of Hamburg for the remaining external interests. I have asked the seven people from Stuttgart to take the steps you have in mind together with you. I myself have to leave for Dornach tomorrow morning and will be back on Monday. I regret that I will not be able to attend the next meetings. I now believe that it is best, since there can be no difference between us, that you conduct the negotiations with these people on your own initiative. As things stand, these personalities are the ones given, since all shades are represented among them; the youthful ones through the presence of Mr. von Grone and Wolfgang Wachsmuth - I am leaving it to you to decide whether you find these two likeable - who are completely inexperienced in terms of all board work. Furthermore, Dr. Palmer has declared that he wants to build every possible bridge to young people.

The appeal to the members of the Anthroposophical Society is available in draft. It will essentially contain what the Anthroposophical Society has had to say. It had to come naturally from those who have led the Anthroposophical Society so far. From February 25 to 28, a meeting of delegates will take place in that the individual branches and groups that consider themselves to belong together will send their delegates here, so that a kind of general assembly will take place. This will provide an opportunity to present all views on the development. Until now, we were faced with the alternative of doing it this way or allowing the Anthroposophical Society, as it was, to come to an end and founding something completely new. In 1918, it would have been easier to found something new. Now we are faced with positive institutions with which we are engaged before the world and from which we cannot escape, so everything must arise out of the Society. Society itself must be more freely formed within itself, and it must be impossible to feel constrained in it. I think it will work, but I would like to hear something that you have to say on your own initiative. The fact that it took so long to get this far must be put down to the deliberateness of old age. We will be happy to hear what you have to say at the present moment.

A representative of the younger generation will speak about the involvement of younger people in society with regard to what Dr. Steiner said in the last Stuttgart branch lecture about the individual phases in the history of the Anthroposophical Society.

Rudolf Steiner: What you said about the wall that has arisen in connection with the first, second and third phases of the movement, which can be very clearly distinguished from one another, is correct. We have to bear in mind that the individual phases lasted for about seven years, and that the Society itself is now about 21 years old. What is true is this: the impulses for entering and participating were actually different for the earlier members than they are now for the essentially academic youth groups. They are different in that the people who came during the first phase came with the whole complex, admittedly from today's contemporary conditions, but with completely unconscious longings; they did not know themselves in connection with any contemporary conditions and were at an age at which one does not give a clear account of one's relationship to time. They came with very general human interests that are related to time, but people did not account for it. It was almost the same in the second phase. Anthroposophy came a lot further, but the Anthroposophists, with exceptions, were less interested in the questions related to the contemporary. The third phase was creepy for those who had joined earlier. They came together with all those who were dissatisfied – not with the general conditions of the times, but in a very specific way with what these people had experienced in today's educational institutions. They would not have come to anthroposophy if they had not felt a strong contrast to today's educational institutions. They came with different impulses than those who had actually seen anthroposophy in relation to time. I myself had to speak about this. What I said about the relationship between Anthroposophy and time has actually been taken in very little. But strangely enough, they came with a longing that actually goes to the heart of Anthroposophy.

Now a strange thing has emerged: namely, the misunderstanding of the School of Spiritual Science courses. I do not want to say anything against their value. But the School of Spiritual Science courses were a misunderstanding. What was expressed there was not at all what you were seeking. You were seeking anthroposophy in itself. This could not be understood by those who had come into the Anthroposophical Society as academics in earlier times. They wanted to weld their academic work together with anthroposophy. They did not accept this. So in time they will not come into conflict with what I have called the bulk of the Anthroposophical Society. The real conflict was only with the academics because they believed that they wanted to represent anthroposophy in a biological, chemical-physical, historical way. They do not want that. They want pure anthroposophy. They have the difficulty of getting over this mountain together with the whole society. The academic side that has entered is like a mountain; but it must be crossed over and over. If both sides work with goodwill, it may prove useful. On the other hand, however, if we want to make progress, in the end a little specialization is also needed. If there is goodwill on both sides, it will work.

A participant talks about some of the younger people's wishes regarding the reorganization of the branch work, in particular the lecture and presentation system.

Rudolf Steiner (interrupts): This little book by Albert Steffen [The Pedagogical Course at the Goetheanum] is justified because it reflects the content of my lectures in a truly artistic way. It is not a journalist's report; it stands on its own. In the past, nothing like this has been done. We will see if it catches on. It would be a stroke of luck.

Wouldn't it? The appeal will have to include two main points. One is to emphasize the need for inner work in the anthroposophical movement. Secondly, it is already essential that the anthroposophical society be so united that it can fend off opponents. Defense not through polemics, but through real, appropriate work in the world. If, in the face of opposition, nothing is done, then anthroposophy will perish. One cannot work in such a way that one asserts something and the other refutes it. With the most important opponents, one cannot reach the public. Today, when defamations are spread about Anthroposophy from the circles of the Pan-Germans and the German-Völkisch, one has an audience that believes everything under all circumstances. One cannot reach them. One must know the people who are among this audience. One cannot say certain things to a Catholic audience. If the refutations are wrong, then they are wrong. But if they are right, they are of no use to us, but – I have to use this word – only harm us, especially among Catholics. They are annoyed when one is in a position to refute the opponent's assertions. Being right harms us today, being wrong perhaps less so. These things can only be refuted by positive work. Make yourself strong, as the others are. Dr. Rittelmeyer was right to use the saying the other day, and I myself have often pointed it out: one does not even suspect how everywhere there is something of which one can say: fire is being made everywhere! Our opposition will be expressed in a very terrible way in the near future. It is necessary to form a united body against it. All things that are good endanger society. It is already the case that the movement for religious renewal endangers the Anthroposophical Society. It is the case that no one imagined that we would achieve something in this area as well. And if we continue to work in the academic field, which is of course also very desirable, then the leisegangs will slip out everywhere. It really worries me because the old reactionary powers are growing ever stronger. When the Hochschulbund was founded, there were many more opportunities to hold back the old powers. Today these opportunities have diminished. They will have to suffer a great deal. But even if anthroposophy were killed, it would rise again, because it must arise, and it is a necessity. Either there is a future for the earth or there is none. The future of the earth is inseparable from anthroposophy. If the latter has no future, then all of humanity will have no future. The tendency alone is enough. Anthroposophy may go through many phases in terms of its expansion. I do believe that you will have to come over this mountain, which I mentioned earlier, for the benefit of society in all peace.

A participant talks about a different relationship that young people should have with society.

Rudolf Steiner: You just have to bear in mind that in the case of old cultural movements that have already come of age in world history, there were very different attitudes of the soul than in the case of those that are historically very young. Today, people simply no longer have any idea how difficult it was to be a Christian in the first centuries of Christianity. Today it is easy to be a Christian. In the early days it was not the external difficulties of martyrdom, but the internal difficulties of the soul. It was difficult to be a Christian in one's own eyes. Today it is difficult to be a true anthroposophist. In a sense it is difficult. Those who have been Anthroposophists for a long time carry within themselves, in their whole soul attitude, the whole difficulty of being connected with the first appearance of a spiritual movement; in them, the understanding for certain phenomena of life is not so strong. Those who have been Anthroposophists for a long time, longer than the young ones, sometimes talk past each other. Just recently, I came across a very striking example. These friends had a meeting; the mood there was that the belief was there, now all bridges have been built, now they understand each other. They were quite honest. On the other hand, I was confronted with the mood that one had to organize the opposition; they did not find each other at all. This certainly reflects the slight tendency to be under illusion about the conditions of life when one is in a certain attitude towards life, which I have characterized. It is hard to be an anthroposophist; it is not easy to overcome a certain rigidity. The illusionists are honest. They come with the freshness of soul, and therefore you, as one who has not yet grown tired, are less inclined to have these illusions than a tired person. Many have grown tired and weary due to the difficulties we have faced. Therefore, there has been a lot of talking past each other these days as well.

One participant talks about his original plan to redirect the energies of the youth and organize them in a fruitful way for the opposition.

Rudolf Steiner: Some things are so that a realistic thinking must also consider them. Somehow there must be something in the future that is your educational institutions. Even if all hopes for the future are in the bud in this respect, it must not be the case that the college remains a mere mock-up. It really worries me how far away we still are from that. On the other hand, the university system is in a sorry state. A century ago, at least there was still a unified worldview; that is now completely gone, including the sense of human dignity. You see, Leisegang – it doesn't depend on the way he treats me – but Leisegang, who will soon become a professor, since he has all the aspirations for it, has now published a work about Plato, a first volume. He doesn't treat me as badly as he treats Plato, he treats Plato much worse, he caricatures him, only – people don't notice it. You see, and that worries me, really worries me, how far away we are from the possibility of creating a university.

One participant points out how a university was created by the prisoners in the prison camp where he worked, and presents this as an example of how a university for the humanities can be created.

Rudolf Steiner: You can't create a university today because the first prerequisite is that the individual scientists are available. Ideas and approaches are already available. But as long as the people who are to work within the movement can only be had as starving students, to put it bluntly, it will be difficult. This is becoming more difficult every day because the time is approaching when it will hardly be possible to think that the preceding period will provide the subsequent one with scholarships. The possibility of bringing about a completely new education in a different way is becoming more difficult every day. I must emphasize two things at every opportunity for purely spiritual reasons: first, to strive with all intensity to become as strong as possible; second, to devote all energy to expanding the circle of friends; it would not be necessary to look at the number, only in view of the time conditions. In the spiritual, the opposite must be true, but in view of time it is so. The widening of the circle need not be at the expense of shallowness, but efforts must be made in that direction in order to maintain a large number of friends. Otherwise the downfall of the individual and of the movement as such is more likely. It is already so. But you must not be afraid to be strong as a youth in order to achieve outward expansion.

A participant talks about how difficult it is to communicate with the elderly.

Rudolf Steiner: Apart from judgments, it is, however, in a sense the case that the lack of understanding is mutual! The situation of old age is such that one can say: the way it is, it is not his fault, but his destiny. But the resistance of youth against old age is both a means of protection and a weakness!

Become interested, become geniuses!

My dear friends! I think I can assume that the present appeal to the members of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany has become known to you all. You have seen from it that it is recognized in the circles of the Anthroposophical Society that, to a certain extent, the rudder, as it has been steered from Stuttgart in particular, must now be turned, and that there is an awareness that such a change in direction is necessary. The details that come into consideration will naturally be discussed at the delegates' meeting. I believe you will be particularly interested in all that will be going on there. You found society in a particular state when you yourself were seeking the path to anthroposophy from the external circumstances of your life. You imagined that what a young person seeks from the depths of their soul but cannot find in the institutions of today's world must be found somewhere. They were placed in these institutions and found that what has emerged from recent history does not correspond to what is actually demanded from the human soul as humanity. Perhaps you were looking for where this demand for true humanity would be fulfilled, and finally you believed you could find it in the Anthroposophical Society. Now, however, many things are not in accordance with the facts as they are. At first it was not all of you who somehow made this discord a conflict. You found many things unsatisfactory, but at first you remained at the stage of merely stating this dissatisfaction. In the face of the past and present facts within the Anthroposophical Society, however, the fact must be faced that the Anthroposophical Society has simply not fulfilled the development of anthroposophy, and that the extent to which something completely new must be created or the old Anthroposophical Society must be continued with a completely new impulse must be faced.

This has been considered by the personalities who have been involved in the leadership to a greater or lesser extent, and the conclusion has been reached that some old sins, which mostly consisted of omissions and bureaucratic forms, should be abandoned and an attempt should be made, in agreement with the representatives of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany, to create the basis on which the Society can be continued.

In Stuttgart, it must be said that the developments of recent years have brought together a large number of excellent workers. As individuals, they are excellent people, but when brought together in a group, they are a truly great movement in their own right. But as one of the leading personalities here has already said, each one stands in the way of the other. This has actually been the cause of much unproductivity here. Each individual has filled his post quite well. One can be highly satisfied with the Waldorf School. But the actual Anthroposophical Society, despite the fact that the anthroposophists were there, has basically disappeared bit by bit, began to dissolve, one cannot even say, into favor, but into displeasure. An end must be put to this state of affairs if the society is not to disintegrate completely.

You have obviously noticed this very clearly and then formed your views. But it was necessary for the Anthroposophical Society to give itself a form again out of its old supports. After all, the work of twenty-three years has been done in the main body of the Anthroposophical Society. Many of its members are in a completely different situation and find something that exists: even if the branch decays, the individual anthroposophists remain, and anthroposophy will find its way; for example, Mrs. Wolfram, who led the branch in Leipzig for many years and then resigned from the leadership, recently founded a local group of the “Bund für freies Geistesleben” (Federation for Free Spiritual Life), in deliberate contrast to the local anthroposophical circle.

The fact that replacing old forces with young ones is not enough is evident in Leipzig, where the local chairman emerged from the student body. A balance must therefore be struck between what has been created over two decades and what is coming in from young people.

The appeal should also represent this in the right way. Many members of the Anthroposophical Society have sought a calming element in this society; they were always very uncomfortable when something had to be said against external opposition. Sometimes harsh words had to be used. But this will not be avoidable in the future either, because the opposition is taking on ever more savage forms. A strange defensive position must therefore be adopted. We must not lose sight of this. It is difficult for the elderly to be good anthroposophists after the calming element has become a habit in them.

As soon as one lives in anthroposophy in such a way that one experiences things as if out of habit, this is something very bad. Anthroposophy is something that actually has to be acquired anew every day; otherwise one cannot have anthroposophy. One cannot just remember what one once thought up. And the difficulties of the old Anthroposophical Society are due to the fact that human beings are creatures of habit, as we used to say when I was very young. For Anthroposophy must not become a habit. You will in turn find difficulties because Anthroposophy demands that we go beyond everything that is merely egoistic in an intellectual sense. Of course, a person can be selfish like other living beings. But anthroposophy and selfishness are not compatible. You can be a tolerable philistine if you are an egoist, even a tolerable human being. If you are selfish as an anthroposophist, then you get caught up in perpetual contradictions. This is because man does not really live on earth with his whole being. When he comes down to earth from a pre-earthly existence, a part of him still remains in the astral, so that when man wakes up in the morning, it is not the whole man that goes into him; it is precisely what goes down from the supersensible man that comes from the supersensible man. Man is not completely on earth; he leaves a certain part of his existence in the supersensible. And this is connected with the fact that there cannot actually be a completely satisfactory social order. Such a social order can only come from earthly conditions. Within such a social order, human beings cannot find complete happiness.

I have said it again and again: threefolding is not paradise on earth, but it shows a possible organism; otherwise it would be a deception, because man is not only an earthly being. This is the fact that one must actually hold to in order to truly feel one's whole humanity; and that is why one can never be satisfied with a merely materialistic world view when one feels one's full humanity within oneself. Only when we really feel this, are we truly ready for anthroposophy, when we feel that we cannot come down completely to earth, we need something for our supersensible human being.

You have evidently felt something of the kind quite instinctively, and that is why you have come to the Anthroposophical Society. You will have to realize that this fact makes your difficulty more or less clear to you. For if, on the one hand, Anthroposophy can never become a habit, on the other hand it is necessary that Anthroposophy does not merge with a nature that really comes from a merely earthly one. For that which arises from egoism is connected with the earthly. A person becomes as bad as he is as a human being when he is supersensible and at the same time egoistic: a supersensible being is completely shaped by the character of a sensual being. Spiritual feeling and perception do not go together with egoism. That is where the obstacle begins. But this is also the point where the anthroposophical movement coincides with what today's youth is really seeking, due to the fact that all connection with the spiritual world has been lost. And now the external institutions are there. The youth flees from them and seeks a consciousness of their humanity. Based on this feeling, you must try to come to terms with what is already there and feel with your own inner being. You must hold together the difficulties you encounter with those of others, and then the way will be found to actually create a strong Anthroposophical Society for the near future, one that is strong even in the circles seeking internalization, a strong Anthroposophical movement.

If you follow this path, you will have to go through many a privation and many a difficulty, because humanity does not want such a movement. There is still much to be faced before you are truly ready to be firmly connected to the cause with your whole being. Then anthroposophy will assert itself under all circumstances. The disintegration of the civilized world is so strong that Europe will not have much time left if it does not turn to the spirit. Only from the spirit can an ascent come! Therefore, the spiritual must be sought without fail, and in this striving you have done the right thing, you have taken the right path. Now it is a matter of taking up the work for the near future. And in order to hear something about how you will shape your intentions, we have come together today.

A participant asks how scientific work should be organized today.

Rudolf Steiner: When it comes to science, nothing of what will be needed in the future is actually there. This is not to say that absolutely nothing is there. In all fields of science, there is a body of knowledge of external facts that can be used to penetrate into those areas that must really be there in the future if uncorrupted human souls are to arise in the future. There are already a number of scientific fields with significant results, from the smallest collections up to the London Museum. But those who are currently doing research cannot use them in the sense of a science of the future, because the people who have come into positions today through the world order or in the social order are inwardly dead. They do not know what to do with the factual material because they have come to it through a kind of automatic development.

The difficulty for anthroposophists is not that anthroposophical work cannot be done – the summarizing ideas and spiritual insights already exist – but that what is needed for science today, namely the factual material, is preserved by those who cannot do anything with the facts. So it happens that those who should actually establish the cultural content come away empty-handed, and that the factual material is the monopoly of people who cannot do anything with it. At the universities, the factual material is not presented to the academic youth in such a way that they learn to look at it with the right eye. Instead, when they are shown a skeleton in zoology, or a plant in botany, and so on, they actually learn nothing from it. What she does learn is: there is the skull bone, here is the shoulder bone, there the shin bone, and so on. This is also how one could describe a table or a machine. A skeleton, for example, is not shown to academic youth in such a way that they should have the feeling that it has grown, but it is shown to them as a machine that can be taken apart into its individual parts.

If you first sharpen your soul-imbued gaze in the right way, you will immediately see, for example, if you look at a dog's skeleton along the backbone from back to front: there, in the back part, moon power is at work, while if you now move on to the skull, you see that solar power is at work there; and in addition, earth power is at work in the flow of the legs. This is something that can be seen directly, if only people are not prevented from seeing it by the fact that they are not taught to recognize it at all. What I have just said, one should be able to see it as one would immediately see a sculpture that is supposed to represent a human being and also reminds one of him: that is a human being. In the same way, one should be able to see in a dog skeleton what is solar and lunar about it. One must only have the antecedents for it.

Those who have received the means with regard to the facts cannot do anything with them. That is just how it is. But those who actually needed the scientific means do not have them. This is the reason for the statement: there is nothing there. The other parallel is also possible: there is everything there. That is the tremendous difficulty of finding one's way. Unless the present-day student, through a particularly favorable karma, through the whole way his soul is directed, comes to the realization that there is a spiritual world, he is dissuaded from it, and the fact that there is a spiritual world seems simply ridiculous to him. So today's student is quite clear, for example, that he has to look for the germ in the mother's body, but he does not realize that a human germ or an animal germ should be seen as it emerges from the elements of reality, namely that germination is based on the fact that at one point in the maternal organism the albumen breaks down, but this disintegration is immediately arrested by the cosmic forces beginning to work in it, and the whole macrocosm expresses itself in miniature in the disintegrating but immediately reassembling albumen, so that the form of the universe is actually expressed in the development of the embryo. The motherly organism only provides the material that must first disintegrate so that the macrocosm can rebuild it. If you look at germination through today's scientific eyes, it is exactly the same as taking a paper rose and claiming that you have just plucked it from a rose bush. In these matters, it is evident that a thorough reversal is necessary in all areas of science, as well as in the arts and in religion. Even in the religious field, the most extreme materialism prevails.

In Germany, the circumstances are particularly difficult. Over time, people lose all courage to live. But this courage to live can only come from the supersensible world. Doubt is entirely possible; it comes from the sense world. The courage to overcome doubt comes from the supersensible world. And it takes courage to look at things in the right way. In the course of natural science which I gave at Christmas in Dornach, I pointed out the fact that where atoms arise, there is death. Atomism is the science of what is dead. Modern science is approaching the anthroposophical-scientific view by stating many facts. Everywhere one can find facts that point to the spiritual-scientific. Radium, for example, is the most striking case of disintegrating matter, producing atomized atoms. Facts are everywhere to be found that lead to the spiritual, but the external science rejects this lead to the spiritual for lack of courage.

In the economy, too, it is the case today that since the 19th century we have had a world economy instead of many national economies. The world economy is already much faster than the national economy; this slow pace of the national economy can be seen even in the smallest of its reaches. The trains that run through the national economy travel slower than those that arrive in Stuttgart today, that is, those that run through the world economy. And if you now want to go back from the world economy to the national economy, this can only mean destroying what has already been achieved and what exists.

A participant then asks how one could develop a relationship to architecture and sculpture.

Rudolf Steiner: It depends very much on the world view. Today's world view, which is based only on pure logic and sensory observation, must necessarily imagine that the world is nailed down somewhere with boards. We have set ourselves external natural boundaries that we cannot get beyond. In logic, we have the inner legislation that human beings give themselves, quite apart from nature. All knowledge, even purely scientific knowledge, must lead to the purely artistic. One must educate oneself to be an artist, so that one shapes forms as they are shaped in nature. But this can be learned as soon as one finds one's way to the point where nature itself becomes an artist. One must also deepen one's knowledge of nature to such an extent that it is only possible to regard plants, animals and humans as artists. Only then can one begin to recognize the infinitely interesting static and dynamic relationships that the human body alone encompasses. Then one will see how each bone, so to speak, represents a system of beams; how there is a difference between standing with legs apart at the front or bringing one leg forward and standing with a step. Every human being is a finely wrought structure in and of himself. The older religions taught their students, who were to be initiated, about the wonderful position of a person in the world through their own dynamic and static relationships. When you look at a statue of Buddha, you see the dynamics and statics of the human being. The fact that the legs are placed wide under the upper body, the structure and the statics of the upper body are recognized and particularly emphasized. As far as one studies the human being in motion and standing, one gets the form of architecture. A perfect building is nothing other than the perfect standing and walking of the human being. Every culture has conceived and represented this static and dynamic in the human being through its architecture in a different way. The Assyrian-Babylonian culture represented the proclamation of the Logos more through the leaning forward of the human being, the Greek culture through the calm standing. One need only be familiar with the way in which the human being stands in the world in order to recognize all forms of construction in a lively way. Today, of course, the architectural imagination is very limited. And yet today's architectural style must be one that is born out of the human experience of self, that flows from the “know thyself”. This has been attempted at the Goetheanum.

If we move from the human being's movement to the human being's form, we come from architecture to sculpture. Sculpture is the experience of the human being's form. To move from architecture to sculpture means to move from the human being's equilibrium to his form. The more knowledge of the human being advances, the more art, the more differentiated architecture and sculpture will be possible, art that is close to the human being. But in order to be able to move on to the form of the human being, an independently built social life, built on selflessness and love, is necessary in today's world. The Greeks could still feel their own form by being in the world. Today's man must find the sculpture that is necessary in today's world by looking at the other man in a synthetically constructive way. The Greeks had no need to look at other people; they found the plasticity they needed by experiencing their own bodies.

Art is based on revealing the secret forces of nature. We need art to understand people and nature. So what we need to bring into today's sculpture is a living artistic view of the human being. We must look at the human being in such a way that we see how, on the one hand, in the form of the head, as I tried to shape it in the group at the Goetheanum, the Luciferic life is expressed, and how, on the other hand, as a counterpoint, Ahriman is active in the hardening of the bone skeleton, and how the interaction of the two then forms the ideal human being. We must regain the human form.

Hebrew culture has deeply embodied the moral impulses inherent in its religion. But it did not dare to make an image of its God. Gradually, through evolution, it came to the logical-empirical conception of human nature and then lost the artistic. So it came about that there is no longer a convergence of world view and art. On the one hand, there is the logical-empirical world view, on the other, artistic imagination.

No connection has yet been created between the view of the laws of nature detached from the human being on the one hand and artistic arbitrariness on the other. The architecture and sculpture of the future will have to be created from the knowledge of the human being in his full form.

A participant: About the difficulties students face in asserting themselves with anthroposophical works.

Rudolf Steiner: The Anthroposophical Society must learn to recognize how important it is that the work done within its framework is not ignored; it must come to recognize the achievements. It must learn to appreciate work such as that of Dr. von Baravalle or the brochure by Caroline von Heydebrand, “Against Experimental Psychology and Pedagogy”. Little by little, even if our research institutes have already solved the tasks that lie in the natural science courses and cycles, it must come to pass that even our opponents will say that there is something to be respected in the work being done in the Anthroposophical Society. We need to train ourselves to recognize human achievements. Today, a student who writes an anthroposophical dissertation is rejected! The Society must become a place where such things become “conscience”, so that it can no longer happen that a professor rejects an anthroposophically oriented work for these reasons. The research institutes, in which people are involved in practice, must stand behind it so that the student who works in a seminar or does a doctoral thesis also gets it developed. The Anthroposophical Society must become such that the professor must accept an anthroposophically oriented seminar paper or dissertation, provided it is substantial enough, because he is concerned that otherwise he will get the Anthroposophical Society on his hands.

Rudolf Steiner asks whether representatives of the youth will come to the delegates' meeting.

A youth representative says a few words about the delegates' meeting. Rudolf Steiner: It would be good if something could be presented in as comprehensive a form as possible and taken completely seriously on the three main questions that must be addressed here:

Firstly: What is the situation regarding the student and youth movement?

Secondly: What experiences do people have at university who feel their full humanity through anthroposophy?

Thirdly: What do academics and younger people expect from the Anthroposophical Society?

These things must, of course, be brought to bear by grasping them in a penetrating way. Nietzsche showed in a penetrating way what the situation was at our educational institutions at the turn of the 1960s. He brilliantly described how the educational institutions should be and what he expected of them. Unfortunately, Nietzsche has almost been forgotten. Today, what Nietzsche described at the time would have to be surpassed. These three questions, which have just been characterized, are the most important. And if we succeed in bringing personalities into the center of the Anthroposophical Society who not only have the highest interest in their field, but also attention to everything that is going on in the Society and everywhere, then everything will be fine. What has been lacking is interest and attention. This is shown by the fact that the emergence of the religious movement went unnoticed until it occurred. Attention and interest must be paid to everything in the Anthroposophical Society. For it is the case that thoughts do not grow, they remain unchanged, but that attention and interest grow and can bear fruit.

Above all, one must seek and follow the path into the supersensible worlds with clarity and determination. Then one will also find the right relationship with people. And the other way around: if one has found the right relationship with people, then one is no longer far from entering the supersensible worlds.

Ill

From the Youth Section of the Free University

The Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum is seeking to establish not only the sections already mentioned but also a further section. This will be possible if the intentions of the Executive Council meet with a corresponding response. In every age, young people have been somewhat at odds with old. This gypsy truth is a consolation to many when it comes to the behavior of today's youth.

But this consolation could easily become a disaster.

One should understand the present youth from the “spirit of the present” both in their questionable aberrations and in their all too justified striving for something different from what the old give them.

First of all, there is the youth that is pushed into the academic career by the circumstances of life. They are offered “science”. Solid, secure, fruitful science for the outer life. It would be nonsense, in the manner of many laymen, to rant about this science. But the soul of youth still freezes to this science before it comes to recognize its solidity, its security, its fertility for the outer life.

Science owes its greatness to the strong opposition it has faced since the mid-19th century. At that time, people realized how easily man can sail into the uncertainty of knowledge when he rises from the lowlands of research to the heights of a world view. It was believed that chilling examples of such a rise had been experienced.

And so they wanted to free “science” from the world view. It should stick to the “facts” in the valleys of nature and avoid the high roads of the mind.

When they opposed the worldview, they derived a certain satisfaction from the act of opposing. The worldview fighters of the mid-19th century were happy in their fighting mood.

Today's youth can no longer share this happiness. They can no longer stir up satisfying feelings in their souls by experiencing the fight against the “uncertainty” and “crush” of the worldview.

For today there is simply nothing left to fight against. It is impossible to advocate freeing “science” from “worldview.” For the worldview is dead by now.

In contrast, however, the feelings of young people have made a discovery. Not at all a discovery of the intellect, but one that comes from the whole, undivided human nature.

The young have discovered that without a worldview, it is impossible to live a dignified human life. Many of the old have heard the “evidence” against the worldview. They have submitted to the power of the evidence. The youth no longer pays any intellectual attention to this power of evidence; but it instinctively senses the powerlessness of all intellectual proof where the human heart speaks from an invincible urge.

Science presents itself to young people in a dignified way; but it owes its dignity to the lack of a world view. Young people long for a world view. But science needs young people.

At the Goetheanum, we would like to understand young people in such a way that we can seek the paths to a worldview with them. And we hope that in the light of the worldview, a true love for science will be generated. We would like to not lose science in world view reverie, but to gain it in the awakening of spiritual experience.

The leadership of the Anthroposophical Society asks young people if they want to understand it too. If they find this understanding, then the “Section for the Spiritual Strivings of Youth” can become something vital.

Newsletter from the Youth Section of the School of Spiritual Science.

The announcement of the “Section for the Spiritual Strivings of Youth” at the Goetheanum has brought forth encouraging responses from the youth community. Representatives of the “Free Anthroposophical Society” and the younger members living at the Goetheanum have expressed to the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society their full and wholehearted readiness to take part in the undertaking.

I see in both expressions valuable starting points for a good part of the work of our Society. If it can build a bridge between older and younger people of our age, then it will accomplish an important task.

What can be read between the lines of the two letters can be put into words: our youth speaks in a tone whose timbre is new in the development of humanity. One feels that the soul's eye is not directed towards the continuation of what can be inherited from the preceding time and increased in the present. It is turned towards the irruption of a new life from the regions where not time is developed but the eternal is revealed.

If the older person wants to be understood by the youth today, he must let the eternal prevail as the driving force in his relationship to the temporal. And he must do this in a way that the youth understands.

It is said that young people do not want to engage with old age, do not want to accept anything from the insight gained from it, from the experience matured from it. — Today, the older person expresses this from his displeasure at the behavior of young people. It is true: young people separate themselves from old age; they want to be among themselves. They do not want to listen to what comes from old age.

One can become concerned about this fact. Because these young people will grow old one day. They will not be able to continue their behavior into old age. They want to be really young. They ask how one can be “really young”. They will no longer be able to do that when they themselves have entered old age.

Therefore, the older person says, youth should abandon its arrogance and look up to old age again, to see the goal towards which its mind's eye must be directed.

By saying this, one thinks that it is because of youth that it is not attracted to the older person.

But young people could not help but look up to older people and take them as role models if they were really “old”. For the human soul, and especially the young soul, is such that it turns to what is foreign to it in order to unite it with itself.

Now, however, today's youth do not see something in the older person that seems both alien and worthy of appropriation to them as human beings. For the older person today is not really “old”. He has absorbed the content of much, he can talk about much. But he has not brought this much to human maturity. He has grown older in years; but he has not grown in his soul with his years. He still speaks from the brain that has grown old, just as he spoke from the young one. Youth feels this. It does not feel “maturity” when it is with older people, but rather its own young state of mind in the aged bodies. And so it turns away, because this does not appear to it to be truth.

Through decades of knowledge in the field of knowledge, older people have developed the opinion that one cannot know anything about the spiritual in the things and processes of the world. When young people hear this, they must get the feeling that the older person has nothing to say to them, because they can get the “not knowing” themselves; they will only listen to the old person if the “knowledge” comes from him. Talking about “not knowing” is tolerable when it is done with freshness, with youthful freshness. But to hear about “not knowing” when it comes to the aging brain, that deserts the soul, especially the young soul.

Today, young people turn away from older people not because they have grown old, but because they have remained young, because they have not understood how to grow old in the right way. Older people today need this self-knowledge.

But one can only grow old in the right way if one allows the spirit in the soul to unfold. If this happens, then one has in an aged body that which is in harmony with it. Then one will be able to offer young people not only what time has developed in the body, but also what the eternal reveals from the spirit.

Wherever there is a sincere search for spiritual experience, there can be found the field in which youth and older people can come together again. It is an empty phrase to say: you have to be 'young' with young people. No, you have to understand the right way to be 'old' among young people as an older person.

Young people like to criticize what comes from older people. That is their right. For they must one day carry that to which the ancients have not yet brought in the progress of humanity. But one is not a true older person if one merely criticizes as well. Young people may put up with this for a while because they do not need to be annoyed by contradiction; but in the end they will tire of the “old young” because their voice is too harsh and criticism has more life in youthful voices.

In its search for the spirit, anthroposophy would like to find a field in which young and old people enjoy coming together. The Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society can be pleased that its announcement has been received by young people in the way it has been. But the active members of the Anthroposophical Society will not leave the Executive Council in the lurch either. Because at the same time as I am receiving approval from one side, I am also receiving a letter from the other side that contains words to which anyone who belongs to the Anthroposophical Society with their heart must listen. “The day may come when we young people will have to break away from the Anthroposophical Society, just as you once had to break away from the Theosophical Society.”

This day would come if we in the Anthroposophical Society are unable to realize in the near future what is meant by the announcement of a “Youth Section”. Hopefully the active members of the Anthroposophical Society will move in the direction of the Executive Council at the Goetheanum, so that the day may come when we can say of the young people: we must unite ever more closely with Anthroposophy.

This time I have spoken to the older members of the Anthroposophical Society about the “youth”; in the next issue I would like to tell the youth what is on my mind.

Newsletter from the Youth Section of the School of Spiritual Science.

In the letter which the committee of the General Anthroposophical Society sent to the members of the Society in response to my announcement of a youth section, there is a reference to the fact that I consider “being young to be so important that it can become the subject of a spiritual scientific discipline in its own right”. |

I really do consider this matter to be so important. Anyone who reads the description of my life in the weekly journal “Goetheanum” will understand why I think so. When I myself was as young as those who speak in this letter, I felt lonely with the state of soul that I now find alive in broad circles of young people. My contemporaries felt differently than I did. The life of civilization, of which this letter says that it no longer allows young people “to arrive at a worldview through any profession” and that young people “can no longer be led to any profession” through their “striving for a worldview,” was on the rise at that time. It was felt by young people as the latest stage in the development of humanity. They felt “liberated” from the extravagances of the ideological striving and secure in the prospect of professions that rose above the “safe” foundations of “science”.

I too saw the “bloom” of this civilization. But I could not help sensing that no genuine fruit of humanity would be able to arise from this bloom. My contemporaries did not feel this. They were carried away in the experience of “blooming”. They did not yet lack the fruit because they wasted their enthusiasm at the sight of the barren bloom.

Now everything has changed. The flower has withered. Instead of the fruit, an alien structure has appeared that freezes humanity in man. Youth feels the cold of civilization without a worldview.

In my contemporaries, there was an upper class of consciousness. They could rejoice in the fruitless blossom because its fruitlessness had not yet been revealed. And the blossom was radiant “as a blossom”. The joy of radiance covered the deeper layers of consciousness; the layers in which the yearning for true humanity lives inexorably in man. The youth of today can no longer find joy in the withered blossom. The upper layers of consciousness have become barren, and the deeper layers have been laid bare; the longing for a worldview is evident in the hearts, and it threatens to wound the soul life.

I would like to say to today's youth: do not scold the “old people” who were young with me forty years ago too much. Of course, there are superficial people among them who even today vainly flaunt their emptiness as superiority. But there are also those among them who, in resignation, bear the fate that has denied them the living experience of their true humanity.

This fate placed them in the last phase of the “dark” age, through which the grave of the spirit was dug in the experience of matter.

But youth is placed at the grave. And the grave is empty. The spirit does not die and cannot be buried.

Being young has become a mystery for those who experience it today. Because in being young, the longing for the spirit is laid bare. But the “light” age has dawned. It is just not felt yet because most people still carry the after-effects of the old darkness in their souls. But anyone who has a sense of the spiritual can know that it has become “light”.

And the light will only become perceptible when the riddles of existence are reborn in a new form.

Being young is one of the first of these riddles. How do you experience being young in a world that has become frozen in growing old? This is the question of feeling that lives in young people today.

Because being young has become such a human riddle, it can only find a living solution in “a spiritual scientific discipline of its own”.

In such a discipline, being young will not be spoken of in empty phrases, but the light that must fall on being young will be sought in it, so that one can perceive oneself in one's humanity.

Today, being young means wanting a world view that can fill one's life's work with warmth. It fears the professions that a civilization without a world view has created. It wants to see the profession grow out of humanity, not humanity crushed by the profession. To find one's way in the world without losing one's humanity in the search, requires a living relationship of the soul to the world. But this only awakens in the experience of the world view. The announcement of the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society was made in such an attitude. In such an attitude, the Council would like to unite young anthroposophists in a youth section to work towards a life of true humanity. But there is something else I would like to say to our younger members. If we succeed in giving the Youth Section the right content, those who have understood in their anthroposophical lives how to grow old in the right way will want to join forces with the youth. Let us hope that the young people will not then say: we will not sit at the same table with the “old”. For Anthroposophy should have no age; it lives in the eternal that brings all people together. Let the young find in the Anthroposophical Society a field in which they can be young. But the “old”, if they take up Anthroposophy in their whole being, will feel the pull of the young. They will find that what they have conquered through old age is best communicated to young people. After all, young people will struggle in vain for true humanity if they flee the humanity into which they must one day enter. In the course of the world, the old must rejuvenate itself again and again if it does not want to fall prey to the formless. And young people will find what they need with the genuine “old” anthroposophists, if they do not want to arrive one day at an age of their own, from which they would like to flee, but cannot.

Newsletter from the Youth Section of the School of Spiritual Science

Wherever the “youth movement” appears today, it reveals that it lives out of deprivation. What does the young person, who becomes aware of his or her youth, “lack”? After all, there is so much to “learn” in today's civilization. It contains not only a wealth of knowledge, but an overabundance.

It is tempting to think that young people are confused by this overabundance, that they cannot “understand” the content of it. But experience shows that this belief is false. Young people “understand” quite well what civilization offers them. One can understand what can be grasped in thought. And our present-day civilization, despite its overabundance, can almost be grasped entirely in thought.

The young person realizes when he begins to develop a relationship with civilization that he understands. And a right instinct tells him that this understanding, this thinking grasping should also be his further fate. But one cannot be young with “understanding” alone. One can only be young when one experiences with one's whole heart and soul what awaits understanding. And as a young person, one senses that one will grow old if one gradually leads the experienced into the understood.

Today's youth absorbs something from civilization that allows them to grow old, but not to be young. This civilization has almost nothing to give to the first years of life. One should enter the earth at the age of twenty today, then one could imbue oneself with the content of civilization.

This civilization has lost its spirit. It brings only matter into thought. These thoughts cannot be experienced; they can only be understood. And once they have been understood, they lie in the soul, incapable of transformation, as hard as stone. They are already fully ripe when they arise; that is why they cannot grow. But the young person must grow; and he wants what he takes up into his soul to be able to grow with him.

A genuine spiritual science can reveal itself only in thoughts. But these thoughts can be seen and experienced; they can be taken up by no one at a higher degree of maturity than he himself has. But they are akin to the human being's nature. They grow and mature with him. If someone gives me material thoughts when I am eighteen years old, I take them in the same way as I would if I were forty or fifty years old. If someone allows me to experience thoughts that arise from the spirit in their unfolding of humanity, then they may be seventy years old; if I myself am only eighteen years old, they will harmonize with my eighteen-year-old state of mind and grow as I myself grow.

The materialistic way of thinking and looking at things demands that young people fill themselves inwardly with “old things”. But young people want to experience their youth. Therefore, “experiencing old age” becomes a deprivation for young people. The Youth Section at the Goetheanum wants to give young people a living knowledge that can be used to grasp youth in a living way. Today's civilization has no thoughts with which one can experience “being young”. A real spiritual science will have such thoughts.

If you are an older person today and hear young people speak, you often have the feeling: oh, how old the speeches sound that come from the mouths of young people! But these are the speeches that young people find among the “old people” today. He absorbs them, but does not make them his own. In his desire to experience them, he feels false. He speaks words that cannot be true for him; and he carries his truth within him, without being able to reveal it to himself. It chokes him; it becomes a nightmare coming from within.

The young want freedom of breathing in a living spiritual life so that the nightmare will disappear. They want an awakening to a healthy spiritual outlook so that their consciousness can be filled with the experience of being young.

Young people want to be awake when they are young; but the thoughts of materialistic civilization only allow them to dream of it. But one can only dream when one has dulled one's consciousness. So the consciousness of youth must walk dulled through mechanical reality. Its hammer blows, its electric waves pierce into dreams. But they cannot bring about awakening. For they are not human; they are extra-human.

Spiritual science can be for souls that want to awaken. It does not just want to impart knowledge to people, but to bring them closer to life. Then it will be given to their freedom to transform life into knowledge.

People who believe themselves to be poets, but who are really just philistines, object: take away the dreams of youth, bring them to awakening, and you take away the best of their youth. Those who speak thus know not that dreams attain their full value only when illuminated by the light of waking. Mechanistic civilization does not bring the dreams of youth to joyful revelation, but rather crushes them as they arise, so that they become oppressive and burdensome.

Only in such images can we say here what the Youth Section wants to achieve. It will not publish a “programme”; it will not give an explanation of the “nature of youth”. It will try to bring to life what its founders themselves can experience of the deprivations of young people today. This will give rise to a “youth wisdom” that can unfold anew in life every day.

Immediately after the announcement of the Youth Section and ever since, young people living at the Goetheanum have expressed their desire to work within this section. Enthusiasm speaks from these expressions. In the first announcement, I said that the Youth Section will be able to work if it is understood for what it is meant. I truly believe that enthusiasm can bring about the right “understanding”. Not the “understanding” of which I have spoken here, and which is lacking in young people, but the kind that is called by the same word but is quite different. An understanding that comes not from the intellect but from the whole human being.

The longing of the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society “can only be to feel a receptive enthusiasm. Then it can hope that the life force of spiritual science is sufficient to give this enthusiasm what it would like to take. This board would like to live with the young in such a way that they can lead their youth towards old age in true humanity, because it believes that in doing so it will meet the needs of the young and give them what their yearning hearts desire.

I would like to address the younger friends in the Anthroposophical Society once more regarding the reasons for the founding of the Youth Section. It seems that two opinions are facing each other within the circles of our youth. One feels that being young is something that must be sought. They feel drawn to anthroposophy because they hope to find satisfaction for their search there. They have realized that this search must go to the depths of the soul, and that contemporary civilization cannot lead to these depths. There is a youth that searches for esotericism in this way because they have intuitively discovered that the true content of the human being can only be experienced in esotericism.

These young people will easily find the way to what the board of the Anthroposophical Society is striving for with the Youth Section. And this board will not interfere with anyone's independent striving. It will have a heart for this independence. But it will also be mindful of the fact that the cultivation of esoteric life has become its task. This concern will be his first. He will lead the Youth Section in such a way that esotericism is given its due, and he believes that he can also find true “youth wisdom” from true esotericism.

But there is another youth opinion. This is easily tempted to take being young in such an absolute sense that even the pursuit of esotericism seems to them like the absorption of a foreign body. They want above all, unperturbed by anything that comes from outside, to immerse themselves in their own youth and to understand it.

In the Anthroposophical Society, young people who hold this opinion also hope to find something. Otherwise they would not be there at all. But they believe that they must first bring Anthroposophy to life by activating their youth. The leadership of the Anthroposophical Society is far from criticizing this part of the youth in a philistine way. But it could easily happen that its intentions are seen in a false light by some young people. For it cannot deviate from its gained insight that the stream of eternity flows through the esotericism attempted by the Anthroposophical Society, towards which the youth aspires. He cannot fall into the error of believing that esotericism must first take on its true form through youth, since he knows that in esotericism youth will find the right paths to be able to be truly “young”.

I am saying this not because I want to point out a contradiction between part of the youth and the board. I do not see any antagonism; and in view of a practical world-conception such antagonism could not arise. The Executive Council is conscious of the fact that its tasks proceed from the spiritual world; and in all its activities it must follow the paths indicated to it from that source. There can be no antagonism in the field of its activity.

But it would be possible for youth itself to be drawn into contradictions if one part emphasized its striving one-sidedly in relation to the other. And that could do immeasurable harm to the anthroposophical youth movement. However, this will not happen if youth pays more attention to something it has learned from the “all-too-old” civilization than it often does. There is a certain tendency towards abstraction, towards speaking in mere concepts. I have already mentioned in the previous reflection how little good this abstraction does to youth. In truth, no one in the youth movement wants this either. But in talking about being young, about the ideals of youth, it is still there. There is even a considerable amount of “age” in today's youth. If, on the other hand, young people reflect on their true experiences, they will find that these are like questions, and that the esoteric side of the Anthroposophical Society at least offers them attempts at answers.

On the basis of such practical insight, an understanding will certainly arise between the various opinions in our youth movement. Through contact with esotericism, young people themselves can have an experience. If this happens, young people will realize that it is precisely through this contact that they can realize what they often have in mind in an indeterminate way. If this does not happen, it could easily be that some of the young people, not out of innate but externally absorbed “old talk”, will draw a theoretical curtain over the suggested experience.

If the young people understand each other, they will also understand the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society.