The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Speech to workers of the Daimler factory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What should be socialized?

How should it be socialized?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing words after the discussion

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

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

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

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

Today, too, it will be my responsibility to speak in connection with the appeal that most of the honored audience may have seen, “To the German People and to the Cultural World,” which essentially seeks a way out of the serious turmoil into which we have fallen, a way out of the world-historical chaos through a special way of understanding social life and the social movement. Furthermore, what I have to say will tie in with my recently published book, “The Crux of the Social Question in the Necessities of Present and Future Life”. Compared to everything that needs to be said in these difficult times, however, even this book, precisely because of the nature of its point of view, contains only the first, very first guidelines. And today, in particular, I must ask you to bear in mind that in the short time available in a lecture I cannot give more than the very first indications of the social point of view that is to be discussed. Perhaps some specific points can be added in a subsequent discussion. In any case, a further lecture is planned, which will then elaborate on some of the points that can only be hinted at today.

The reason for speaking today, as I would like to speak here, is that the social facts are truly loud enough and clear enough to be seen over a large part of the civilized world. And anyone who is able to appreciate them in their true form can see that we are only at the beginning with regard to the movement they are initiating. But it will be well to face the full seriousness of the matter right at the outset. Above all, those who have followed what we now call the social movement, which in this form is more than half a century old, will have noticed that now, when we are facing the facts that have emerged from the terrible world war catastrophe, , long-held thoughts, party opinions, and views seem, one might almost say, like mummies of judgment, walking among us and proving dead to what social facts demand of us today. If we want to arrive at a fruitful opinion, then it is necessary to at least briefly point out the reasons why long-held party opinions of all shades prove so inadequate in the face of facts. Not so long ago, I attended the conference in Bern that was tasked with commenting on the founding of the so-called League of Nations. Today, when it is necessary to speak openly and honestly about all things in order to make any progress at all, it is safe to say that, while the men and women at the League of Nations conference in Bern may have said many important things and expressed many fine ideas seems to be more or less the same as what the statesmen of the European states said to the nations, to the representatives of the nations, in the spring of 1914. I do not intend to go into the details of the matter today, but I would like to point out to this assembly the significant fact that the responsible Foreign Minister of the German Reich dared to say at a crucial meeting in the spring of 1914 that the general political relaxation - please bear in mind, the general relaxation, by which was meant the way to secure world peace for years - had made gratifying progress. Well, it made such progress that it was followed by that catastrophe, as a result of which, to put it mildly, ten to twelve million people in the civilized world were shot dead and three times as many were maimed. This and many other things must be remembered when those who, let it not be denied, talk quite cleverly about world affairs, are, as it were, blind to what is really hidden in the facts as the germ of future events. And with that, I would like to say from the outset, we come to one of the main points we will have to discuss today.

If we look back over the past decades, anyone who has had a heart and mind for the proletarian social movement that has emerged will say: over the course of more than half a century, many things have emerged that point to what the broad masses of the proletariat feel in their innermost being as their demands. If you have followed events, you could see how, I would say, from decade to decade, the proletarian demands have been expressed in an ever-changing way. If you had an understanding of the movements of humanity in world history, you had to say to yourself: basically, all of this, what is consciously spoken, what is formulated as a theory, what is set up as a program, is not in fact what it is about. What it is about would be – if I apply the word often used in modern times here as well – more or less instinctive, unconscious impulses that lived in a large part of humanity. These unconscious impulses expressed themselves, for example, in many preludes to current events. I will mention only a few stages.

In the Eisenach Social Program of 1869, we see emerging from the very dark, dull spiritual depths of the proletariat the demand for, as it was put, “a fairer wage for manual labor within the social society.” But then, after a relatively short time, as early as 1875 in the so-called Gotha Program, these demands took on a completely different, I might say actually communist form. At least in so far as they were openly expressed, they no longer dealt with the fair remuneration of labor, but with the equitable distribution and equalization of goods according to human needs. Then we saw how, nevertheless, the basic tenor of a political program remained alive in the proletarian movement. Until the beginning of the 1890s, the proletarian demands more or less clearly expressed the aspiration to a balancing out of social inequalities and, above all, to overcoming the principle of wages. Then we see how this political color of the program, I might say, strangely recedes, and how a purely economic program, the socialization of the means of production, the wholly cooperative nature of the work, becomes the theme. And one could go further. I am only hinting at the fundamentals. But anyone who really engages with this development of the modern social movement must also look at the other side. They must ask themselves: What has not been done to the detriment of humanity in the face of what has emerged! What could have been done? What I am about to say is not meant as a criticism of historical developments, for I know as well as anyone, of course, in what sense historical developments are necessary, and how nonsensical it is to send a moral or other condemning criticism into the past. But it is another matter to learn from the present for the future. What should have happened cannot be said otherwise: We have had guiding, leading personalities within the upper stratum of the human social order – these guiding, leading strata, have they shown themselves inclined to understand more deeply, from what they have brought forth as social experience, as social science on the basis of their class preference in more recent times, what the proletariat wants, than this proletariat itself?

Of course, the following is a hypothesis, but one that may shed light on the situation.

Do you see how different everything would have become, where we would stand today, if personalities had emerged within the leading strata of humanity who had absorbed the proletarian demands, imbued them with social experience, with social knowledge, with such social experience, such social knowledge that could have been put into practice – and if from there the starting point could have been won for a transformation of social life, perhaps decades ago! For a healthy self-reflection, one must not spare oneself the task of recognizing what has been terribly neglected in this direction. This has been neglected because, in a sense, it was bound to be neglected, because the intellectual life of modern humanity was such that it simply did not suffice to provide such an understanding. And here we are faced with the first key point of the social question in the necessities of life in the present and the future.

I am well aware that what I have to say in the first third of my remarks today will be somewhat uncomfortable, perhaps even incomprehensible, even boring, for some people. But anyone who does not recognize the seriousness of the first link in the social question, the spiritual social question, will not be able to contribute anything to the emergence from the chaos and confusion of the present. We must unreservedly admit that the intellectual life that has been brought up by the upper classes of human society, that this intellectual life, as it was formed, was not up to the facts. Even today, the legacy of this intellectual life is still far from being equal to the facts. Let us take a look at what has actually happened. It has often been emphasized, and rightly so, that the newer proletarian movement has emerged in the course of human development through newer technology and through the capitalist economic order. Of course, nothing should be said against this emphasis on true facts. But as true and correct as these facts are, there is another fact that people would rather deny. It is just as true, just as correct, and, above all, it is actually more important than anything else for what has to happen today: Perhaps three or four hundred years ago, with the advent of modern technology and soul-destroying capitalism, the process of what could be called the modern, more scientifically oriented worldview began.

About twenty years ago, I met with fierce opposition from proletarians and non-proletarians, from workers and middle-class people, when I expressed what I believed I had clearly recognized: that the modern labor movement, in the most eminent sense – it sounds paradoxical, but it is so – has the character of a movement of thought. However strange it may sound, it is true. It starts from thoughts. It starts from thoughts that, drawing ever wider and wider circles, sank into the souls of the proletarian population in the hours of the evening, when the proletarian population wrested itself from the fatigue of the day, and in which a truly more more real conception of social facts than was given by the political economists of the universities and teaching institutions, who essentially gave what the bourgeois class had to say about economic life and the other aspects of modern life. What has become part of the thoughts and especially the thought habits of the modern proletariat is, in essence, more important and significant than anything else for the movements that are taking place in the civilized world today. For what is actually at issue here? Well, as I said, with the advent of modern technology, with the advent of the capitalist economic system, the newer, more scientifically oriented worldview also emerged from the old worldviews, which had more of a general human or even a religious character. This scientifically oriented worldview, how did it confront the bourgeoisie, how did it confront the proletariat?

We can only come to an understanding of this fact if we have not merely learned to think about the proletariat from above, as so many do today, but if our fate has led us to think with the proletariat! You see, what one has learned to think and feel in the age of technology, in the age of capitalism, has certainly led many members of the leading, guiding circles of humanity to become free-thinking, free-religious. In this respect, unfortunately, unfortunately, modern humanity lived in a terrible illusion that must be seen through today. Yes, one could be a naturalist like Carl Vogt, one could be a popularizer of natural science like Büchner, one could be completely devoted to natural thought with one's head, but the whole person can still be part of a social order that makes it impossible for him to feel committed to the newer ways of thinking with more than just his head. It was different for the proletariat. I would like to mention a scene that could be multiplied not a hundredfold, but a thousandfold. A scene of the kind that has taken place with momentous consequences and that the leading classes have so far failed to recognize in all its world-historical significance. You see, I remember it vividly because I was standing next to it twenty years ago when Rosa Luxemburg spoke in Spandau near Berlin at a proletarian assembly in her peculiar, measured, deliberate manner. She spoke about science and the workers, one of those speeches whose fruits are now ripening all over the world. I will only use a few words to hint at the most important points of this speech. Rosa Luxemburg spoke to the workers, who had gathered on Sunday afternoon with their wives and even with their children, with complete awareness of modern scientific orientation, to hear something about the question: How does a person, as a worker, achieve a dignified existence? or: How should he think about his existence as a human being? At the time, she said: For a long, long time, humanity has lived in illusions about the ancient times. Now, at last, through its science, humanity has come to realize that all people are descended from the same animals. In the beginning, as she said, almost in her own words, man behaved most indecently as a tree-climber. Then she added: “Can anyone still believe that with such an equal origin for all people, there is any justification for the social inequalities that exist today?”

You see, a word had been spoken that the modern proletarian understood in a completely different way than the member of the previously leading strata of humanity was able to understand it. The member of the hitherto leading classes of humanity might have been convinced by such a word with his head, but he was completely caught in a social order that was a relic of world views of earlier times, in all sorts of ways, even if he did not admit it to himself, in all sorts of religious, artistic and other sentiments. He was not obliged to place his whole being in the light of such a philosophy. The proletarian, however, was compelled to see his whole being in the light of such a philosophy. Why? Not because the machine had come into being, not because capitalism had emerged, was the essential thing. The essential thing was that the proletarian was called away from his earlier living conditions, which, through his craft or the like, gave him something to answer the question: What are you worth as a human being among other human beings? Now he stood at the machine; that gives him no connection between himself and other people. Now he was standing in the midst of the bare economic system of capitalism. Now he was forced to answer the question from a completely different angle: What are you actually as a human being? — So he turned to this modern world view as he did to his new religion, which for others was a head-on conviction, but for him something that filled his entire being. Now, what had the proletarian taken over and what had ultimately filled everything that spread as a social outlook among the working class? It came, even if it was not always understood, from the development of the leading, namely the bourgeois, strata of human society. What the proletarian had adopted in the way of wisdom, of science, of materialistic views about man, had not grown in the proletarian's intellect; it was the heritage of what bourgeois thinking had developed in modern times. The proletarian, while living quite differently, only brought bourgeois thinking to its ultimate consequence, to its utmost development. And what did it become in his soul? Oh, he was convinced that this last legacy from the bourgeoisie must, after all, give him something soul-bearing. It was, so to speak, unconsciously the last great trust that the proletariat placed in the bourgeoisie, and that consisted in its taking over the newer materialistic world-view from the bourgeoisie. This last great trust has been betrayed. At least that is the unconscious feeling of the proletarian. And that is what underlies today's social facts, despite all the excesses, in their innermost essence.

When we look at this fact, then we must really take a good look at precisely what was unconscious in the proletarian's soul as a result of what has been mentioned. The bourgeois – take hold of your heart, try to recognize it through true self-reflection, if you are a bourgeois or your ancestors were bourgeois – the bourgeois has very different feelings as a legacy of earlier times. The modern proletarian, after his way of life, after he was called to the desolate machine, to desolate capitalism, rejected these old traditions. His soul was supposed to fill this newer worldview, but it could not. And no matter how enthusiastically the proletarian professed what this worldview said, he felt desolate in his soul, he felt a longing for a different spiritual life. For this intellectual life, the fruit of newer spirituality, has no power to answer the great soul-questions of mankind. This intellectual life says nothing about the connection of man with what every man feels in his heart as his higher humanity. That had a desolating effect. It had such an effect on the soul of the proletarian that he longed for something indefinite. This is what then masked itself in all kinds of demands and came to light in all kinds of forms. We will not understand this masking, these forms, if we cannot decide to look at the matter in its full depth from the point of view of a real world-view question. This newer spiritual life had no momentum for matters of world view, no momentum for the universally human. When the leading strata of newer humanity sought such momentum, sought something in spiritual life that would support the soul, they turned to the old religious ideas, to the old artistic, aesthetic, ethical or other views. But what they had to offer the proletarian, and what only the proletarian could understand, was not soul-nurturing, and to this day it is not soul-nurturing. We must ask: where does it come from? We must not ask the theorists, we must truly build no gray theories. We must immerse ourselves in a real life practice if we want to see clearly. Of course, I can only sketch the world-bearing facts today, but they can be fully proven. With the advent of modern times, with their technology and their capitalism, something was left over from an earlier development that, to the connoisseur, only remotely resembles what we call the state today, insofar as this state is truly worshipped and revered by enough people, one might say, almost like an idol. The classes of people who were the leading ones at the beginning of the modern era, when technology and capitalism emerged, used the framework of the state to bring into this framework everything that they felt comfortable bringing in. And we see it as justified, at least understandable from the point of view of that time, when one had to fight against the church and many other powers, as since the dawn of modern intellectual life, of historical life in general, intellectual life has been more and more incorporated into the sphere of the state. The school and other branches of spiritual life were increasingly drawn into the sphere of the state. This was seen as a great step forward in modern times. That is why it is so difficult today to fight against the general prejudice in this area and to say that it is precisely in this area that a retreat must be made, certainly not into a dark Middle Ages, but into the liberation of spiritual life in all areas from the state. . That is what one will have to realize today, that it is necessary if one wants to participate, even to a small extent, in the process of emerging from the terrible situation into which humanity has brought itself. It was considered a step forward to gradually place everything that belonged to intellectual life under the supervision of the state. Only a few artistic fields, some things that were considered unimportant for life, were still left free in the intellectual field.

Indeed, anyone who is familiar with the situation in this field knows what it means that people have become so arrogant in recent times with regard to the judgment that one can hear time and again that in the Middle Ages, philosophy, and by that we mean all science, all human intellectual life, trailed theology. Now, of course, the majority of those who are really intellectually active at the present time do not follow theology, but something else takes place. I would like to characterize it by quoting a word that could be multiplied a hundredfold, no, a thousandfold. A very famous, and rightly famous, important natural scientist of modern times once spoke as Secretary General of the Berlin Academy of Sciences about his colleagues, about the entire body of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and said that these scholars were the scientific protection force of the Hohenzollern. Well, think about it, that testifies to the dependency in which intellectual life has fallen, after it has freed itself from the clutches of theology. It no longer trails behind theology. But what it is inclined to do vis-à-vis the state, oh, the last four and a half years prove it. Read what German historians have written. And it is true, unfortunately most true – not only the administration, the staffing of the sciences depends on the state, no, those who really know the facts know that this science, which has become dependent on the state, has also become dependent on the state in terms of its content, its existence, became dependent on the state, and above all in so far as it was made by people who had killed the original spiritual life in themselves and became more or less only mediators for the assertion of that which the state actually asserts in them. It will be difficult to openly and courageously confess what has just been said, but it must be confessed. For it must be realized that spiritual life is only possible in its real essence, that it sustains people, that it sustains souls above all, that spiritual life is only possible when it is based on itself, on its own freedom, when everyone from the teacher of the lowest school knows: You are not subject to any command of the state, but only to the administration of those who have grown out of the spiritual life and serve it. With this spiritual life, which is completely independent of the state, something will be created that is a healthy soil for the development of the spirit in general.

What have we experienced in the spiritual development of recent times? Oh, how fundamentally alien to real life is everything that is cultivated within the walls of the scientific establishment. And what do we therefore lack in the field of economic life everywhere? Today, knowledgeable experts in this economic life admit that we lack the most important thing in economic life, that we lack, for example, a real science of industry. Economic life could not lag behind; it had to keep pace with the course of more recent development. It was impossible for the German iron industry, for example, to continue producing only 799,000 tons of pig iron, as it did in the early 1860s. No, by the end of the 1880s, it was necessary to produce not 799,000 tons of pig iron, but 4,500,000 tons. What is remarkable about this production of pig iron? That these 7,990,000 tons of pig iron were produced at the beginning of the 1860s by just over 20,000 workers, and, curiously, that the 45,000,000 tons in the 1880s were produced by just over 20,000 workers as well. What does that mean? It means that technical progress has advanced so far and economic life has progressed so much that the same number of workers were able to extract 45,000,000 tons of pig iron at the end of the 1980s, whereas only 7,990,000 tons were extracted at the beginning of the 1960s. But then one wonders: Has this perfection of technology been followed by perfection in other social fields? No. And today, insightful experts readily admit that we lack a science that is suitable, for example, to help production in the sense of increased consumption according to the demands of the present, so that the factories are built in the right place everywhere, that the factories are properly accompanied by other, supporting factories in the neighborhood. Whoever today observes the economic chaos that has emerged due to the lack of an industrial science in this regard can see the real reasons, the truly practical reasons for today's social movement. For a healthy spiritual life, a spiritual life that must not be dependent in a comfortable way, must not be supported by the state and its auxiliaries, but must prove its ability and strength for the social order anew every day, such a spiritual life, that is a healthy soil for all spirituality. And just as you say to yourself when you see a bad piece of wheat sprouting, there is imperfect soil underneath —, so you should say to yourself today: the fact that we have no industrial science, that we do not have what we need like bread itself for the recovery of our economic life is due to the fact that the soil in which the practical sciences should flourish is unhealthy, that the spiritual life does not produce those people who are the right leaders of capitalist administration, those people who can really find trust in the broad masses of those who have to work.

You see, these are the connections. Either you see the connections in this way, then you will find a way out of the chaos - but it is necessary to look into this deeper connection - or you do not see this connection, then you will go further into chaos, further into overexploitation, into degradation, no matter what you do in the sense of the old thinking about the economy. For only by starting with the socialization of spiritual life itself can we move beyond this overexploitation and this depletion. But socializing spiritual life means emancipating it from state life, leaving this spiritual life to its own devices from the lowest school level up to the university and completely freeing humanity's relationship to this spiritual life.

Believe me, I am familiar with all the objections that can be raised against what I have just said. I know that both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat will tell me: Well, when schools become free again, illiteracy will flourish once more, and similar things. You see, I would like to mention one thing in particular in response to the objections that may be raised by the Socialist side regarding what I have just said. The Socialists attach great importance to the so-called unified school. They say that in the future there must no longer be a class school; the children of all people must be taught in a unified school at least until the age of fourteen or fifteen. Very well, but do you believe that a school other than a unified school will exist when, for objective reasons, the independent intellectual organization, the intellectual organization independent of the state, sets up this school? I have written a little booklet: The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science. You may take whatever position you like on this point of view. I can fully understand any opposing position to this point of view; but if you disregard this point of view, if you disregard what can be said purely from the point of view of school philosophy about such a view, you will see that, when the education of the child is discussed, purely consideration is given to that which develops in the human being up to the age of maturity. When one speaks about the constitution of a school for objective reasons of spiritual life, one does not come to the idea of developing anything other than a unified school. It will be a need of spiritual life emancipated from the state that this spiritual life will have to prove itself effective every day anew in its representatives, that it will make its true essence and strength available to social life only when it is based on itself. Such a spiritual life will not live in abstract heights, it will not preach. Such a spiritual life will not cultivate unworldly science behind walls; it will educate people who, when they carry the thoughts of this spirituality within them, will become true leaders of economic life, our so complicated, so demanding economic life.

Spiritual life is not practical for the state; it has become impractical, it has become abstract. For decades I have repeatedly said to those to whom I was privileged to speak: You know teachings, you know theories that, for example, culminate in ethics, in morality, so that people are preached “love your neighbor as yourself,” or preached of brotherhood, of general compassion and the like. These sermons seem to me like speaking to the stove in the room: “You stove, that's what you look like; your essence invites you to warm the room, that is your duty as a stove, your categorical imperative, so warm the room!” Preaching is as useless for a stove as it is for a person. Therefore, we do not preach to the stove at all, but we do put wood or coal in it and light them. Likewise, in our present social order, those spiritual enterprises that remain at an abstract level are no longer appropriate; only those that really find access to what lives in the human being are appropriate. Do you think that if, for example, a truly living spiritual life had existed since the middle of the nineteenth century - but that is, of course, a hypothesis - people would have been just as uncomprehending about the Eisenach, Gotha and Erfurt programs as they were about them? No, never! On the basis of a healthy spiritual life, a healthy industrial science and a healthy social science would have developed. In the social sciences in particular, we have always put the cart before the horse. Instead of those who were called upon to speak about the social order, about the economic order, somehow finding something that had to happen, that could have met the demands of the proletariat, instead of that, these gentlemen recorded what was already there. That is what has brought us so low in this area. And the proletarian had no other choice than to experience the consequences of what was done with the economic system in which he was harnessed, based on the facts I have presented. From his point of view at the machine, from his involvement in soul-destroying capitalism, he saw the intellectual life of the leading, guiding classes. Well, of course, these leading, guiding classes could not help but shape life more and more democratically; they called on the broad masses of humanity to embrace democracy. Little by little, they also came to give the proletariat a share of what they cultivated as intellectual life; adult education centers were founded, art houses where the people were shown what art the other classes produced, and so on. What was developed there – no one should, of course, be reproached, because the people believed they were doing the right thing, which was in the spirit of progress in democracy – but what was actually staged was nothing more than a great lie. They just did not understand this lie. When the broad masses of the proletariat were called upon to look at the pictures of the bourgeoisie, to listen to the school courses of the bourgeoisie, and when they were then persuaded that they understood something about it, then that was not true. For one cannot experience anything in the field of intellectual life unless what is produced is produced within the same community. Because a deep gulf had opened up between the social experiences of the proletariat and those of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat's alleged understanding of bourgeois intellectual production was nothing more than a lie.

Thus the proletariat could not help but feel that it was part of the bare economic life. After all, everything was organized so that only a few could really enjoy the fruits of this intellectual life. But what did the proletariat experience? In the economic sphere, it experienced capital, the effectiveness of its own labor, and the circulation of goods, the production and consumption of goods. That was all that the proletariat really experienced. But when it looked at the state, which was used in this way by the ruling and leading classes of modern times, as I have just described, the proletarian felt something that every human being can feel who is mentally healthy. One can reflect a great deal on what the important concept of right actually means within humanity, or rather, within humanity. In the end, we will say to ourselves: the sense of justice is as fundamental to human nature as the perception of the colors blue and red is to the healthy eye. You can always talk about the red or blue color to someone with a healthy eye, but you cannot evoke any abstract idea of it. In the same way, you can talk about the individual rights to any healthy person. The broad masses of the proletariat also felt this in the periods when the democratic principle had led them to reflect on themselves at the machine and within capitalism. But then this proletariat looked to the state. From its point of view, what did it think it would find within this state? Truly not the realization of the right, but the class struggle with its class privileges and class disadvantages. Here we have another example of where bourgeois thinking has proved itself to be powerless. On the one hand, it was compelled to allow democracy to prevail; on the other hand, it did nothing to draw the consequences of this democracy and did not really dare to exclude from the state that which must be excluded, and to include in the sphere of the state that which must be included in the sphere of the state.

Today, due to the advanced hour, I will only point out one thing, but an important one: the second key point of the social movement of modern times. I will point out how it has taken hold – as I said, the one whom his fate has destined to think with the proletariat has seen it again and again – in the minds of the proletarians, the word of Karl Marx, that the modern proletariat must suffer from the fact that its labor power is bought and sold on the labor market like a commodity, that in economic life not only commodities circulate, but human labor power also circulates. Wages are nothing other than the purchase of human labor power as a commodity. Of course, the proletarian was not so educated by the heritage of bourgeois science, which he had inherited, that he could clearly understand in his mind what actually existed. And the proletarian leaders had only just inherited bourgeois science, so they certainly could not. But the proletarian felt the following in his heart in response to the above quote from Karl Marx. He looked back to ancient times and said to himself: There were once slaves, and the capitalist could buy the whole person like a cow or an object. Then came the time of serfdom, when one could buy less of the person, but still enough. Then came the more recent time, the time when people were made to believe that they were free beings. But the proletarian could not enjoy his freedom, because he still had to sell something of himself, namely his labor. You cannot sell your labor like something you have produced. You can take a wagon wheel or a horse to the market and sell it, and then go back. With your labor, you have to go along. There is a remnant of slavery in real life, no matter how much is said and taught scientifically about so-called freedom. This was what was fixed in the feelings of the proletarian, and what should also have been felt by a real spiritual life in the leading and guiding circles. But although they rightly evoked democracy, which fostered this feeling towards human labor, they were short-sighted enough not to accommodate this feeling through any institution. Now, finally, the facts speak in such a way that it is absolutely necessary to raise the second core question of the social movement: How to strip human labor of the character of the commodity? This is only possible if, on the one hand, we separate intellectual life from the actual political or legal state for the reasons given, and, on the other hand, we separate economic life from this political or legal state, if we thus place three independent social organisms side by side, which can only become a true unity if they are independent. Then they will help each other organically from within, whereas the current unity of economic life, state or legal life and intellectual life has led us into chaos. Now, on the one hand, economic life borders on natural conditions. How foolish it would be if some corporation were to sit down and determine today what natural conditions are needed for the year 1920, for example, how many days a year it must rain and how many days there must be sunshine. That would be folly, of course. In this area, where economic life borders on the natural foundations, one understands this folly, but on the other side, where economic life borders on the free state, which is not allowed to engage in economic activity, one does not yet understand a similar thing. Even Walther Rathenau emphasized in his latest pamphlet, 'After the Flood', that the detachment of the worker from the economic cycle would bring about a tremendous fall in the value of money. He cannot even imagine what will be possible as a result of the liberation of economic life from state life – the withdrawal of labor from economic life, so that economic life is left with nothing but that which is objective and independent of man. In the State the worker will have to stand on such ground where every man is equal to every other man. The future of the State, freed from economic and intellectual life, will be such that everything that lives in humanity, and which can be precisely defined, will develop within the State. In relation to this everything will stand completely equal before all men.

Not equal are men in regard to their individual abilities and talents. All these individual abilities and talents must be developed in a free intellectual life, in an intellectual life independent of the State. Democracy can achieve nothing here. Democracy has as its content everything in which all men are equal and to which no experience of life belongs. But experience of life is the element of economic life. The State must not concern itself with economic affairs. Its function is to lay down and regulate all those matters in which one human being is absolutely equal to another, and in which true democracy can prevail. These include, besides property rights, which you will find more fully explained in my book, above all labor law. In the future, the time, extent and type of work will have to be regulated by the state, which is independent of economic life, so that the worker, who is himself involved in this regulation, comes with a legally limited amount of work, with a working hours limited above all by labor law, when he enters the factory or workshop, before he concludes any kind of contract with a supervisor. Just as economic life, on the one hand, borders on the natural foundations of life and can only get by with a few technical measures, but is ultimately dependent on them, so economic life will, in the future, have to border on the other side of the firmly established labor law. It will no longer be possible to determine wages according to the utility value of goods, as is still essentially the case in our economic system today. All prosperity, all production within economic life will only be able to be shaped as a consequence of what is determined by the state as labor law, just as economic life can only be developed as dependent on natural resources. You can read more about this in my book “The Key Aspects of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life Today and in the Future”. We are now coming to the second of the key aspects of the social question, the regulation of labor law by separating economic life from state life.

The third of the core issues of the social question is the economic question itself. This finds its regulation when this economic life, realistically wedged between the two boundaries just described, is regulated within these boundaries by purely economic forces, the forces of the professional classes, by the forces of production and consumption through cooperatives and the like, in a completely independent manner from the legal and intellectual life. There is no more time today to go into detail - that can be done in the next lecture - about how the emancipated economic life can then bring about what prosperity will depend on labor law, and also on property law, but in a healthy dependence on it and, above all, in a morally necessary dependence, as it is on the other side in a natural dependence. In detail, however, it will be necessary for the other two areas of the social organism, the spiritual and the legal-state, to supply their strengths to economic life. But they will supply them precisely when they develop in the right way on their own ground.

When I was speaking on this subject recently in a Swiss town, a very clever person said to me during the discussion – of course I recognize all clever objections, I am aware of how much can be objected to what I am proposing here; but it is based on reality, and therefore there is as much to object to as there can be objected to as a rule; the reason why what is proposed is practical is that so much can be objected to it and because the objections must be countered in a practical way, not with judgments. He said: Yes, you now want to define the state with its law and its justice, but justice must prevail in both intellectual and economic life! I replied with an image: I imagine a rural family, the man, the woman, the children, servants, maids and three cows. The cows give milk. The whole family needs milk. Is it therefore necessary, or even possible, that the whole family should also give milk? No, if the three cows give milk properly, the whole family will be supplied with milk, and it is not at all necessary for the others to give milk as well. So it is with the three members of the social organism. Each of the members supplies for the other members that which can be supplied to them precisely because in its emancipation it is placed on its healthy, essential foundation. This is what one has to consider above all in the face of these truly practical social proposals, drawn from reality.

For more than a century, humanity has been guided by a threefold motto: liberty, equality, fraternity. Who could close their mind to the powerful impulsiveness of these three ideals? Nevertheless, very clever people of the nineteenth century, they have rightly, I say expressly rightly, pointed out the contradictions between these three great human ideals and said: If one is to develop the freedom of individuality, if the individualities are really to come into their own alongside each other, how is equality to prevail? Or again: How is fraternity to come into its own alongside equality, alongside the expansion of pure right? Well, you see, there is a capital, fundamental contradiction here. Why? Because these three great ideals of humanity, liberty, equality and fraternity, were still being formulated at a time when people were hypnotized by the idea of the unitary state, that unitary state which has actually led us into today's catastrophe. But something right, something lofty, something powerful was felt in these three impulses, and this can only be realized when it is known that each of these three ideals is suitable for the member of the three-part social organism placed on its own ground. In the future, the free spiritual organism must develop out of the impulses of freedom, the state and political organism out of the impulses of equality, and the economic organism out of the principle of fraternity on a large scale, from experience gained from person to person, from organizations, associations, cooperatives, and so on.

This is what prompted the person speaking to you today, when we were in the midst of that terrible catastrophe that brought us here in Germany to our present situation, to turn to many places so that the tone of the Germany. One could already see that at the time. The sound of the guns that thundered in vain should have been accompanied by a spiritual voice that would have filled the world, so that Central and Eastern Europe would have heard that in the future they should not work with guns but with the spirit. The way should have been sought to prevent what has now come to pass. My friends have put a great deal of effort into bringing to the relevant authorities, who were still appointed at the time and have now sunk into the abyss, what has been brought forth from the necessary conditions for the development of humanity in the present and near future. And I said to some at the time: What is expressed in this draft - at that time it was mainly formulated for foreign policy - is what has been deduced from the conditions in Central and Eastern Europe and the civilized world in general through decades of dedicated work, and what is to be realized in the next ten, fifteen, twenty years. And it has been said: You now have a choice. Either you accept reason and tell humanity that you want to realize this, or you face cataclysms and revolutions. Because what you do not want to realize through reason is what leads to revolution. This may be said today by someone who, before this war catastrophe, spoke of a social ulceration, of a social cancer. At the time, I was considered a fantasist, and those who spoke of a general relaxation shortly before the slaughter began were considered practical people.

Let us hope that in those who already understand the necessity of a change in thinking - not just a change in institutions, but a change in thinking, a change in learning in people's minds - let us hope that the impulse for the social movement that is heralded by such loud facts will shine in them. Let us hope that it will dawn on people before it is too late. Because what speaks through facts must be caught up with by thoughts. Today we do not need easy talk about this or that that should be changed. We need new thoughts in people's minds. Many people have said: A catastrophe like this war has not been seen since the beginning of human history. But few have said since: Therefore, we also need thoughts that may seem to some as if they have not yet been thought, but we need them, these thoughts, if we want to escape from this terrible catastrophe that still exists, and escape from confusion and chaos. Let us turn to self-reflection! Let us try to combine insight with courageous social will, then it will not yet be too late, even if the situation is already difficult today. Let us try to prevent the moment when we would then have to say to ourselves in terrible human tragedy, mourning: Too late!

Closing remarks after the discussion

I do not want to keep you very long today. First of all, it will be my task to thank you warmly for your trust. Believe me, it is truly not because of any personal desire to be consulted in these serious times. Rather, if I regard your trust as something extraordinarily meaningful, it is only because I have to face up to the seriousness of the times. And if I did not believe that we should not wait long in these times, but must quickly take action, I myself would perhaps recommend to you: Consider one or the other. But today it is really a matter of finding the way to rapid action out of the confusion of the present. I have been here in Stuttgart for eight days now, and I must confess that after having discussed the same ideas in Switzerland for a long time, the impressions of the last week here have been a very decisive experience in terms of my expectations and hopes, and from a very special point of view.

You see, today it depends on the people of the masses wanting what is reasonable. From my speech, you yourself will have gathered how, for years, attempts have been made to find the right thing to do with minorities, with those to whom, in a certain respect, the leadership of humanity had been entrusted. They preached to deaf ears. Today, a great deal depends on the masses, a great deal depends on whether one finds the possibility of cultivating reason in the broad masses. It was a great experience for me to be able to speak about these ideas to broad masses of the population, as has been mentioned to you, and to experience no contradiction. Today I consider this to be extraordinarily important, because it shows me that if one seeks the way, one finds it, and if it has not been found so far, then I believe it has not been sought in an appropriate way. The last few days have proved this to me, and that is why they were an important experience for me.

There is a lot to be said about the individual points of the debate, but given the late hour, it would be too much. However, I would like to defend myself against some of it, picking up on the last words, which actually showed great goodwill towards me. I would just like to recommend to you: Read page 140 of my writing 'The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Present and Future Life': 'The individual institutions of life presented will have shown that the underlying way of thinking is not, as some might think — and as was actually believed when I presented what I had written here and there orally — about a renewal of the three estates, the estates of nourishment, defense and teaching. The opposite of this division of the estates is aimed at.” The previous speaker said that the idea of threefold social order can also be found in Plato. No, what I presented to you today is the opposite of the division of the estates. It is not that human beings are newly structured in the state, not that the old estates are re-established, not that the Platonic idea is realized, but that what is independent of man, the social organism, is structured in three, and man attains his full, unified human dignity by not being divided into classes. It is by becoming a threefold social organism that class differences are overcome. There is a gulf between us and Plato. We must also rethink Plato. I must make this point, even in the face of such kind words. It is very important that we do not try to equate today's events with some old idea of Plato's.

Then today, in a way that I find very gratifying, the name Karl Christian Planck has been mentioned repeatedly. I believe there are also people here today who visited the Bürgermuseum years ago, where I emphasized the legal and political ideas of K. C. Planck in the context of my speech at the time. Yes, K. C. Planck is also one of those whom I would most like to cite as evidence of the aberrations of intellectual life in modern times. After all, K. C. Planck felt compelled to say that he would not even want his bones buried in his ungrateful homeland. So little attention was paid to what he had to say for that time. But I know that if Planck were to live again today, he would move with the times. If he were to ask himself, “How would my professional legal state be implemented in reality?” — he would automatically come up with the threefold order. That is what I believe to be viable in Planck's work, and I believe it will be a good preparation for what needs to be said today, though so many decades after Planck. It would be a good preparation if a good many people wanted to read The Testament of a German and also other books by K. C. Planck.

A great deal has been said: negotiations should be held, and the like. But aren't the negotiations that have now begun, when so many people, of whom you have been told, have to a certain extent embraced the ideas, negotiations that have already begun? That is also the opinion of our committee, that further progress should be made along these lines. But now I would like to say a word, a word that the great Gladstone once said. He once said that the North American Constitution was the most exemplary constitution he knew. Another, perhaps more witty English statesman, said that in his opinion the constitution did not need to be as good as Gladstone said, because the North Americans knew how to do the right thing for themselves with a bad constitution. It depends on what the people actually make of a constitution.

Now, instead of going into the details of the debate, I would like to point out the fundamental differences between what I believe and what many people see as the solution. You see, what is at issue here is not to set up some abstract program in which a great many people see salvation, but rather to bring people into such a context in social life that they can find what is right from within the social community. My appeal and my book are addressed to people. I have said repeatedly over the past few years: I do not imagine that I am smarter than others who also have experience, but it seems to me that my proposals are close to reality, to practical life. At any moment, the things we are talking about here can be realized from any starting point, here and there. It is only a matter of having the courage to do so. I have often said that perhaps no stone will be left unturned by my individual proposals, but that people will find the right way to live together if they are given the opportunity to do so. And people will find the right way if they are grounded in the threefold social organism. My appeal is to people themselves. If people want to establish the institution in question, they will enter into relationships with each other in which they can really organize their social life in such a way that the conditions of a healthy social organism are fulfilled. It is a practical matter, a practical grouping of people according to the threefold organism. Then, in the spiritual, legal and economic spheres, people will find what is right when they are in these three spheres. It is about people, and basically, to understand this call, nothing more is needed than real faith in people. I have often been told that the call is difficult to understand. I must confess that I was surprised that people who have understood so much that I have not understood in the last four to five years said that. There was so much that people understood or thought they understood when it came from the Great Headquarters or from some other source. Then everyone understood and even framed the sayings in golden frames. But now it is important that people understand something of their own accord, out of their own free decision. Man must rely on himself; that is the first requirement. This is the keynote of this appeal and of everything that is wanted here. You will be able to deduce the actual keynote of the appeal from what I have just said, and I hope that what is wanted will be understood better and better.

In the present grave situation of a large part of humanity, especially of humanity in Central Europe, it would be disastrous if the cure for various serious social ills were sought with small and petty means. It is necessary today to strive for comprehensive, forceful impulses that are based on a real understanding of what has driven us into confusion and chaos. It is necessary to turn our eyes, impartially, honestly and sincerely, to what actually is there and from which we want to escape. These considerations, which are characterized by the few sentences just quoted, were the starting point for the writing of that appeal for the threefold social order, which you know and which I also want to talk about today. It is only possible, I might say, to point out the necessity of what is said in this appeal and, in somewhat more detail, in my book, The Essential Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Present and Future Life, from this or that point of view. And many lectures would be needed if one wanted to point out everything that underlies the impulses that led to this appeal. Therefore, I must ask you to accept that what I can say in a single lecture can only be a part of what is actually needed to understand the social ideal that is meant by the appeal. Above all, however, I would like to point out today that a glance at the international situation that led to the terrible catastrophe of recent years, if viewed objectively and without prejudice, must lead to this appeal. Foreign political conditions and domestic political conditions, if we speak from the point of view of Germany, seem to force us to the impulses that are meant here. The basic idea of this appeal is that the terrible situation in which we find ourselves is essentially due to the fact that in modern times there has been a tendency to mix and blend three areas of life that must now develop independently: the three areas of intellectual life, the actual political or legal or state life, and economic life.

In the unitary state, which has increasingly been regarded as the panacea for the social order, hypnotizing humanity, all the forces of these three areas of life have been merged. Today, salvation for our social organism must be sought in the independence of these three areas of life, as a practical goal. This is, in the abstract, the basic impulse underlying this appeal. If we want to understand from one of the many points of view that come into consideration, we must look to the left and to the right, so to speak, if we want to understand what has led Central European humanity, in particular, into today's terrible and dreadful catastrophe. Germany and the German people were involved in the war to the west and to the east, and it can be said that it is only by looking at the circumstances in the west and the east and how they interacted that we can understand our current situation in Central Europe.

If we look to the West, we will see, if we first consider social hardship, how, especially in the countries of the West, in those countries with which the war lasted the longest, in the historical development of modern times, clear fusion of economic life with political life has taken place, so that from the national instincts, especially of the English-speaking population, I might say, in this part of the world, as if naturally and elementarily, a striving for the state has arisen, above all, from the particular point of view of economic life. Everything political was permeated by the economic. The economic laws became political laws. Thus we see the fusion of political and economic life when we turn our gaze to the West.

In another way, we see the fusion of political life with cultural life initially in the form of nationalist folk cultures and their intellectual life, which emerges from this nationalism. Looking eastward, we see the fusion of intellectual life with political life. Everything – here it can only be hinted at, but a thorough study of the European and American situation proves it – everything indicates that the explosive materials which have gradually accumulated between Central Europe and the West can only be understood from the conflict that arose in the West itself between economic and state life due to the fact that economic and state life, but with a particular predominance of economic life, had merged in a chaotic way. In the East, the explosive materials were stored due to the merging of the individual spiritual cultures of the national communities with the political life of the state.

We were placed between these accumulations during the development of modern times. We have so far failed to learn what our task is in this wedging between West and East. The terrible world catastrophe that arose from these two impulses, which I have characterized, should teach us where to steer, especially in Central Europe, which should learn from the West and the East. From the West it should learn that, as a neighbor of the West, it has the task of separating and achieving independence in economic life and political state life. From the East it has to learn the separation of spiritual life from - if we look superficially at it only in national life - state life. Huge errors – there is no use closing our eyes to this fact today – huge errors have piled up in the politics of the middle states, in the careless politics of these middle states, which finally led to nothingness, because the statesmen were not able to see how certain national instincts in the West have so far prevented economic life from merging with political life and gaining the upper hand in the latter, just as it provided one explosive charge after another in the East, how intellectual life has merged with state life in an unorganized way. Huge political errors, which one must recognize in their historical necessity, are what finally had to be discharged in that catastrophe that brought us the most terrible disaster. Has one in recent times, and I mean a long time, yes, has one actually until today the good will to look at these conditions in a penetrating way? Are there not, in spite of the present terrible situation, many people among us who look down on truly practical impulses as worthless idealism because these practical impulses are great ideals today, and who, out of complacency and timidity of spirit, long for small goals, which they alone call practical, while they turn against the great goals that are necessary today as against the impractical ones. These people, who today reject the truly practical, great goals as idealisms and only want to look at the very nearest, these people are the same or the descendants of the same who brought Central European humanity, European humanity in general, into its present situation and who will cause the damage to become even greater. If it is not possible for the so-called practice of life of the philistines to be replaced by the real practice of life — today the situation must be viewed impartially and honestly — then the result of a true foreign policy, which leads to the impulses of the threefold social organism, will never come.

But today we are not only dealing with a consequence of foreign policy. We are dealing with developmental forces that are surging from quite a different direction and making waves in humanity! What we are facing today can be compared to the migration of peoples and the encounter of this migration with Christianity at the beginning of the Middle Ages. Anyone who considers the great impulses of Christianity in their effectiveness through the Middle Ages and the modern era must actually notice the character of Christianity's impulses, especially among the peoples who are usually referred to when the migration of peoples is considered, and the character it has taken on among the more southern peoples. Originating in Asia, Christianity first took hold among the highly developed peoples of Greece and Italy, among the highly developed intellects of these southern regions of Europe. Only then did it penetrate into the lands of the “barbarians,” as the southern peoples called those storming in from the north. If we take a survey of these conditions, we find that what actually made Christianity effective in the world did not develop through its passage through the southern peoples, who were at the highest stage of development but already in a state of decline, but that it unfolded its mighty impulses in the hearts and minds of those peoples who still had unspent intelligence and unspent soul power. That was, I might say, the horizontal migration of peoples with its peculiarities at the beginning of the Middle Ages. Today, when we look at the proletarian movement, we are faced with a vertical migration of peoples. That which can be called the proletariat flows out of the depths of cultural life to the leading currents of culture. But what we must seek as the new, saving element of culture, as the great impulses that lead us out of the confusion, that works, I would say, from the depths of the spirit, as Christianity once did for the Greek and Roman peoples. And we see how that which wants to seize the future in order to reshape the world in spiritual, state and economic terms needs the unspent intellects, the unspent minds of those masses of people who, in today's vertical migration of peoples, are streaming from bottom to top, while, as I already I have already stated here, in the worn-out brains of those who, like the Greeks and Romans of old, are at the height of culture, there is hardly any trace of that fire in the leading circles that have been in charge up to now, a fire that we urgently need today to find the way out of social distress and to achieve truly great, practical goals for humanity. That such paths must be found is indicated above all by the fact that the vertical migration of peoples has played itself out in the course of the more recent development of humanity.

Foreign policy points to the threefold nature of the social organism. What does domestic political life show us? It shows us that precisely those elements of the people who carry the unspent intellect, the unspent powers of the soul from below upwards – however little many people today may want to admit it, however little the proletariat itself can find suitable and appropriate words and ideas for certain phenomena today – that these people feel this in their souls, they feel it in the hardship of their bodies, and in everything that confronts them, one can say that for three to four centuries, but especially in the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, they feel the triple hardship of the social order in three ways. They felt that they were facing, first of all, a spiritual life with which they felt no community other than the one that had been characterized for them in the last half-century by Karl Marx's words about “surplus value”. What underlies this has by no means been fully understood, neither on the one hand by the bourgeoisie nor on the other by the proletariat. In fact, things are taken rather superficially, especially in more recent education. What underlies it is that the entire, so much praised, so much vaunted intellectual culture of modern times in all its ramifications could only develop as the culture of a few on the subsoil of the deprivation of culture on the part of the great, broad masses. Not as if the hitherto leading classes had brought want and misery to the proletarian masses out of a malicious will, out of devilry. No, they brought it about, as I tried to show last Monday, through lack of understanding of the tasks that arose in world history from the fact that ever broader and broader masses were seized by the modern vertical migration of peoples, by the striving for a spiritual life that they lacked. But that was how it was, and the essential thing is that what we have achieved in art, indeed in science, what we have achieved in education with regard to intellectual life, could, on the one hand, only be for a few and that it had to be worked for under the deprivations of many. This special kind of intellectual life could not exist without creating an abyss between the privileged and the disadvantaged. The broad masses, striving upwards, felt this in relation to the main aspect of human life, in relation to the intellectual life.

In contrast to the life of the state, or of politics or law, the upwardly striving masses felt more and more that there is something for human nature that is the same for all people. This equality cannot be developed in any theory; it simply exists in the experiences of every healthy soul. Just as one cannot speak to a person with blind eyes about the color blue or red, so one cannot speak to an unhealthy soul about what lives in every healthy soul as a sense of right and wrong, that sense of right and wrong that makes man equal to all other men in the second sphere of social life, in the life of the state. But this feeling, which was still suppressed in the broad masses in the old patriarchal conditions, and even in the conditions of the Middle Ages, this feeling of equal rights, it came up more and more intensely in the last centuries and especially in the proletarian development of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The ruling and leading classes could not help but call on the broad masses for democracy. They needed it for their own interests. They needed a proletariat that was increasingly educated in schools. But you cannot educate one soul without educating the other at the same time. By making the proletarians into skilled workers for the complicated tasks in their factories and elsewhere, the ruling and leading classes had to, because one is not possible without the other, because the other develops by itself, at the same time allow the legal consciousness that is inherent in every self-aware human soul to arise in the proletariat. But this sense of justice developed quite differently in the proletarian than in the previously leading, guiding circles of humanity. In the previously leading, guiding circles of humanity, feelings of justice developed around the circles of interests into which these classes had long been born. The proletarian, by being placed at the machine, by being harnessed in the soul-destroying capitalism, was not equipped with such interests. Those relationships that existed everywhere between what the leading classes represented in social life and what they felt as their humanity, those contexts of interest did not exist for the proletarian. I do not mean it humorously when I say that for the members of the leading classes, something may have emerged from the social context in which they were placed, from an inner sense of humanity that gave them a certain sense of right and wrong when they could write, let us say, “factory owner” on their business card and the like, or even “reserve lieutenant”. But for the proletarian, there was no such connection of interests between the soul-destroying machine and his humanity, and between being harnessed into capitalism and his humanity. The proletarian was reduced to his bare human rights, and by looking at the others, he saw not universal human rights, but class privileges and class disadvantages. That was the second experience, the experience in the field of state life.

And the third experience arose for the proletarian in the economic sphere. There he saw how his labor power in the wage relationship was treated by the leading, leading circles in exactly the same way as a commodity. This had a deep, profound impact on the feelings of the modern proletariat. It created an awareness that perhaps did not express itself clearly in the mind, but that took root more and more deeply and intensely in the hearts of proletarians who were aware of their humanity: In ancient times there were slaves, the whole man could be sold and bought like a thing; later there was serfdom, less of the human being could be bought and sold, but still enough; today there is still buying and selling of human labor for those who own nothing but that labor. This labor power, one must go with it, by having to sell it, one cannot carry it to the market like an object and go back again after selling the object, one must deliver oneself to the one who buys the labor power. The enslavement of the laborer to the economic cycle was the third experience of the modern proletariat. Thus, in the social order that emerged as a welfare state, the proletarians found themselves united in the same way that we found them united in foreign policy; they found themselves united in the modern state, in intellectual life, in state and legal life, and in economic life. Just as the amalgamation of the great imperialisms led to the explosion of the world war, so, on the other hand, what moves from the bottom up, what is experienced threefold in intellectual life, in legal or state life and in economic life, leads to social explosion. The two belong together. The old order exploded into the world war catastrophe from the empires, into which modern capitalism saw itself transformed from large-scale enterprise without really knowing it. Large-scale enterprise has become imperialism, and the clash of imperialisms has given rise to the world war catastrophe. That which moved vertically, from bottom to top, contains the same impulses. It only leads in the opposite direction to that social distress that was a world social distress in the conditions of the newer empires, which either, as in the West, became empires of interests, or as in the East, amalgamations of state empires with national empires. The fusion of the three spheres of life led to the explosion of the world war and into a social distress of the greatest magnitude, because this so-called world war is nothing different than previous wars. It is the last gasp of the old order in a terrible form. Let us see how a new one is about to begin, from the bottom up. Let us not fail to see what impulses are striving to develop differently for the further development of humanity than those that developed from the old economic order into world imperialism and thus led to the most terrible horrors of recent times. This is how the signs of the times speak today. And so man must know how to face these signs of the times today. Have we not experienced how, especially in Central Europe, it has become apparent that people have gradually lost a truly healthy judgment about intellectual, economic, and political life because of the unnatural, the impossible gradual fusion of the three areas?

I ask you, without getting involved in a critique of the circumstances, I ask you whether events and facts of the last human development – let us look at them only with regard to Europe for now – have not emerged almost entirely under the influence of the fusion, for example, of politics and economic life? The whole world has screamed – I do not want to get involved in a critique of this screaming, of course, there are not only lambs on this side and only wolves on the other – but the whole world has screamed about the breakthrough through Belgium at the beginning of the war. How could this breakthrough have come about? It could only have come about because the strategic railways had been built there. They would not have been there if the economic forces had been separated from the political forces within the German territory. Look at the map of Europe, consider the many railway networks and then study from a healthy industrial science - which we do not yet have - whether these purely economic institutions, the railways, would be as they are - you can even do these studies in neutral countries - if they only served economic life and developed out of it. Or do we not notice, when we look at the relationship between economic and political life, how, precisely because the empire has become more and more merged with economic conditions, all of Central Europe has gradually become more and more of a large commercial building, following the Western model? Do we not notice that political education is increasingly fading away? Just think of the vast sums of intelligence, the vast sums of prudence that have been directed towards pure business life, towards economic life, while the peoples of Central Europe have become more and more apolitical, even compared to their apolitical nature of earlier centuries. We have become depoliticized by merging politics with economic life.

And finally, more and more we have come to depend completely on state life for all intellectual life. Here, too, it must be pointed out again and again how not only the filling of positions but also the administration of schools have come to depend on modern state life, but also the content of intellectual life itself, the content of art, the content of science. People are not yet aware of this today, which is why the most monstrous prejudice arises in this very area, when people attack what is important. And what is important today is that we rise up to work towards a healthy separation of economic life from state or political or legal life on the one hand, and again towards a separation of the entire intellectual life from state life on the other.

Today, the call for socialization runs through our economic life. It emerges, one might say, from the aforementioned vertical migration of peoples like a motto in world history. And even though there is still little sign of even a reasonably adequate understanding of true socialization, we must nevertheless say, when we look at social life without prejudice: However unclear the thinking on the matter may be, the call for socialization expresses something significant in world history. We see this perhaps most clearly from the fact that, precisely because of the terrible economic experiences of the war, even capitalistically oriented thinkers could not avoid speaking of the necessity of socializing the economy. This necessity for socialization of the economy is, for example, very energetically emphasized by an otherwise capitalist-minded man, Walther Rathenau. Indeed, in some of the points the Appeal makes, one can even find points of contact with what Walther Rathenau says, for example, in his little book 'The New Economy'. But as we shall see in a moment, for those who really understand the impulses of the threefold social organism, there is a radical, fundamental difference in the socialization of the economic between what must be demanded on the basis of this threefold social organism as such socialization and Rathenau's views. And this fundamental difference shows precisely what is most necessary in contemporary social striving.

But how did people actually arrive at the idea of socialization in the economic sphere, at the demands for socialization? For a long time, the human ideal was seen in what was called the free play of economic forces. Much of what can be called the modern private-capitalist economic system came into being as a result of the free play of economic forces, of the free competition of economic personalities and groups. But then, in the course of the development of the economic system that had emerged under the influence of modern technology, under the influence of modern capitalism and under the influence of the free play of economic forces, it became apparent that more and more was being separated from a human minority, namely the proletarian majority, which became the bearer of the three great demands that I have just characterized. And so the justified demand arose within the proletariat for socialization, that is, for the opposite of the pure play of forces in the economic sphere. According to the ideas of the leading figures of the proletariat, the development of economic life should henceforth be based on the thorough organization of the whole of economic life. And we see, of course, how in certain areas, albeit to the horror and disgust of many, such thorough organization is being implemented. For the old free play of forces, one still found the beautiful saying of the salutary of throne and altar as an echo of earlier state and economic orders. Now, out of the catastrophe of world war, the call and enthusiasm for throne and altar is abandoned, but we see something lurking that opens up in the face of the former throne and altar. Not only the former ruling classes, but also the broadest sections of the truly rational, thinking proletariat feel something frightening in the question: What will happen when office and machine take the place of throne and altar? Will it be better for us? Could it not be that the same dictators might develop from among those who work in the factory and office as have developed under the influence of throne and altar? This is a significant question, but also one that, if answered in a healthy way, must lead to a way out of social hardship to truly practical goals. I am still speaking in a very abstract way, but the idea I am about to express can be practically applied in all areas of economic life if all those involved in economic life are called upon to organize these matters. But it must be done in such a way that trust can prevail between all these links in the economic chain.

Let us speak openly and honestly on this matter. The days I have spent here in Stuttgart addressing numerous proletarian assemblies have been a great experience for me. I hardly spoke, only in form at most, to the proletarians differently than I speak here. I was, it turned out, understood in Switzerland and here in the broadest circles of the proletariat. And what did this teach me? It taught me that it is only possible to make progress, whether with socialization or with other social demands of the present, if we work with the trust of humanity. That we will only make progress if we work with people and align ourselves with their desires, if we stop seeking salvation only in issuing decrees from above out of a seemingly superior intellect. Today we can only avoid dictatorships if we find the right words that, when spoken by individuals, are spoken from the heart, from the feelings of the broad masses, especially the working population. I wanted to say that first. It points out that the social issues that are immediately urgent cannot be resolved in small circles, however they may call themselves, but that they must be resolved on the broad basis of the factories and workshops, from the people, not from socialist theories.

One of the first demands, if we take this human factor into account, is that the economic life should learn from the bitter and terrible events of the world war catastrophe, that is, from what the world war catastrophe has become, how socialization should be carried out. We must learn that everything that leads to such socialization must be disastrous, especially if it again confuses state or legal life with economic life.

Time and again I have to point out the unnatural amalgamation of economic life with state and legal life, as it developed in Austria in the last third of the nineteenth century. The fact that Austria fell into such a terrible decline, and was ripe for decline long before the world war catastrophe, is due to the fact that, on this hotbed of conflict, it was not understood how destructive it would be to form the state based on the rule of law from economic curiae at the dawn of the newer constitutional life. Only through coercion was a change made, much later, but it was much too late, to something other than what was attempted in the 1860s. The so-called Reichsrat was formed from four economic curiae: large landowners; chambers of commerce; cities, markets and industrial towns; rural communities. Purely economic interests were asserted on the territory of the state, where the law was to arise. Economic interests were transformed into rights! And anyone who has properly studied this political development of Austria, which under the Taaffe Ministry in the last third of the nineteenth century was called muddling through, knows what seeds of destruction lay in the fact that in these territories, which were based on the most diverse nationalities, the impulse was not found to develop the legal life separately for itself and the economic life separately for itself. I could say a great deal, and I could say a great deal in the parliaments of practically all the present States, if I wanted to show in detail how the impossibility of merging political or state or legal life with economic life has increased everywhere. From today onwards, the first requirement must be to separate this economic life from the state life. Then we can proceed with the claim of all human resources involved in economic life, trusting in them to carry out the appropriate socialization, which will consist - as I have explained in my book and also hinted at in other places - in the formation of associations, first by profession, then by context, coalitions, cooperatives, which arise from the pursuit of harmonization of conditions in consumption and production. Only on this basis can healthy socialization arise. It will arise when people see the damage caused by both the free play of forces and mechanical socialization – both of which have been prejudicial to humanity. It will only arise when we learn from the lessons of world's history, so that socialization will come about not through the extinction of the free play of forces, but precisely through the understanding work of the free play of human forces. You can only do that if you spread trust, but then you can do it! That, more or less, is what Walther Rathenau meant, and he was echoing a certain saying of Gretchen to Faust. But the threefold social organism means something quite different. You see, that is why Walther Rathenau's concept of socialization is quite different from the socialization that had to be proposed by the threefold order, because Walther Rathenau cannot imagine anything other than socialization taking place while state supervision continues and the state draws a steady profit from what is produced in the socialized enterprises.

This only proves that a person who might have learned from practical experience remains trapped in blind theory. This only proves how powerfully suggestive the thoughts that have formed in the course of the development of modern capitalism continue to be, even in those who strive for socialization, how necessary it is to struggle against prejudices in this area with all the strength of free practical insight into the circumstances. Everything that is to be raised in the way of order in economic life, of reasonableness and understanding permeating economic life, of morality, must come from the independent personalities and bodies that themselves direct economic life. Economic life will only develop healthily when the state has nothing to say in economic life other than what it has to say through the personalities involved in economic life, as personalities with rights. Of course, if someone cheats others in the field of economic life, then he is subject to the state law. He is subject to the state law as a personality. But the functions and activities of the personality in economic life must be based, in the economic partnership, on the mere contract, on mere trust. Even if this still meets with many prejudices on the socialist side today, anyone who judges not from concepts and ideas but from the experience that the last decades of European economic life have brought, up to the economic downfall in the war, will say this. And he must say: We will not achieve sound economic conditions until the separation of economic life from state life has been accomplished. We have arrived at the present situation through the intermingling of what should be based on trust and contract with the state, which should be based solely on laws. The laws of the state may only shine into economic life insofar as they shine through personalities. Only in this way can we bring out of economic life what must be brought out, that which, as labor power, is today, like a commodity, unlawfully harnessed into the economic cycle, according to the proletarian sense.

On the one hand, economic life borders on natural conditions. Imagine the following absurdity: some economic consortium would get together, determine its balance sheet, the probable balance sheet for 1919; and this consortium would take the 1918 balance sheet and then, based on assets and liabilities, determine how many days it should rain in the summer of 1919, for example, in order to achieve a desirable business situation for the next year. Of course this is pure nonsense, isn't it. But I only mention this nonsense because it should be seen from it that, on the one hand, economic life is based on natural conditions, which we cannot completely regulate from within this economic life. We can do some things through technical devices, but we cannot completely regulate them from within mere economic life. Just as economic life borders on natural life on the one hand, so in the future economic life must border on the legal life of the state, and in the legal life of the state everything must be regulated that is subject to the legal life, above all human labor. For the economic cycle, the regulation of the human labor of the worker must lie outside this economic process. Just as the natural forces of the soil ripen the corn and wheat outside the economic process, so the regulation of the measure, time and type of labor must be outside the economic process. Nothing must be determined by the economic situation, nothing must be determined by the economic conditions and forces with regard to the measure and type of human labor. With regard to labor, man stands quite differently to man than with regard to the satisfaction of human needs, which are met by the economic cycle of production, circulation and consumption of commodities. From this cycle of production, labor must be taken out and regulated in the purely democratic life of the state, in the separate state emancipated from economic life. Thus the economic process is healthily constrained between nature on the one hand and the legal life of the state on the other. All this must be organized in the spirit of threefolding. This can only be achieved if the state does not develop what can only develop within the economic process from person to person, but only develops everything that relates to the relationship between individuals, where each individual is equal to every other individual. Therefore, no profit that comes from a consortium of people, from an economic group, from an economic community, may prevail on the basis of this state life. What is gained in the economic sphere must in turn flow back into the economic life of the people to raise their standard of living. Whatever flows into the state, let us call it a tax or whatever, must, if I am to express myself clearly, come only from the pocket of the individual human being. Only the individual human being can stand in relation to the state; then, on the basis of the state, only the individual human being stands in relation to the individual human being. Then human rights will truly flourish on the basis of the state. Then the social question, insofar as it is a labor question, will be solved by emancipating state life from economic life, in which the compulsion can no longer prevail by which labor itself becomes an object of the free play of forces in the free play of forces. The worker must have organized his labor power before he enters the workshop, before he enters the factory, before he enters the economic process. Then he appears as a free personality, whose freedom is guaranteed by the state labor law, to the head of labor; only then does a healthy relationship develop.

Here we are on truly practical socialization ground. Those who understand the conditions of this ground know that you can make socialization framework laws without end from other conditions. You can make them today, find them useless after two years, reform them, find them useless again after five years and reform them, and so on. We will not arrive at a healthy, beneficial state sooner than we rise up to attack the practice at such a point as I have just pointed out. It is precisely this characteristic of the development of recent times that this development, in many ways for human thinking, for human habits of thinking, clings to the surface of things. And now, when we are confronted with world-shaking facts, we see in so many cases, unfortunately, unfortunately, the inadequacy of the old party judgments, which were supposed to build up and which in the building up often behave not like judgments that intervene in reality, but like mummies of judgment that have died under the party stiffness, under the party philistrosity of more recent times. Therefore, it can be said that in the present day, when things should be seen urgently and squarely and honestly and truthfully, the most important things are seen so crookedly. It is understandable that many who have seen modern capitalism in its development now hold the view that private capitalism as a whole must go and common ownership of all means of production must prevail. It is understandable that this judgment, which has been formed over decades, I would say out of bleeding souls, out of need and misery, is difficult to discard. Nevertheless, a deeper question must arise – after all, we cannot do without capital accumulation in the modern economy – the question: What must be associated with capital accumulation? The individual ability of people to use capital in the appropriate way, not in an egoistic but precisely in a social sense, must be associated with capital accumulation. We cannot do this if we do not cultivate human individual abilities, if we do not make the respective capital administrations of the enterprises accessible to these human individual abilities. Therefore, on the ground on which this call for social threefolding, which you have mentioned again today, originated, an idea had to be grasped that represents something completely different from what is still often understood today as the socialization of capital.

It is remarkable how, when thinking practically, one is led to making the administration of capital dependent on the third sphere, which must become independent in a healthy social organism, the emancipated spiritual organism. We have increasingly severed the link between intellectual work and the work of capital in the economic process. As a result, instead of developing an economic upswing that can be linked to an increase in the standard of living of the masses, we have increasingly developed a kind of economic overexploitation despite all technical advances. Particularly with regard to the impulses that play a major role in modern economic life, for example the impulse of credit, modern economic life has run itself into a strange cul-de-sac. Credit in the context of economic life today is something that can almost only be supported by existing economic factors. In the future, we need the possibility that credit will not only be born on the basis of economic life, we need the possibility that credit can be born into economic life from outside. Not true, a paradoxical assertion, a strange assertion; but what underlies it is even stranger as it is. As spiritual life becomes independent in the direction of the future, developing out of its own conditions, we shall emerge from that abstract spiritual life, from that luxurious spiritual life that cannot find any relation to practical life. Those who know me will not suppose that I want to belittle spiritual life in any way. But the intellectual life that will develop out of its own conditions, isolated from the other two social organisms, will not be an abstract intellectual life that merely preaches or remains on abstract intellectual heights. It will be an intellectual life that does not merely lead to abstract knowledge about this or that, but that leads to making people capable as people. In a future social order, we will no longer be able to use our grammar schools, which are alien to life. Nor anything similar.

But that which will live will be something that has spiritual impact, that the human soul is able to carry in all its most spiritual needs for life. It is precisely by developing that which so many people today regard as an outlandish spiritual life that we come to find that path which cannot be found by our education system, which is forged to the state, that path which educates the human being as a whole human being, educating the human being in such a way that any kind of intellectual culture will no longer be possible without at the same time being a skill for practical things, a way of looking at practical things. The materialism of modern times has made people impractical. A true spiritual life, which will not be the life of a state servant in the field of the spirit, will make people practical again. It will not produce people in the field of the highest culture who think they have worldviews but do not know what a bank, credit, mortgages and so on are, and how these work in economic life. It will not produce people who know about the forces of physics but who have never chopped wood in their lives. I am, of course, speaking comparatively here. There is a practical bridge between a genuine spiritual life, left to its own devices, and the management of economic life. Capitalism, in its damaging form, can only be overcome if the management of capitalism is closely linked to the recovery of spiritual life. Then there will emerge what may be called a healthy socialization of capital. Then those people will emerge from the spiritual life who can also bring credit, new credit, into economic life, who can constantly fertilize economic life. Then the cycle of capital will be possible, of which I speak in my book. Today I can only touch on these points. In the next lectures that I am allowed to give here, I will have to discuss individual specific questions of this kind, in particular the relationship between capital and human labor.

Thus we see how the three great impulses of human social development, which, as I mentioned the other day, have been shining maxims of human endeavor since the French Revolution, will be able to materialize through the three-part social organism. Freedom in the field of independent intellectual life, equality in all fields of state life, fraternity through the associations and cooperatives of the self-built economic life.

Now, in conclusion, I would just like to say this: I know that if one hears only the generalities, and not yet the specific practicalities that have been mentioned again today, one can have many objections to them, because one does not know how everything is really connected in practice in the thinking about this threefold social organism, from the founding of the university to the sale of a toothbrush. The practical nature of the proposal lies precisely in the fact that one can object in many ways when one only hears the general. But the practical value will emerge when people of all professions, of all human activities, participate in the realization of this idea in their social work in the individual concrete case. In the face of the objection that it is idealism or even utopian, in the face of this objection, more and more people will speak out about the serious facts of the time.

In July and early August 1914, world events reduced to absurdity in a strange way the ideas that many still consider practical today. In my pamphlet, 'The Crux of the Social Question', I pointed out at the end, where international relations are discussed, that people at home and abroad still have no idea of what really happened in Berlin on the last day of July and the first days of August 1914. The world will demand to know what happened there. When the truth is told about these things, it will be seen that a terrible light falls on the events of modern times, a light that will show that we do not just need a transformation of one or the other, that we need new thoughts, new habits of thought, that we not only have to transform institutions, but that we have to relearn and rethink in the thoughts of our heads.

Those who honestly and sincerely come to terms with this situation will not despondently recoil at the objections of those who say: You idealist, stick to your trade, stick to your ideals, don't talk us into practice! These practitioners will see what a pest this practice of life will reveal itself to be. But those who are the true practitioners, who think from the great impulses of human development, do not ascribe any special cleverness to themselves. For what compels us today to speak as I have done today, are the facts of the present itself. Oh, sometimes one feels so that one would like to compare oneself with that boy who once sat at the machine and had to operate the two taps, where the steam was let in through one and the condensed water through the other. The boy was truly not a genius inventor because of his age, but he stood before the machine, which revealed something to him through its facts. He saw how opening one of the valves coincided with the descent of the balance arm on one side, and opening the other valve with the descent of the balance rod on the other side. So, in his naivety, he took some ropes and tied the cocks to the balancing rod – and lo and behold, there he was at his steam engine, watching the balancer go up and down and open and close the cocks. But with that something important had been found. It was not the man who had been right at the time who now approached the boy and said: You good-for-nothing, get rid of those cords, just open the valves by hand; but it was the man who had found the self-control of the steam engine through the naive machinations of that boy.

Today, the facts speak so powerfully that one truly feels naive when trying to find how the self-control of the healthy social organism should be achieved. I could only hint at this today. It will be found when the following are allowed to function in full independence: spiritual life, economic life, and political or state life.

And so, I would like to conclude today by saying that I hope that humanity, and in particular Central European humanity, will recognize the significance of these impulses in the necessities of life in modern times before it is too late. For it must be recognized that we can only effectively move towards practical goals out of social need if we come up with ideas that contain the germ of action. It is thoughts that contain germs, thoughts that contain the germs of deeds, that we should seek, and we, who represent the tripartite social organism in its three impulses of independent spiritual, economic and legal life, believe that these impulses must be carried into the development of humanity before it is too late.

Closing remarks after the discussion

Dear attendees,

I do not want to keep you any longer with my closing remarks, not so much because there is not still much to be said about the remarks of the esteemed speakers, but above all because we are already too far ahead in time. Therefore, some of what I would like to say, but only in a vague way, has been said by some of the esteemed speakers, will have to be taken into account in the next two lectures to be given here. However, I would like to address some of them today, albeit very briefly. So please forgive the brevity of the answers to the direct questions that have been put to me.

The question has been raised as to why I myself – possibly through those on whom my word could have made some impression – have not raised the voice of peace earlier. Well, even though there were speakers in this discussion who again raised the accusation of idealism, I would like to emphasize quite strongly that I am and want to be a practitioner of life through and through, and that therefore it never occurs to me to merely propagate things that do not show their potential for realization in the facts of life. I would therefore also like to answer these questions with a few facts. What do you think would have been a truly practical way of promoting peace propaganda in real terms, say here in Stuttgart, well, let's say in the middle of the year or in the spring of 1916? By calling you together here and speaking fine words to you about the necessity of peace? Do you think that in the spring of 1916 a real practitioner of life could have achieved that so easily? Well, there were other ways. These ways, which came from the realization, from the full realization of the matter, were tried in order to do what was right at the time. In the not too distant future, it will be necessary to talk seriously about the history of the last four to five years, not in the way that people still talk about the history of these years in many circles. To mention just one of the facts: I fully advocated what I considered necessary as early as the spring of 1916, when it would have been possible to take practical action. I tried everything possible. Partly because of lack of time, because I would have to talk a lot about it, I will not elaborate further. It came to the point that on a certain day my task in the face of the terrible events should have begun. But then came the strange decree, I will call it that, from the highest instance, although those who had examined the matter considered it to be very promising. The decree came from the instance in which many people believe because they were ordered to believe: “He is an Austrian German, after all. Before we use Austrians for such services, we have to hire our capable German people for them. — That is the truth! That is how a truth can be! If I told you the whole context of the matter, no one would ask me why I did not stand up earlier for what I stand up for today. And another thing. At the beginning of this century and at the end of the last century, I was a teacher at a workers' training school founded by the old Wilhelm Liebknecht. At that workers' training school, I formed a very loyal following among the students. But perhaps the members of the Socialist Party present here know that there are also so-called bigwigs within this party. And so it came about that one fine day, because I did not want to teach a dogmatic, materialistic view of history, four people out of six hundred of my students – four people who had never heard me outnumbered six hundred of my students who had heard me for years – and managed to get me fired. This is also a small chapter as to why the things that are now being spoken of me have not been spoken of earlier. Those who know how and where I have spoken on these subjects do not ask. But it is one thing to speak and another to be listened to. I am firmly convinced that many of those who are listening to me today would not have listened at all before the great lessons of the terrible and dreadful events of recent years came. This is also something that must be taken into account.

If it has been said that a bone of contention should be thrown between the state and labor, then, please, I must also refer to one of the next lectures. It will show that the esteemed previous speaker has misunderstood me completely if he believes that I want to make the state an economic actor in just any old way. That will not be the case. Rather, the state will play no economic role at all, so it cannot be the payer of wages either. Instead, for the state it is a matter of the freedom of the labor force. In this sense, I have also been correctly understood by many.

Now I have only briefly responded to certain questions with individual facts. In the course of time, these very questions will be answered quite differently.

If one of the esteemed gentlemen who spoke before has pointed out that it has been said that I have not explained the things, then it must be said that it is precisely the case that these things can only be explained from the experience of life, that when they are expressed, they go out as an appeal to human thinking and human experience. One must really turn to life for a change, otherwise we will not make any progress. Here is something that approaches people in such a way that they are to give it their free understanding. Unfortunately, we have seen that much has been understood in recent times – well, what I have not understood are the things that certain gentlemen have had framed in quite beautiful frames in recent years, the proverbs from a certain quarter, I have not understood those. The difference between what is to be understood here and what has been so easily understood in the course of the last few years is that, of course, here, with understanding, an act of inner freedom should be present. There, understanding was commanded. Let us sit up straight for once, try to understand something without being ordered to understand it, and let us try to work out how much of what we think we understand we only think we understand because it has been instilled in us, drilled into us or ordered to be understood. Now, anyone who is a practitioner of life can finally understand when someone says: Don't be hard on the money bag carrier, have pity on this or that person. But such instructions are actually quite selfish instructions, really quite selfish instructions, because it does not matter whether someone realizes that money is dirt or continues to believe that money is a little god. That is not what matters to the socially minded, but rather what role money and a person who has it play in society.

We should not shut ourselves off from such feelings: we should feel sorry for the moneybag carrier – but we should open our minds to the circumstances, not just to what we would or would not want to feel sorry for based on our own tastes. It is a matter

about breaking the habit of idle preaching. This idle preaching is one of the things that has brought us to our present plight and misery. I have often said figuratively to my listeners: All the talk about love of one's neighbor, about brotherhood, is all very well, it does so much good for the inwardly egotistical soul when one talks about love of one's neighbor in a well-heated room, about loving all people without distinction of station and so on. But that is now compared to reality as if I stood in front of the stove, so I said, and said to the stove: You stove, it is your stove duty to heat the room. The way you look, you have a stove physiognomy, such an object has the categorical imperative to make the room warm. — But it does not get warm, I can preach as much as I want.

And so people preach in abstractions over and over again, it does not get warm, but outside it is now going haywire. The thing to do is to stop preaching, use my thoughts to consider how warmth can be created in a sensible way, and to get firewood and make a fire. In the matters that are now at hand, it is important that our thoughts contain the seeds of what can be done. I believe that anyone who really seeks will find this in the meaning of the call to action in my book 'The Crux of the Social Question in the Necessities of Present and Future Life'. There have been enough words that are just words, now we need action. But if these actions are to be reasonable, we must first come to an understanding about them. We need germinal thoughts for action, such germinal thoughts that lead to action as soon as possible, before it is too late.

It might seem as if, in the events of the great world catastrophe, which today is at the “Versailles” stage, the topic: the future of capital and human labor, seems somewhat unfounded. However, following the events in their depths, one might perhaps point out that these two topics: world catastrophe and that to which today's reflection is to be devoted, are intimately connected. For it must be more or less clear to anyone who has observed the events of recent years with an open and alert mind that something of what could be called world capitalism on a large scale has led to this so-called world war, that this world capitalism behaves, as you painfully know today, in its own way within the so-called conditions of peace, and that through a large part of the civilized world today, what could be called the demand directed precisely against capitalism is already going like a mighty historical opposition. Thus, the contradiction between capital and human labor is perhaps the deepest, most significant problem of our time. Capitalism ultimately rose to what can be called, and often has been called, imperialism. Human labor gasped under the rule of this imperialism. And if you take a closer look at the most significant characteristic of capitalism, you will find that it effectively came to an end in the terrible world catastrophe. What is one of the main characteristics of the capitalist world economic order? It is this: that man's working life, his enrichment, is based on the so-called profitability, the investability, of capital. Now I ask you: how much of the causes of the horror of the catastrophe can be traced back to the investability of capital on a large scale? To what extent were the struggles actually fought for the expansion of the investability of capital by certain imperialisms? And so it is already apparent, and will become more and more so, that from the depths of humanity rises and will rise the demand: How do we come to a reorganization of human existence, after those forms which the world economic order under capitalism, imperialism, has assumed, firstly, to such a high degree have shown themselves to be a disaster for humanity, but secondly, have long been leading to their own destruction? And so, with what we are discussing today, we are actually discussing the contrast between capital and labor, a declining world economic order on the one hand, and a rising world economic order on the other.

In discussing this question here, I ask you to bear in mind that it is necessary, from the points of view from which we are speaking here, to first speak clearly about the comprehensive, the great impulses, so that then, on the basis of understanding these great, comprehensive impulses, we can go into the details. For no one who, in this day of the great reckoning of the world, wants to avoid turning to the great, comprehensive impulses can possibly think of making a healing contribution to the rebuilding of the world. Whoever today calls great, comprehensive points of view impractical, actually expresses, whether he wants to or not, that by remaining in his so-called practical, in his small, he does not want to participate in what is really necessary for the development of humanity. Therefore, allow me today, in connection with my last two lectures, to dwell on somewhat more comprehensive impulses, so that next Friday I will be able to discuss only details that arise from the comprehensive plan of the threefold social organism in a fully clear way. These details could not be discussed without first fully unrolling the blueprint.

If we want to get to know the demands that arise from the broadest sections of the population today, and which at the same time express significant historical necessities, then we first of all need to have the good will to listen to what is most necessary in the light of the new situation, in order to give the people's particular demands a form that can be integrated into the reality of human development. Circumstances in recent years have changed so much from what they used to be that they appear to be something completely new, and yet many people today still cannot let go of old habits and old ways of thinking, and they have no ears, at least no willing ears, for what is most urgently needed. Today we are indeed faced with demands that do not originate from this or that source and cannot be propagated by this or that source. We are today actually faced with the demands of the broad masses of the people, which arise from the depths of human feeling, human experience and human will. In this time, above all, trust is necessary, trust among people, trust of people in those who have something to say about the demands of the time. Above all, it is trust that is not based on something personal, but trust that is based solely on the matter at hand. Today we are noticing something very significant. It can be said that if one knows how to gain access to the broadest masses of the people, it is relatively easy to gain trust. However strange it may seem, it must be said: Today it is all the easier to gain trust the more one speaks to those people who, due to the previous economic, legal and intellectual order, have been uprooted, so to speak, with regard to the human necessities of life, who rely on the strength of their own person, on the strength of their work, to make a living.

It is remarkable how the most comprehensive impulses are received with understanding by those who have personally experienced the inadequacies of human development in recent times. It is more difficult to speak to those who today are still, as it were, standing there with the remnants of the old economic, legal and intellectual order; who carry over into the new era what they have acquired, inherited or otherwise appropriated from the old order. They are attached to their possessions and to their ideas. And it becomes difficult for them to find anything practical except for that which enables them to preserve, at least to a certain extent, what they have acquired, inherited or otherwise appropriated. Today, many people, and all the more those who belong to the latter category, lack not only the opportunity to seek trust in order to achieve a new beginning through trust between people, but they even lack faith in this trust; they lack faith that the understanding of those who want to understand great impulses is genuine and honest. I do not wish to criticize, I only wish to discuss facts, but facts which make it so extremely difficult to advance today by means of that which alone can advance us - the power that lies in man for the understanding of other men. Today it is infinitely difficult to popularize this basis of all real socialism: understanding of one man for the other. For it is a strange fact that in our time, when the call for socialism sounds so significant, so magnificent, it is in this time that the strongest anti-social instincts live in the depths of the human soul. This is why, clouded by these anti-social instincts, it is actually very difficult for few people today to gain sufficient, realistic, truly practical insights into what is necessary for the further development of humanity. What has been discussed in the previous lectures and what will be discussed today and next time has not been plucked out of the clouds. It has been taken from real life. For much of what is required by the impulses of the threefold social organism is, in the secret desire of many people, actually already there, already there in the sense that it wants to move from the depths of the soul to the surface, that it wants to fight for its existence, and that only the institutions of our present-day intellectual, legal and economic order want to hold back these forces that are pushing to the surface. The world-wide struggle between capital and labor, which is now agitating the world, makes one particularly aware of the strange phenomena whereby people today are working out of their old state economic order to counteract what wants to fight its way up for their own good. Do not expect me to start with some more or less satisfactory definition of capital and human labor. In reality, one does not fight against concepts and ideas, in reality one has to fight against forces and people. In reality, however, one also often has to fight against delusion, inadequacy, even blindness. In this respect, things are extraordinarily strange today.

This brings me to the second point to be considered, apart from the socio-psychological fact of seeking trust. From the great mass of the proletariat and the socially minded, the call arises, and it has been arising for a long time, for some kind of socialization of the means of production, which, after all, are essentially the same for the proletariat as for capital. Anyone who, in the sense in which I have dealt with it in my last two lectures here, engages in the development of social and socialist ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may come to the conclusion that there is something in this call for socialization of the means of production that corresponds to the most justified thing that one can see in the more recent development of humanity. But for those who allow themselves to be influenced by the facts as they have changed through the world catastrophe, it will not be difficult to see through how inadequate many of those ideas, party opinions and the like that have also asserted themselves on the socialist side have become, now that the facts arising from the world catastrophe are loudly and powerfully demanding expression and seeking to be shaped. Now the questions must be raised: How can we shape social life? How does the path lead to what is presented as a good goal: socialization of the means of production? How do we arrive at such ideas that not only show us the goal that can satisfy demands born out of suffering and deprivation, but that also open up the path to that goal for us? That is the task of the threefold social organism: to find the way to an end that the broad masses of humanity recognize as their own, feel as their own, and to a certain extent understand as their own. I must again and again emphasize that what I have to say here is not derived from some vague theory, nor is it the product of erudition. It has its source in real life and its present far-reaching demands. But one sometimes wonders how the times, how human thoughts relate to something that has been taken straight from the depths of life. In the form in which the call for socialization sounds today, it comes from a significant world-historical rallying cry, from the so-called Communist Manifesto of the ingenious Karl Marx. And basically, what has been experienced to date and what will continue to be experienced in terms of social and socialist impulses will be branches and shoots of what is given at the root with this Communist Manifesto. But it is remarkable that in the same year that the Communist Manifesto appeared, an honest, realistic book was published. And the thoughts in this book arose from the soul of a man who already knew life and who would have been inclined to profess himself a socialist completely even then, if he had been able to do so based on his knowledge of life. It is Bruno Hildebrand who wrote the book at that time, a seemingly unassuming book, but a symptomatic book, a book that should be thoroughly considered: “The National Economy of the Present and the Future”. I mention this here today in my introduction for a very specific reason. If you take everything that has been put forward by the opponents of socialism since the Communist Manifesto, you can clearly find it all in the work of Bruno Hildebrand from 1848. What is actually the basis of the impulse of this remarkable man? He said to himself, I have to imagine what a social order would look like if it were purely socialist! He visualizes such a socialist social order to a certain extent. If he could consider it possible, as everyone can tell from the man's explanations, then he would immediately profess it. He cannot consider it possible according to his views. Why? Not because he believes that some people who have acquired, inherited or otherwise obtained wealth will suffer, but because because, as a thinker of reality, a genuinely practical thinker, it becomes clear to him that those who want socialism as they imagine it would have to feel unhappy in such a socialist social order in no time. And why should they feel unhappy? The man gives all this. He shows how many of the legitimate human powers would naturally have to disappear if a socialist structure were to take hold of human society. He shows how it would be impossible to establish the relationship between capital and labor in the long term, especially in a socialist society.

Now, one is in a very strange position when faced with such a realistic examination. One says to oneself, but now, the historical necessity of socialism does exist. Socialism must come, and it will surely come. Should one want that which may also bring people into misery, at least not into happiness, who want the new order? That is the question that can weigh like a terrible burden on people today who look deeper into human development. What we are called upon to do today, prompted by the forces inherent in human development, cannot be clearly understood from any agitational or demagogic background, but only from a sense of bitter seriousness and sacred responsibility towards the demands, the legitimate demands of humanity.

The questions that arose from these foundations are the questions that ultimately emerged for the foundation of the impulses of the tripartite social organism. The socially structured human society stood there as a future perspective, based on real life. But in the quest not simply to speak out of illusions and demands, but in the quest to arrive at something that can truly benefit humanity, the question had to be asked: Why is it that what is historically necessary, what must certainly come to pass, can at the same time appear as something that disturbs humanity in terms of the noblest forces? Such a prospect cannot deter those in positions of responsibility from recognizing the necessity of a social structure for the social order. But it can drive him to investigate how to ensure that good and not evil may come of it, so that the free human nature, developing in all directions, may come into its own, and not a human being withered and dried up inwardly must live in the historically necessary. This leads to a more exact, life-oriented study of this social organism. And there it becomes evident that if one simply wants to transfer the old state order, the old state content, into the new social order, if one would develop the old unified state into the new social order, then what the opponents of socialism, if they are well-meaning opponents, would argue, would come about. The murky picture is immediately illuminated when one realizes that One must first remove the actual legal or state or political sphere and the sphere of human spiritual culture from the economic organism, in which we have become more and more involved, so that the state and spiritual organism have become servants of the economic organizations. If you leave these inside, you sail away, hypnotized by the idol “unity state”, and if you want to socialize, then the objections apply. If we separate the newer human culture, the legal or political or state life on the one hand, and the spiritual life on the other, from economic life, in which more and more of human culture has been concentrated, then the possibility remains in the freed economic cycle to socialize in a healthy way. And at the same time, the possibility arises to socialize in a healthy way in the other two areas as well.

I wanted to draw attention to this for the simple reason that today, when these things are discussed, people are so easily persuaded that what is being said has, as it were, come about overnight. What is meant by the threefold social organism is not such an idea. It is something that has arisen out of living together with social reality. Because only if you have the prospect of the tripartite social organism that you characterized recently and the one before that, does the possibility arise of casting the right light on such impulses in the newer development of humanity and on their design in the present and into the future, which are necessary for capital and human labor. Among the confusing and unjust forces of modern times, views have emerged that do not always point in the right direction. For example, it can be said that those who have thought about how to help human development have expressed the strangest ideas about what they actually mean by capital and its effects. There is an economist, Roscher, who includes the state in capital; there is an economist, Thänen, who includes people in capital. I could give you a long list that would prove to you how people view the economic world and have the strangest ideas about what is active in economic life. Therefore, we will perhaps get a clearer picture of what is actually moving and stirring humanity today than we would from the ideas of such people and perhaps also the ideas that we can form ourselves, by pointing out the fundamental impulses of the unleashed struggle between capital and human labor. First of all, we can point to the beliefs of both sides. For basically, two economic creeds are pitted against each other.

What does the capitalist actually believe? The capitalist believes that he lives off his capital, or if he is economical, that he lives off the interest of his capital. That is his belief. He does not think much about this belief, because he does not suspect that no one can live off capital and interest. And he also does not suspect that there is a certain justification when a very significant political economist, who even became a Prussian minister for once, uttered the words that capital is the fifth wheel on the economic wagon. You really have to consider what that actually means. It means nothing less than that human society does not actually need what is considered capital today. But in reality, this capital feeds many people, very many people. These people are all nourished by the fifth wheel on the economic wagon, that is, they feed themselves in such a way that if they did not feed themselves, the economic wagon would also move, only they themselves would have to do something other than feed themselves from capital, namely work. You see, that sheds light on the capitalist's belief. It is very difficult to fight against this belief, as it is generally very difficult to fight against religious beliefs, for the simple reason that religious beliefs are intimately connected with human nature. And no matter how often you tell the capitalist: your capital does not create life, as long as your capital is not transformed by the social order into a power, into the power that you have over other people through your capital, who work and provide you with a living through their labor. Anyone who looks at these things thoroughly will realize that capital only has any significance when viewed from the standpoint of this question of power. So much for the moment about the capitalist's creed.

Now, the creed of the laborer, at least of the laborer who has developed into the modern age under the soul-destroying capitalism, this creed is: I live from my labor! In today's social order, it is just as much a mere belief, an unjustified belief, that one can live from one's work as it is an unjustified belief that one can live from some capital, although the belief that one can live from one's work has at least a certain limited truth. It is just that it is not completely true within our social order. For within our social order, which is based on the division of labor, in order to be able to live from this labor, a threefold activity of the human being is necessary, which proceeds from the spiritual culture of the time in the broadest sense. Firstly, there is the inventive activity that leads to the means of production, and secondly, there is the organizational activity that leads to the harmonization between the means of production and human labor. Thirdly, there is the speculative activity that leads to the utilization of what is produced with the help of labor on the means of production, and to the transfer of the products to the corresponding members of human society. Without this threefold spiritual activity, labor is unfruitful in the social organism based on the division of labor. But this points us from the outset to what, as I said, sheds light in a certain way on what is needed today. We just have to look at what is there in the right light. Today's society works under the influence of capital. The worker feels quite rightly when he regards the means of production as the essence of capital, that is to say, that which must be created by human labor and does not lead directly to consumption, that is, is not a direct consumer good, is not a direct luxury, but what serves to produce consumer goods and luxury goods. Socialism seeks to bring these means of production into a social order that is different from the one into which they came under the influence of the capitalist economic order of modern times. Now, strangely enough, one can say that it is already apparent that in a certain sense the means of production are something in themselves, that they can be separated from people. Just compare how, in the older economic forms, what the human being needed as a craftsman to produce was grounded in his or her humanity. Now compare everything that is done on a large scale today with the help of modern means of production, how it can be separated, as it were, as a material good from human individuality. We know that when a sum of means of production that make up a business is sold – it can be sold by a person or a corporation to another person or another corporation, both of whom may have nothing to do with these means of production other than to draw their royalties, their profit – it shows how, to the greatest extent, the means of production are detached from their owners. Here we have something that exists in reality, which in the future only has to be turned into its opposite in a corresponding way, and then we come to a real socialization of the means of production. I have tried to indicate such a thing in my book “The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Present and Future Life”.

Two things must be achieved. Firstly, a closer bond must be established between the managers of a business and the means of production. A manager or a consortium of managers must be the one who, through his intellectual work, whether it be planning, calculating or inventing, intervenes in the business through the means of production and participates in it. The greatest possible trust must be placed in such a consortium, which is united by its entire intellectual structure and intellectual abilities with the means of production of a particular enterprise, by those who, as manual laborers, have to work with these means of production. In the future, the craftsman, the manual laborer, and the person who does not derive the profit that arises from the means of production, but who, through his intellectual abilities, through his intellectual work, which he has oriented towards the type of specific means of production, is solely entitled to manage this company, these means of production. But this manager has only as long to manage the production means as he can justify the management by the connection between his abilities and these production means.

This is where a point begins, where, however, those who can only imagine that at least the essentials of the old remain, begin to look perplexed. And yet, when the time comes that someone who has grown together with a certain set of means of production through his abilities can no longer maintain this state of being, then the social organism has the obligation to transfer these means of production to another person or group of persons without purchase. This means nothing less than that in the future there will be a coming together of – let's call it capital or whatever we want – of capital and human abilities without purchase. Capital will then only have the meaning of what is needed to initiate large businesses. In the future, capital will come into being through a person who is capable of running a particular business. This capital will only come into being through the trust that other people have in him, who will give him what they work as surplus labor beyond their needs. He will be able, so to speak, on behalf of a group that trusts him, but that means the general public of the social organism, to build up such a business, which today can only be built on private capital and private capital gains. But once the business has been set up, the possession of the means of production no longer applies. After the means of production have been set up, the worker faces the person who is the technical or other intellectual director of the business. The means of production do not belong to anyone; the possession of the means of production ceases. And the moment the collaboration of the company with this manager is no longer justified by the special abilities of the manager, the manager is obliged to transfer the means of production to another consortium, to another group of people. Directly or indirectly! This achieves for the future what I must call the circulation of capital and the end of private ownership of capital! Capital will be incorporated in a healthy way into the socialized social organism. It will circulate in this social organism, as blood circulates in the human or animal organism, where it must not be used by one organ alone, but must circulate through all the organs. Free circulation of capital! That is what is really required for the future.

In such a social organism, in which capital circulates freely, only real freedom of labor is possible. For just as private capital ownership is in fact a fifth wheel on the cart in relation to social functions, so human labor power, as the counterpart of capital, has been placed in a dilemma under the rule of capitalism. What is necessary for the recovery of human society is achieved through the circulation of capital that no one owns. What is paid out today, what is extracted from the means of production, what people call their capital or their pension in mortgage certificates, in mortgage bonds or bonds and so on, is absolutely unnecessary in the real process of human development of the social order. It is removed from this social order, and that removes the people who remove it from this social order, making them more or less parasites and those who generate the great forces of discontent within the social organization. Some people will, of course, find everything I have explained here about the circulation of capital highly impractical. I believe that. But to find something impractical, in this case, means nothing more than not wanting to let go of what is the fifth wheel on the wagon of the economic order, that is, having become accustomed to finding only what has proven practical for oneself, for one's own selfishness. But in the future, human beings will have to give themselves over to the social organism with their entire being. It will not be enough for people to sit in their rooms and fantasize about love for their fellow human beings and brotherhood and think very highly of themselves while doing so, and then cut the coupons, which they can only cut because the people in the mines and factories work for them in need and misery so that they can do themselves good in their sermons of philanthropy, love for their fellow human beings and brotherhood.

This talk, this good behavior, must come to an end. The organization of human society in such a way that it truly meets the demands of good behavior is what is now going through the world as a call. What has emerged under the newer capitalism, what has developed more and more, what has now, so to speak, arrived at the pinnacle of its consciousness, namely its class consciousness, is the social group of people that, for the time being, basically consists only of the working population, of the proletariat. What needs to be done with regard to this social group? Well, this social group has, in a sense, practiced self-help, and it has also achieved many things for itself, which it has wrested from the capitalist-led state, the purely capitalist economic order, and so on. Cooperatives and trade unions have emerged to organize the social group – initially, the masses of workers were anarchic, not in their attitudes, but in their grouping, initially anarchic. But as long as we were under the old economic order, these attempts at organization could not achieve any real goal. Despite all the praise of workers' protection, workers' insurance, even international workers' protection and so on, none of these things were suitable for properly organizing the social groups that live as the proletarian population. Because something was left behind in all these attempts at organization: the opposing capital and its representatives remained. And so it emerged, as it still is today, that there was a struggle between one social class, the supporters of capitalism, and the other social class, the proletariat. Struggle, competition, that is what emerged. And we have seen what we have come to through this struggle, through this competition: the unionized worker must wrest his wage increase or something else from the representatives of capital through the union. What the proletariat feels today clearly expresses how little the previous organization was able to fulfill what lies within the proletariat as a demand.

In earlier lectures, I have already pointed out what the main point is. One could say that two main points of socialism as a whole lie in two demands, to which a third then arises as a matter of course, as a self-evident consequence. They lie, firstly, in the demand, which has already been discussed today in the context of capital, in the demand that in the future the capital invested in the means of production should no longer be property. Capital is divested of its property character. Secondly, in the future, labor must no longer be a commodity. That is to say, in the future socialist or social society, in the healthy social organism, the wage relationship will cease to exist. Labor or labor power must no longer be a commodity. The person who does manual labor produces as a partner with the intellectual worker in the way that has already been characterized. There is no labor contract, there is only a contract for the division of services. This can only be achieved if the worker faces the supervisor as a completely free human being, that is, if he is able to determine the extent, time, and type of his labor on a completely different basis than that of the economic order, if he is free to dispose of himself as a whole person before entering into a contractual relationship.

I know that today's pigtails cannot yet imagine what has been said as something practical. But fifty years ago, many things could not be imagined as practical that have become practical in the fifty years since. The worker enters into the contractual relationship as a free human being who can say: Because I can determine the character of my labor on a basis independent of economic life, I will now approach you and work with you in the way my labor is regulated. What we produce is subject to a division of labor with you!

You see, therefore it is necessary that in the future the actual state, the actual social legal field, be detached from the economic field. By doing this, it will be possible to regulate everything that can be regulated as law on democratic ground, independently of economic life. Economic life itself can only be organized on the basis of experience and the real foundations of that economic life. But labor power can already be organized when the worker enters economic life at all. If that is the case, then in the future there will be, on the one hand, circulating capital or the circulating means of production, which are not the property of any one person, but are actually there for general use, and which can always come to the most capable through the institutions that I have just described. On the other hand, there will be human freedom, not only in terms of all kinds of ideal goods, which the manual laborer cannot count as his own today, but above all in terms of human labor power. Then the economic life will be relieved of the wage relationship, for then there will only be goods in the economic life, or, for that matter, we can call them products. Then what is capital, wage and market today will face each other in a different way. Then, as you have seen, capital will have ceased to exist, and so will wages, because there will be achievements that the worker produces together with the supervisor. The concept of wages will cease to have any meaning.

But what is now the market will also take on a different form. Today, the market, although it is already organized in many small ways, still has something anarchic about it. The market regulates the mutual values of goods, and that is the only value that should exist in economic life in the future, because human labor has a value that cannot be compared to anything else and must not be counted among economic values. What economic values there are will be the comparative values of the goods. Under the circumstances described, it will be possible for the goods to acquire such comparative values that give the greatest possible number of people, that is, all people who work, a standard of living that is as close as possible to the general, not to a group prosperity. This can only be achieved if the market ceases to be what it is today, if it is thoroughly organized, if the most comprehensive economic experience, the calculation of the various economic fundamentals, leads to a determination of commodity values that are not subject to the anarchic conditions of supply and demand, but are oriented towards human needs, as determined by experience. This can only be achieved if this economic life, if the market, or rather the markets, are transformed into associations, into cooperatives and so on. This cooperative structure, this structure not only on the basis of such cooperatives as have already been tried, but the interweaving of the entire economic life with a cooperative structure, will only be possible if, on the basis of experience in economic life, an intuitive knowledge of the relationships between producers and consumers is acquired. There are also some signs of progress in this respect. You can familiarize yourself with these in the writings of Sidney Webb, for example, where great things have been achieved in cooperatives, insofar as great things can be achieved within the current economic system, which still exists outside these cooperatives. But if the economic system is changed in the way I have suggested, then the point is that the cooperative structure must be brought about not according to subjective demands, but according to what the economic structure itself yields. I would just like to make a certain remark so that you can see that things are not left hanging in the air. It will be obvious to anyone who takes into account the nature of economic life as described in my book 'The Core of the Social Question' that the question arises: how, for example, can we limit cooperatives? If we want to limit them arbitrarily or for reasons outside of economic life, then we will always end up with false pricing and, as a result, false influences on people's lives. Now there is a very definite law that can lead to the development of a cooperative structure out of reality. You can start by considering the two currents of economic life, production and consumption. You can imagine consumer cooperatives where people join together who want to buy economically so that they take advantage of everything that can be exploited for buying by joining together as consumers.

On the other hand, producers can join together; this has already happened to a great extent within our economic system, and this is where the production cooperatives come from. Now, both types of cooperatives have very different tendencies. If you study consumer cooperatives, you will find that consumer cooperatives are primarily interested in buying as cheaply as possible and secondly in having as many people as possible in their ranks. They never resist the expansion of their cooperative if they have their true interests in mind. The production cooperatives have the opposite characteristics. The participants will fear competition if they expand, and they have every interest in selling as expensively as possible. This indicates that in the future, salvation can only come from bringing together people with consumption and production interests, in consumption-production or production-consumption cooperatives, where not only consumption will regulate production but where even the size of the cooperative will be regulated, in that consumption tends to make the cooperative as large as possible, that is, to expand and grow, while production tends to set limits to the cooperative. In this way the social structure is created out of the essence of things, out of reality itself. I could cite innumerable cases from which you would see that anyone who is capable of thinking in terms of reality, anyone who really wants practical ideas in their head today, will find the foundations of true, genuine socialization that is beneficial to people in the beginnings that already exist in reality.

But all that I have told you presupposes the real threefold social order. There will be no capitalists in the modern sense, arising purely out of economic life. There must be people who grow out of a free spiritual life, as I have characterized it in previous lectures, out of a spiritual life that will not produce abstract intellectual products that are alien to life, but that will unfold spiritual material that, on the one hand, rises to the highest heights of the spirit and, on the other hand, trains people to become truly practical human beings. At all levels of intellectual life, people who are alien to life because they only know will not be educated, but people who can think, who can dispose.

A cycle will take place within the limits that I have already indicated today, within which the administrations of the spiritual organizations will send their most capable people into economic life, as I have explained in my book, and economic life will send its people into the spiritual organizations, so that they may deepen there the knowledge they have gained through their experience in economic life or, as teachers, instruct the growing youth in economic life.

A living cycle, carried by human beings themselves, will take place between the three limbs of the social organism. The three-part organism will not disintegrate into three separate areas. The human being, who will live in all three parts, will become the living unity.

In the future, the human being, with his or her social interests and powers, will form the very basis of all life. The human being will be much more important than today, when the apparent unified state still divides humanity into classes and estates and does not allow people to be full and whole human beings. Today, people still believe that if they have a constitution, then a great deal has been achieved. In the future, people will understand that a constitution is nothing if the people are not there who, in their own liveliness, carry the forces to mutually compose, if I may say so. That is what matters, that one understands what I recently hinted at: Gladstone, the English statesman, once said that the North American free state had the most advantageous constitution. Another Englishman, who seems to me to be more ingenious than Gladstone, said in reply: But these North Americans – that was precisely his view – could have a much, much worse constitution, even a terrible one; they are the kind of people who will make the same out of a good and a bad constitution! That we must put the human in the place of what is separated from the human, that is what must be achieved. From a living spiritual life will come the living leaders of the enterprises. Capital is no longer needed! Alongside such living leaders will stand the free worker as a whole human being. He will know how to answer yes when he raises the question: Does the social order give me my human dignity? And a market that is not anarchic but organized will be able to bring about a just balance in the value of goods. Many details need to be said about all these things. Today I could only sketch out an outline, and you could ask many questions. I know that some of today's words cannot yet be fully understood. Next Friday, details, evidence and further explanations will be provided to show you that this is not something that is carelessly thrown into the world, but something that is intended to provide what is justifiably demanded with the call for socialization.

What is justifiably demanded, but perhaps not yet clearly recognized by those justifiably demanding it.

What is given with the tripartite organism is not intended to be like the description of a house. No matter how beautiful the description of a house may be, one can object that such a description is of no use at all; the house must be built. But there is a difference between a beautiful description of a house and a construction plan. And a construction plan is intended to be everything that is given as impulses for the tripartite division of the social organism. However much it may be misunderstood today, it will be the one thing that alone can lead humanity out of the chaos and confusion into which it has been brought. I know that I can still be misunderstood today. Some say that this is a new party formation. It is not even remotely a new party formation. What is at issue here is what follows from the very development of humanity, which has nothing to do with any kind of party formation.

And anyone who believes that they can see into this development of humanity and recognize what the time itself demands also exposes themselves to the misunderstanding, even from those who want to misunderstand or perhaps misunderstand in good faith, that they personally want something. For he knows that what is objectively striven for cannot be so easily inserted into the development of mankind in the face of people's prejudices and preconceptions. Today, however, we live in a time, especially here in Central Europe, where we have to look at what the last excesses of the old capitalist competitive labor have brought. And we in Central Europe are experiencing particularly painfully the consequences of what the leading circles, the leading circles so far, have brought upon humanity. We are experiencing it in pain and suffering, we are experiencing it in these days with bleeding souls. We may say that days of trial are clearly evident. In such days one may give oneself to the hope and faith that in the face of unusual experiences, unusual thoughts will also be understood, that in the face of great suffering, great courage will not be found for small, but for great reckoning.

That is why I believe and why I say what I have to say, even in these days of suffering, out of this belief: Through suffering, pain and trials, we will find the courage, the boldness, the understanding for a new construction. The construction must be done not only by transforming old institutions, but by transforming all our thinking, all our habits of feeling, by transforming our whole inner man.

Final remarks after the discussion

Dear attendees! Although I am completely convinced that he is not even aware of how he actually came to his assertions, and although I do not in the least want to deny him a kind of goodwill, what the second speaker has discussed here makes me feel that, piece by piece, he has each time what I said, sometimes by a quarter, sometimes by half, sometimes completely reversed, and then polemicized against his own assertions, discussed with them, in order to arrive at something that has nothing at all to do with what you heard from me today or yesterday. It happens very often that one creates the possibility of discussion through such preconditions, and so I would like to discuss only a few individual points from this perhaps quite unconscious discussion practice. For example, the gentleman who spoke before repeatedly dwells on the opinion that I advocate tyranny or the supremacy of the intellectually gifted. How does he make it clear that, according to what I have discussed, one consequence could be that the intellectually gifted should rule? Now I do not know whether the speaker has also heard what I said here recently, or whether he knows what is in my book. Otherwise he would know that the underlying principle of all the impulses I am talking about is that all human talents find their appropriate social place. It is precisely a matter of the structure of such a social organism, which does not give priority to any particular talent, but which makes it possible for each talent to find its appropriate place. This cannot be achieved by anything other than the thorough selection and development of the various talents in places where people understand talents and where talents can be managed in the right way. The spiritual organism will have to see its main task in developing talents. Read my book carefully. Do not add a single adjective to what I say, but take what I really say as it is. Then you will see that in the field of spiritual life not only spiritual talents are developed, but all talents down to the most physical ones. The spiritual organism is not there to create a spiritual aristocracy, but to develop all talents. Apart from the fact that I pointed out last time that a spiritual gift cannot really exist without at the same time offering the possibility of developing a manual gift when necessary. In short, the speaker has not made the slightest effort to break out of previous thought habits and really muster the will to rethink, but has criticized, according to what has been customary up to now, something that consciously strives out of what has been customary up to now. But that seems to me to be what must be overcome above all. People who, even if they have good will, do not make the effort to understand what the other person is saying and wanting, are precisely the ones who have led us into today's situation. And painful as it is for me, I must say: I can only see in the previous speaker one of those people who do not want to let us out of the confusion. Before the great world catastrophe, one could understand such people for my sake, because in those days the great test and the great questions had not yet come to humanity. But today we should truly not want to stop the course of development by our stubborn thinking. That is what makes me so anxious when people come up with all kinds of old stereotyped ideas and even want to frighten people by saying that the other person is a thought anarchist or something similar; I did not understand the adjective. These are things that can be frightening. One must counter what can really be inferred from what has been said. According to the imagination, what the speaker said can be inferred from the threefold structure, but read my book and you will see that every possible precaution, if I may say so, has been taken to ensure that what appears to be inferred here cannot be inferred at all.

For example, the speaker claimed that the interests of the professions would be in conflict. That is a matter of course. But precisely by separating intellectual life, by separating legal life, this is resolved. I have taken up a lot of your time today with what could be called an introduction: if socialism is realized and it leaves everything in the social organism that brings about what I have described, then this will happen. Of course, in the social organism that the speaker envisions, this would be included. In the threefold social order, precisely what he wants to introduce into the economic order is taken out of the economic order. It seemed to me that the speaker, although he professes to believe in the council system, is a representative of the court council mindset, which once made a similar objection to me, not from the people's council system but from the court council system.

The matter does not have the foreign policy side that the speaker painted, but a completely different one. The only remedy for our foreign policy situation, which has led us into this catastrophe, should have become apparent when foreign policy matters were discussed - I cannot, of course, discuss everything in one lecture. What we can achieve above all by means of the threefold social organism, even if it is only implemented by one state and not in neighboring states that still retain the old capitalist order, is the previous game of interests.

It is indeed a peculiar feature that every state can carry out the threefold order independently of the others, and that, for example, through the interplay of interests, which will be quite different will be quite different from the present one, when economic interests alone also work across borders as economic interests, that then those sources of conflict which have led to the wars that are technically called resource wars will be eliminated. The privy councillor who made this objection told me: Yes, so far a large proportion of wars have been resource wars. If your system is realized, then there will no longer be any resource wars, so your system contradicts reality. I had to tell him: If you had said that in confirmation, I would understand it; that you say it to refute it is peculiar. So I have to say: The only help against the mood that exists on the side of the Entente is that we break down this mood, this resentment, into three parts. That is what this threefold division would bring in this area for the current foreign policy. I would advise the speaker to study the foreign policy that follows from the tripartite division from a point of view broader than that of a court councillor; then he would be able to spare himself the completely useless definition of whether the tripartite organism is anarchistic or the like. He would be able to see how true it is, as I have already hinted at here, that the same people who are enthusiastic about unity need to be told: a rural family consists of a man, a woman, children, a farmhand and three cows, and they all need milk. Do they all have to give milk? No, only the three cows have to give milk, then everyone will have milk. It is necessary that the entire organism is structured in the right way; then the members will also work together in the right way to form a unity, and what arises on the one soil will also be able to work in the right way on the other members.

Because the previous speaker did not take this into account, he would have to decide the endowment through universal suffrage. Well, you can decide the filling of positions, you can decide all sorts of things through universal suffrage. But how you would like to administer the talents through universal suffrage, I ask you to think through thoroughly, and you will see if I follow the method of the previous speaker and outline the consequences - but I only recognize this method as a sophistic method, so I will not go into it further - but if I were to outline the consequences to you, then you would see what would come of it. If you democratized talent, you might not call it thought anarchy, but you would call it something else.

Similar things have been said many times. I was particularly surprised to hear the expression “spiritual capitalism”. I don't know what that means, especially how it might be used after a lecture in which the circulation of capital was discussed in the way I discussed it. Intellectual owners – yes, honored attendees, just try to think with realities! Imagine the social organism – the speaker has not described it as he imagines it – according to the few hints the speaker has made. Then you will have to say: What is it exactly, if, let us say, intellectual workers work alongside manual workers under some kind of socialist order? I do not know what kind of difference it is supposed to make to my economic organism that the intellectual worker works alongside the manual worker. I have expressly stated: ownership ceases at the moment when the capital is realized, that is, when the means of production are there. How one can then speak of intellectual ownership is completely beyond me. From the particular experiences mentioned by the esteemed speaker, one can of course derive anything one wants. One can of course derive a great deal from the atrophy of the soul and the like. I did not find it very tasteful when the speaker concluded by saying that he would leave the middle class to me so that the proletariat would be all the more assured to him. Well, there is no need to get involved in such things, because whether you ultimately see it as an inflammatory phrase or not is entirely a matter of taste.

But what has been said with regard to trust and with regard to believing in trust – well, you see, I must say that today it is truly not a matter of criticizing the relationship that we have come to know from the old conditions, but today it is a matter of establishing new conditions. If someone were to tell me today, whether for the first time or the hundredth or the thousandth time, that he does not believe there is trust, but has had to struggle with mistrust in so-and-so many cases, then I would say to him: Nothing will get better if we do not try to create this trust, because we have to work with trust today. All the other threads that have been used to draw the masses together are failing. The threads of the future can only be those of trust. If mistrust were to be allowed to take hold tomorrow or the day after, we would just have to wait for what comes after tomorrow and the day after, because if good things are to come, they can only come out of trust. The trust that I mean and that we must work on, this trust will have to come from the souls. This trust must be created, it is more important than anything else, even today. Then, when this trust is created, the relationship between those who work with their hands on the means of production and those who work intellectually will be right. Then this trust makes impossible what the speaker has painted as a horror.

This is precisely what is so terribly lacking today in these socially turbulent times: the will to build on trust. Oh, this trust will be there, the more and more trials come upon people, and I would have to despair of humanity, at least of the rebuilding of healthy conditions, if I could no longer believe that one person will be able to find their way to another through trust. Because, dear assembled, socialize as much as you want, talk about socialization as much as you want, but one thing must underlie this socialization: the socialization of souls. Those who do not seek the way to the socialization of souls may socialize externally as much as they want, but they will lead people into more anarchistic conditions than what the previous speaker wanted to present as a kind of anarchism. And there is no other name for soul socialism than trust. But this trust must be worked at. And today, is this trust not a little shaken? Dear attendees, I have been connected with the social movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for a long time. I have worked in it; I know it. What the honorable speaker said before, one could have heard over and over again against what I said today. Apart from the threefold social order, the same objections that the previous speaker has raised today have already been raised by others in 1898 and 1899. But it is most necessary that we move beyond the old ideas, that we can relearn, that we do not remain with the old. As painful as it is for me to say, I believe that those who cannot overcome their old prejudices are holding us back the most. And those gentlemen who use the method of first turning the sentences halfway or completely around in order to then polemicize against their own, always have an easy time of it, because of course not everyone will understand, after hearing a lecture just once, how the things are meant, how they must be understood if they are placed in reality. For precisely those things that do not correspond to theories, not merely to good will, but that stem from a conscientious, responsible life experience and observation, precisely those things cannot be exhausted in an hour, but only suggestions can be given for them. But I have always said that these suggestions, since that time, and it has been quite a long time since I have spoken of the threefold order, may well turn out quite differently in their realization than what I myself say about these details, for example. What matters to me is that the building plan is taken from reality and can be lived into reality, that it is realistic. And because I believe that it is not subjective human

will that imagines it must realize these impulses, but because observation of the developmental forces of humanity in the present and in the future itself leads to it, I believe that it will find understanding. And I hope that I must say once again, from our sorely tried time and from our painful situation we will still find understanding for much for which we perhaps cannot yet imagine finding understanding at all today.

I have often had the opportunity to speak here about the so-called threefold social order, which is supposed to be the way to fulfill the current demand for socialization. Today, I would like to take the liberty of adding a few details to supplement and explain what I said in the previous lectures. I am well aware that even what I will be able to present today will not yet be what everyone imagines by way of the practical advice that is called for. But I would like to say that it will be recognized more and more that the impulses that want to be put into the world under the name of the threefold social organism are practical impulses to such an extent and of such a kind that, as with all truly practical impulses, it is necessary to apply a certain instinct for reality to what is put forward. For only that which does not want to be a preconceived program, which is thought and felt from the outset in such a way that it is formed out of reality and thought into reality, can basically only be understood by someone who takes the trouble to put himself in the position of how such things appear when he wants to lend a hand in realizing them. It is easier to have some preconceived party program and demand its realization than to listen to reality itself and discern what that reality demands. The tripartite social organism seeks to solve the problem of socialization in such a way that everything that happens in the direction of its impulse must first prove itself in practice, by being directly applied in reality. On the one hand, the present time is just as little accessible to impulses of this kind as, on the other hand, it needs them precisely for the most essential demands of the time. The impulse towards a threefold social organism wants to tackle the facts which can be subject to real socialization in an honest and open way. Above all, it does not want to destroy all the fruits of human culture that have resulted from the great developmental advances of modern times. It does not want to dismantle, it wants to build. He does not want to destroy certain lines of business that have emerged and that definitely meet human needs, for example, by socializing them in a stereotyped way, without taking into account the facts of the matter. For such a realistic program, if we had another word, I would not call it a program, one must indeed muster the goodwill to understand, because it is very easy to misunderstand what is actually meant by this three-part social organism. What is meant is, above all, what can be deduced from our practical life, from the way it has developed through technical and industrial progress, from what has been created in the way of means of production and knowledge about production.

But today a truly practical impulse in this direction must be based on something quite different: it must be based on a true understanding of the human being. Therefore, I must emphasize again and again, the threefold social organism is not about establishing any new classes or other groups of people and their differences, but rather about merely threefolding everything that takes place around people in the world. In future we shall have a separate economic administration, a separate legal administration, and a separate spiritual administration. But the same human beings will be active in the economic organism, in the spiritual organism, and in the legal or state organism. It is precisely this threefold organism that will enable man, through his continuous interaction, to establish the necessary unity of human social life. Anyone who wants to understand this in the way it actually is today must, above all, realize that it means something when a person is brought from one sphere of life to another. The same people will work in the economic organism, which will have its own administration and organization. The same people, of course not at the same time, will be active in the legal and spiritual organism, at least through their relationships with the spiritual organism.

Now one could say, yes, but what significance does this structure have? Only someone who wants to close their eyes to the true reality would raise such an objection. I will give you an obvious example. Until very recently, anyone who had a little knowledge of life would have said that merchants were a completely different breed, I would say, based on their way of life, than, say, stiff bureaucrats. Now, something very strange has happened recently under the influence of the so-called war economy. Merchants were brought into the bureaucratic government offices, and lo and behold, these merchants became the most beautiful bureaucrats in the bureaucratic government offices. Now, that is an undesirable example of human adaptation to what man is placed in, but this perhaps unsympathetic example points to a general human phenomenon. Man behaves in a certain way because of the circle in which he works. If we reorganize the entire life of human society in such a way that the three most essential branches of life have their own administration, let us say, their own representation, their own organization, then the person who has to live in such a sphere as one of the members of the social organism will work out of the spirit of that sphere. He will be able to contribute to the whole of human life in a way that would never be possible if everything in social life were mixed up and confused. However, creating clarity in such a field requires dedicated observation and practice of life. And if what is being striven for in the future for the good of humanity is not based on such devoted observation and practice of life, we will only end up in more confusion and chaos, but not out of it. Above all, if we want to create something healthy in the individual, we must be able to devote ourselves to what the immediate present can actually teach us with regard to social life. We must not ask: What have we thought for decades about socialism, about socialist programs? - and then, in this thinking, completely overlook what is around us in the immediate present, but we must have the ability to really look at this immediate present. This immediate present has brought something up that should surprise most of all those who have thought about socialism before.

Anyone who is familiar with the thinking about socialism, even among the socialists of past decades, must say that the events of the present must come as a surprise if one only wants to take things in their true sense and truthfully, openly and honestly, especially today. If we look beyond mere appearances and try to see what holds the germ of the future in a phenomenon, what is the most striking and significant phenomenon in the life of social demands of the present? I believe that anyone who has really taken a proper look at what is actually happening cannot find any other answer to this question than: the most striking phenomenon is the so-called soviet system. And I would like to say that one should have the ability to pay proper attention to the tremendously significant symptomatic phenomenon of the soviet system. For in a certain respect it can be said that the emergence of this system of councils is precisely what should have surprised traditional socialism the most. Traditional, old socialism should have listened attentively to this system of councils; it should have said to itself, this is actually the refutation of much of what I have thought. The council system refutes many old ideas about socialism. One need only recall, I would say sketchily, what traditional socialism has always emphasized and unfortunately still does: People do not make social upheavals, evolution does. It has been said that economic forms will gradually be transformed, primarily through the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a few capitalists, so that, to a certain extent, the old type of society itself grows into the new one.

Then came the world war catastrophe, which shook humanity. It poured out on the one hand over capitalism, which was driving itself into its own destruction. But it also poured out over the truly justified aspirations that arise from human nature, which are called the social movement. What has actually emerged from this social movement? People have emerged who, in the most diverse ways, as councils, as people's councils, want to take further development into their own hands, who want to intervene in development out of their own human resolve, their human insight, and their human will. If one were to have a sufficiently developed sense of discernment for the facts of reality today, one would perceive what has been indicated as an enormous surprise. But it seems almost as if precisely in those circles that have settled down so well into the old ideas of socialism, this power of discernment would be difficult to achieve. The November events have occurred. What has announced itself in the East - I will speak neither approvingly nor disparagingly about it - as the system of the Soviets, has also occurred in Central Europe. One was forced to think of something that could be called, by what was there through the November events: the realization of the social aspiration to which one has devoted oneself for a long time and from which one has promised oneself so much for a long time. There, very strange phenomena have come to light. One need only recall a few events in this, our present, strange transitional period, and one will immediately notice how little the old habits of thought were suited to the new phenomenon, which should actually have been surprising. I will highlight one example. A very clever person, full of enthusiasm for social ideas, gave a lecture in Berlin on socialization. He discussed certain very general ideas about socialization, the kind that were current when socialism still justified criticism, but could only criticize, when it was not yet called upon, as it has been since November, to intervene in events. He had very definite general ideas about what socialization should look like, and I believe – because it is perfectly clear to someone who can discern the human soul between the lines of what is said – that the man must have said to himself: What I have imagined in general program sentences cannot be done! — When something cannot be done, then today one says — it was also said in the past, but today it has become very characteristic —, well, people are not yet ready for it, it will come later. Yes, later, according to this man's views, true socialism will come. But what comes until then? He has now worked out a broad socialization program, it is the engineer Dr. Hermann Beck in Berlin, and he calls what is to be achieved in the transition period social capitalism. We have thus happily arrived at a situation in which the events that have occurred do not lead us to envision as an ideal what has always been called for: a real overcoming of the damage done by capitalism. However, one must learn to distinguish between real socialization and what is often striven for today, namely the transformation of private capitalism into state and municipal capitalism. That is not socialization, that is fiscalization or something similar. Do not confuse socialization with fiscalization. What needs to be looked at today – if you have a sense of reality, you will – is, as I have already indicated, the way in which people who want to participate in social events stand out, and this is expressed in the so-called council system. But no one who wants to make the transition from capitalism to socialism based on abstract principles, on some ideology or on some utopian premise can cope with this system of councils.

The striving for the system of workers' councils shows that it is unwise today to attempt socialization from above. The only way today is to work together with those who aspire to the council system, to create an exchange of views and experiences in ideas that are directly human. That is why I said, when I spoke here on Tuesday, that it is necessary today that we learn to understand the reality of trust, that we learn to really create with those who come from the working people and strive for certain goals. It is much more important today to listen to what those who come from the working class have to say than to reflect on how some law or the like should be based on some ideas. What we need today, what must be real reality today, is to recognize that what is to happen must come from the people. It is therefore more important to establish a living connection with the broad masses of the people than to hold meetings among ourselves upstairs. Holding meetings at the top only leads us to continue the old damage, because what wants to be realized today must come directly from the people, and the symptom that history wants this is the system of councils. And in addition, this system of councils has basically already emerged in two forms, and just as the proletariat's ordeal has necessarily led to the threefold social order because the proletariat has experienced physical and mental hardship in the three spheres of life, so too does the remarkable phenomenon of the system of councils already point to the threefold social order. At first this system of councils presents itself in such a way that on the one hand so-called workers' councils arise, but on the other hand another form of council is already emerging, the form of council that is now appearing as a demand for works councils.

Those who have an instinct for what is emerging from the times can already know today that the system of general workers' councils points to the political side, the state side, the legal side, and can only be developed if we 'can go towards a legal life separate from economic and spiritual life. Such things come about, I might say, with unavoidable historical ambiguity, in that they break away from humanity. But the question must be asked: how can that which asserts itself in this way be shaped on a healthy soil that makes a real organization of human society possible? Just as the system of workers' councils points to the independent legal basis, so the institute of works councils points to the independent economic basis, for it is in this that the practice of impulses for the tripartite social organism is to be sought, so that it is not built into the air with a program, but is built on soil and land, out of the historical reality, which one only has to observe correctly. There is really no need to discuss whether the councils are a reality or not. They are partly a reality, they will become more and more so, no one will be able to drive them back again, they will arise in even more diverse forms than they already are. Realistic thinking demands that we create the ground on which these councils can be worked with.

The one area in which the threefold social organism wants to create is the economic area. The esteemed listeners who have heard earlier lectures of mine will know that what is at issue here is to shape this economic ground in such a way that the so-called wage relationship disappears on its own, that the regulation of the type and time and the like of human labor is removed from the economic cycle and transferred to the legal state, where decisions are made about the time, type and measure of human labor. What remains on the economic plane is what is revealed in reality as the production of goods, the circulation of goods, and the consumption of goods. You will also have gathered from earlier lectures that economic life is about an organization that consists of associations, mainly of those associations that together regulate the conditions of consumption and production. It has often been said from the socialist side: In the future, production cannot be for profit, but must be for consumption. It is therefore self-evident that the consumer interest, which has not played a conscious role in the economic process itself to any significant extent, must come to the fore in economic activity. Cooperatives will have to be formed in which both the consumer interest and the dependent production relationship are represented. In these cooperatives, the main thing will be to always find out, within the practical work, how large such a cooperative must be. The size of such a cooperative cannot be derived from the boundaries of the state structures that have emerged in the course of modern history – for the simple reason that these state structures have emerged as closed administrative bodies for reasons quite different from the conditions of production and consumption, and because other boundaries arise as soon as people associate socially in relation to relations of production and consumption in such a way that the regulation of relations of production and consumption results in the mutual value of commodities, which makes a healthy life possible for the broadest sections of the population. In order to accomplish such tasks, we will have to develop a genuine economic science, one that cannot be conjured out of thin air, nor even out of subjective human experience, but out of the experiences of collective economic life. Within these experiences, one will have to observe how cooperatives that are too small lead to the members of these cooperatives having to wither away in terms of their economic situation; cooperatives that are too large must also lead to withering away in the economic life that is provided by the cooperatives. Once the relevant law, which underlies economic life, is clearly recognized, it will be expressed in the following words: Too small cooperatives promote the starvation of the participants in these cooperatives, while too large cooperatives promote the starvation of the others in the economic life associated with these cooperatives. Therefore, it will be a matter of avoiding this twofold atrophy of human needs. That will be the guideline for the work to be carried out by all sections of the national community. For it cannot be determined by any mathematical calculation how large such a cooperative must be; it must have a certain size in one place and another in another. It must regulate its size according to the actual conditions. These actual conditions are to be determined by those who are directly involved in economic life. They cannot be regulated in any other way than by disregarding any state legislation on economic life, leaving this economic life to its own vitality, so that it can be shaped by the continuous living interaction of the councils. One cooperative must be enlarged according to the circumstances at a certain time, while another must be reduced in size. For the social organism is not something that can be defined by a constitution or determined by laws that have been established once and for all; rather, it is something that is in a state of perpetual life, just as a natural organism basically is. Therefore, what is the measure of economic life can only be expressed at most in more or less short- or long-term contracts that are concluded, but never in any limitation or definition of the powers of the councils that are part of economic life.

You can still say today, and rightly so, that he is telling us about the extent of the size of a cooperative, but where is the evidence for this? Yes, that is precisely because we have not yet achieved an economic science that must be based on economic experience in the most eminent sense, that cannot be constructed, that cannot be gained from the idea, but only from life. I can tell you that no one who has truly studied economic life with selfless devotion comes to a different conclusion than the one I have expressed to you. For it is the peculiarity of social laws that they can never be proved in the same way as natural laws, but that they must be proved directly in their application, and that therefore only those who have a certain instinct for social reality can have a sense for them. This is so difficult in the present time that we are confronted with facts which require this instinct for reality, but people are so reluctant to develop this instinct for reality that is present in every human soul.

The second task that will arise in the future will be a price regulation arising from the laws of economic life, which will represent the mutual value of the goods. For it is only through such a price regulation, observed in economic experience, that the basic law of all socialization can be realized. This will make it possible to fulfill the basic principle of all socialization, which, after all, basically consists of nothing more than ensuring that what a normal person can achieve through normal human labor based on his or her abilities is equal to what the society in which he or she lives provides for him or her, so that everyone can receive from society the equivalent consumption for what he or she produces. In addition, of course, there is what the community must provide for those people who, due to illness, old age or abnormality, must be supported by society itself. This is not achieved by wage struggles or the like, but only by ensuring that the economic cycle is such that prices are formed in a healthy way, not too low and not too high. Prices themselves, ladies and gentlemen, can be said to be irrelevant. It just always depends on earning what things cost. But that would only be the case in societies that merely produce land products. The moment a society has to simultaneously produce products for which man-made means of production are needed, there is a necessary normal price that must not be exceeded or fallen short of.

In this respect, we could learn an enormous amount from history if we could look at history today on the basis of real insights into economic laws, rather than economic fantasies, as is often the case in the economic histories of recent years. For example, it is extremely instructive for people who are honest in this regard that we have already reached the point in the most important regions of Central Europe that a kind of normal pricing system exists over large areas. That was around the fifteenth, towards the middle of the fifteenth century. This normal pricing - please read about it in the histories that at least give some clues about it - which at that time extended over a large part of Europe, only became possible because the old serfdom and semi-slavery, the old hereditary leasehold and the like had gradually given way to better conditions, better conditions, by no means ideal conditions. But then an event occurred that undermined this economic development. It is impossible to say what it would have meant for European humanity if this event had not occurred. Of course, I do not want to engage in bad historical construction, nor indulge in historical criticism, but only point out these things for a better understanding, because what happened had to happen. One cannot even imagine the favorable economic development that would have followed if what had already been prepared around the middle of the fifteenth century had found a straightforward continuation. But it was cut off by the radical introduction of Roman legal concepts; it was cut off by the fact that economic life was disturbed precisely from the legal point of view. Anyone who is familiar with this phenomenon at its very roots has in it an enormously strong historical proof of the necessity of separating actual state life from economic life. Old habits of mankind led to a certain sympathy for these Roman legal concepts. In the Baltic region, from which so much reactionary thinking has emanated, there were people at the Diet who said: According to Roman legal concepts, which we must reintroduce because they are the right ones, the farmers should actually become slaves again.

Today, when we are facing not a small reckoning but a great one, as I said before, we must see through such things with a healthy eye of the soul, see through them in all their consequences for the present. But if we want to shape our economic life independently in this and many other ways, we will need a real organization of the council system. It will be a matter of introducing into the factory the system of workers' councils, which today is longed for and hoped for, which some people are already trying to set up based on a certain understanding of the times, so that it so that it can be an intermediary between the workers and the managers of the future, in the sense that I characterized it in my last lecture here and as I presented it in my book 'The Crux of the Social Question'. That will be the first task for which the works councils will have to come up with, to really be able to mediate for those contracts that have to be concluded between the workers and managers of the future, who will no longer be capitalists. But all these things can be prepared today. All these people who are part of such a council can already take on functions today, even if they can only be transitional functions. Furthermore, the works council will, above all, have to mediate in everything that arises from the company and is of general interest in the context of life in a unified economic entity. But other things will also be necessary for this system of works councils if we do not want to continue to individualize economically, which the working class in particular would soon come to resent. If we want to socialize the whole of economic life, the unified economic entity, then we will need many other types of councils. I would just like to point out from the types of councils that there will be a need for transport councils and economic councils. The factory councils will be close to the production conditions and production needs of the working people. The economic councils will be close to the consumption conditions.

This will create an economic body that, above all, will represent a real system of councils. Such a system of councils, which does not prevent – that is what will be important in its practical design – the initiative of the individual in economic life from being decisive in the individual case. But that can really be developed if trust prevails. If the initiative of the individual were undermined by, say, the soviet system, then all internationality of economic life would be lost. This internationality of economic life would be particularly lost – people today have little idea of the extent to which this would be the case – if, instead of socialization, nationalization were to be introduced, that is, state capitalism, if economic life were to be merged with state life. If the state were to manage the economy, as some strive for – anyone who is familiar with the actual circumstances knows this – then it would be impossible to control the complicated conditions that the internationality of economic life necessarily creates. If you set up a real system of economic, transport, works councils and similar councils, which will truly not take as many people out of the working population as the current bureaucracy, then, if you can still manage to avoid undermining the initiative of the administrative people in the practical implementation, then all the fine apparatuses of internationalism can be fully maintained despite socialization. Then, if the councils are real councils, that is, institutions that set the direction of life, then the councils, through their coexistence with the administrators, will bring it about that the administrative man, whom they trust, can also take the initiative in their sense in detail. The broad lines of the institutions will always emanate from the council. The day-to-day activities will be taken care of by the council. In this respect, anyone who can imagine economic life as separate from the rest of society, and taking into account all the circumstances , which are present today, to institutions which do not reduce the achievements of the old culture, but which make it possible to bring about a dignified existence for all people within these achievements.

You may ask what means the economic life, separated from the state, will have to carry out the measures it has taken, in a sense against the resistance of individuals? Today, however, it is thought that such measures can only be implemented by means of coercion. In this respect, we have not yet deviated very much from the old habits of thought. I do not know how many people have noticed that such old habits of thought continue in a strange way. If, for example, I read a certain passage from a certain speech today, many people will be astonished. This passage, taken from an address to troops in Danzig, reads: “The troops shall see the man who stands up for their weal and woe and advocates military discipline and order. If the right military spirit lives in the troops, I will repay loyalty with loyalty.” You will say, in which old imperial speech did you find that? No, it is from the speech that the Reich Minister of Defense Noske gave to the volunteer troops in Danzig. This is how old habits of thought take root. But it is essential that we move beyond the old habits of thought. Today, people do not yet realize how they are muddling along in the old habits of thought, how little they have come out of the old things. So naturally some people ask, who can only imagine that what is decided upon as a measure will be carried out by some kind of state or even military force: What means does the economic body have to enforce what is born out of its womb in the way described? — In the future it has a very effective but at the same time very humane means, the boycott. The boycott, which does not even need to be imposed by coercion under such conditions as I have described, but which simply arises by itself. If a cooperative exists for any business and branch of consumption and someone wants to go over to the other side, he will not be able to produce, precisely because of the law that the circle from which he produces will then be too small. And in a similar way, other conditions for thwarting economic measures through the obvious boycott can be eliminated. If someone were to believe that the recalcitrant could then come to such a large cooperative that he could compete, he need only reflect on the real laws of economic life and he will know that by the time he would come to this competition, he must have perished long ago.

You must seek this as the practical life behind the threefold order, that this threefold order takes account of reality and seeks to create a foundation for this reality. Of course, we shall have to take certain things seriously that today still go against human habits of thought. We shall have to take seriously what I have already explained in earlier lectures, namely the emancipation of spiritual life. We shall have to realize something with this spiritual life that has always been implicit in the call of socialist thinkers, but is poorly understood today. It was always inherent in socialism that it would lead to something new, but people have never thought about it clearly. Time and again, the adherents of socialism have said: competition and profit-making must be replaced by objective administration. That is quite right. This must be done especially in the field of intellectual life. It will, of course, be necessary for this intellectual life to be able to administer itself. Purely from the observations on human existence, one will be able to create something truly fruitful for the future through a mass pedagogy. I know that I am perhaps saying something crazy to many people today by saying: If we want to socialize in a healthy way, then we must, above all, express human strength and potential in such a way that the human being can stand powerfully in reality throughout his normal lifetime.

This will be particularly evident in the free administration of education. In other areas, it has already been shown in a less than pleasing way, in that the conditions of promotion in the old state have led to the fact that the highest council positions were usually occupied by old men who then wanted as little as possible to do with the matter. In the future, the necessity will arise from the self-government of the mind that these old gentlemen will have the most diverse leading tasks. But for that they need to be young and fresh. Our state school undermines youthfulness. This youthfulness has certainly not been found in the Reich Railway Office – it was called the Reich Railway Office because the posts were mostly filled by old men. It will be necessary for us to shape the very first stage of school teaching, which can only develop in a free spiritual life, on the basis of a thorough anthropology, so that the human powers of thought, feeling and will are not developed in such a way that later life is unable to maintain them, but weakens them. During the years in which the human being develops thinking, feeling and willing, we must shape all of this in such a way that we create a foundation for life. What can be achieved in the years of youth can never be made up for by the human being later on. But only if school life is administered according to the most intrinsic laws of human life, not according to the state corporation, can it be possible that the strength of his power will not be weakened throughout his entire life. And for social life it will be necessary in the future not only to acquire knowledge through school institutions, but also to learn to learn, to learn to learn from life. It still looks strange today when one says that a properly organized school system will provide us with very different people in the future than we have today.

You see, it is necessary for new things to arise, things that are not even thought of now. People today still look perplexed when you talk to them about wanting intellectual life to follow its own laws. They cannot imagine anything other than an intellectual life administered by the state because they have no idea of what the human being is in human society. Matters are serious today, and those who want to take things lightly will not achieve what is so necessary for us today: the recovery of the social organism. We must see again and again how strangely people continue in their old ways of thinking, how they at best bring themselves to say, “What he says is so unclear to us.” Of course, such things, which must have the power to give birth to a long-lasting reality, must first be accepted as something that is unclear, because one must get used to acquiring a new, realistic view of life by dealing with them. Today we have the duty to reflect on our deep instincts. When we reflect on them, we will be able to recognize with clarity what appears to be unclear. When many people today say that the impulses of the threefold social organism are unclear, it is often due to the old, wrong school education, which has prevented people from coming to a truly concentrated thinking, from coming to the conception of realistic thoughts. And so, on the one hand, one is obliged to say what is necessary, but on the other hand, one has to fight to prevent all kinds of prejudices from wanting to create new things in the world out of old habits of thinking. When people today keep asking: What is the way? How do you do it? — I would like to know what would be a clearer way than that of the threefold organism, if only one wants to follow it. But just think of what has to happen first if one wants to go down this path. The government, which has continued to develop from earlier developments, will have to say to itself one day: We reserve for ourselves all those departments that relate to legal life, public safety and the like. With regard to intellectual life, culture, education, technical ideas on the one hand, and with regard to economic life on the other, to industry, trade, commerce and so on, we will become a liquidation government. This requires our time as something immediately practical: the insight that governments that come from the old practices and habits can pull themselves together to say such things as those just mentioned; to cast aside intellectual and economic life to the left and right, so that these can shape and administer themselves.

Only the initiative can lie with the previous governments, because they have already developed out of the old conditions, but they must have the selflessness to become liquidation governments to the left and to the right. This requires a great reckoning. Those who call this impractical, I can understand, because they cannot rethink what centuries have hammered into their heads. Today, however, we are faced with the necessity of hammering out of our heads what centuries have hammered into it. Today we are faced with the necessity of taking things with the utmost seriousness, because only this utmost seriousness is the truly practical thing to do. This seriousness will then unite with the necessary insights that I have mentioned to you with regard to the organization of economic life, the size or smallness of these or those cooperatives, price fixing and so on. But these are tasks that arise in the concrete, in the practical, and to which we must resolve, for these are the foundations of a real socialization, the foundations for a truly social shaping of human life. This is what the councils want, even if they cannot yet say it, as they strive to emerge from the greater community of the people. Therefore, people should have been surprised by the council systems, especially all those who believed that they had already come far enough in what is called socialization. Today we are experiencing strange things.

This afternoon, I had to read a remarkable sentence that I would like to say had to be received by me with the strangest feelings in these serious times. There I read the following sentence in connection with the impulses of this three-part organism. You don't really want to believe it:

“The present struggle is not about finding an idea or putting the right man at the helm, but about how the socialist idea must be translated into reality. It is not about beautiful plans, but about execution.”

Now I ask you, my dear audience, how can you execute if you have nothing to execute? Such things are said today in good faith, out of a good opinion. But they are nothing more than a symptom of how little sense and understanding people have for what has to happen. Someone presents the plan of a house, and someone objects: It is not the plan of the house that matters, but the execution. — It may well be asked: Where is your plan? Where does it show itself? — We would remain silent if your plan showed itself, for we speak truthfully only through the facts.

That such things are possible today, that such thinking is possible in the face of the seriousness of the times, is what makes one sad again and again when one thinks of the possibility and necessity of what has to happen. We must be seized today, especially we here in Central Europe, by the seriousness of the situation. For only by breaking ourselves of today of thinking and speaking outside of things - because we never look into things - only by doing so will we avert the great disaster. Today, one needs the opportunity to create out of the broadest masses of humanity. If anyone attempts to do so, he is told that he is suggesting things to the masses, for the masses do not understand them. The ruling circles have no idea what the masses already understand in their fresh minds, things they themselves do not understand because they do not want to understand anything. These things are a problem for our time, and I do not shrink from speaking about them, no matter how many objections are raised about suggestion and the like, because basically I only say what would come from the hearts and souls of people themselves if they were to become clear about what lives in these hearts and souls. I only want to clarify what lives in the hearts and souls. But many people today do not want to know anything about that because they shy away from living with those who clearly carry the demands of the time in their hearts. However, you can find out a lot about this from all sorts of voices of the time. Recently, for example, a gentleman wrote in the widely read magazine 'Die Hilfe' (Help) - and it is not a socialist magazine, but it aims to be a social magazine; similar views can be found in socialist magazines today - that we cannot socialize now. He does not consider the possibility that he does not know how to do it, but of course he does not attribute the reason why he has no idea how socialization should be carried out to himself, but to the others. In his article, he says quite naively: “Capitalism has simply corrupted our people... Yes, anyone who had a nation of healthy, happy, kind-hearted people who were eager to work and for whom fraternity was a living concept and not just a slogan like ours could dare to introduce communism overnight.”

Now I ask you whether anyone in the world would need to introduce communism if we lived in a social order in which people are healthy, happy, cheerful, kind-hearted and in which only fraternity lived. You see, that is today's world of thought. People have no idea what they said just a short time ago. They would truly have no need to think of an ideal of socialism if people were as they should be, as they are supposed to be, precisely through socialization.

People always forget one thing: if the natural organism is healthy, then a person does not feel what the health of the natural organism is. Then he must first seek in health, but then he can feel the harmony of his soul, or the joy of his soul, for that matter. But if the organism is sick, then he feels pain, then the pain of the organism is part of his soul experience. Then no one can come and say, “I cannot make you healthy,” because I could only do so if you first felt healthy in your soul, if you had harmony and joy in your soul. We must strive for a healthy social organism. That is what matters. We must not ask, as the gentleman I just spoke of did, “But where shall we get the people from?” Mankind must first be educated for socialism! — Think of the Munchausen hero who wants to lift himself up into the air by his hair. No, socialism should be there to educate people.

It is easy to call people immature when one is unable to develop mature impulses oneself. Our task in the present is not to accuse humanity, but to create conditions that will no longer require us to accuse humanity to the extent we do today. Therefore, the impulse we are talking about here sets itself the task of examining the conditions of a healthy social organism. We shall not make any progress until there is an awakening of understanding for this threefold social organism. Then I would like to see, if in a sufficiently large number of people - and that is what matters today - there is understanding for what is to be done, which government can resist such understanding! Under any other circumstances, we will not make any progress with all the experiments.

Today, the effort must be made to create understanding in the broadest circles. This can happen faster than one might think. And it must happen faster than one might think, because only those who are immature themselves speak of people's immaturity. We have no time to waste dreaming that it will take a long time to socialize. If one recognizes the practical possibility of basing social life on the three fundamentals of the spiritual, the legal, and the economic, then one will realize that one can carry out a real socialization on these three fundamentals. But one must resolve not to cling to old prejudices. We must make up our minds to really relearn. The same gentleman I have already told about, says the beautiful sentence: “Any renewal that tries to rush ahead of this development,” he means the development towards kind-hearted, friendly, contented people, “must fail because it finds no support in the people's feelings.” — In the feelings of this gentleman, it certainly finds no support. Such sentiments must simply be ignored if they cannot be improved, because humanity must not be held back any longer by old prejudices and old habits of thinking. Today we need to go deep within ourselves, to reform and revolutionize our feelings and our thinking. Then we will find the resonance in the people. We need not suggest anything to people; we need only find the clarity for what they legitimately want. We need only do the work of trust and not shy away from this cooperation with the broad masses, then we will truly serve the demands of the present time.

Today, I want to say once again that everyone must take themselves by the word: I must learn to understand what needs to be done from the phenomena of the time, from the loudly speaking facts, before it is too late. And it could very soon be too late, which would then be most regretted by those who have not taken the trouble to transform themselves, out of the abilities they have acquired, so that they can really understand these new demands of the time and place themselves at their service. To be able to place oneself at the service of the times, even if we have to relearn in the deepest part of our being, that must become the task of all people, before it is too late!

Closing words after the discussion

Since, in principle, hardly anything has been said in the discussion against my statements except by one of the honored speakers, it is also unnecessary for me to say much in detail in the closing remarks. I do not wish to go back over the arguments of the speaker who has contradicted me. I think it is certainly a strange way of putting things to say that one should refute things that are quite incorrect in comparison with what is in my book. A discussion cannot be conducted in such a way that one asserts inaccuracies or fallacies during the discussion and then demands that one refute what one never deigned to assert. I would like to point out just one thing. It has already been said by Mr. L. and it is also my conviction that, as far as Karl Marx is concerned, anyone who really knows Karl Marx will have to say that Karl Marx has always allowed himself to be taught by the facts of history, contemporary history, in such a way that there is no doubt that anyone today who would not be able to answer the question: What would Karl Marx think under today's conditions? — You see, there is a very, very strange word from Karl Marx that comes to mind when someone like Mr. W. refers to Karl Marx in such a strange way. Marx had many contemporaries who were his followers, who called themselves Marxists, and Karl Marx said something very strange, but it has a very deep meaning for these Marxists: As far as I am concerned, I am not a Marxist. Such a saying should really make you think. Sometimes you have to ask yourself what the followers of a certain view actually believe. A view, such as that put forward by Karl Marx, is meant by its creator to flow into the full movement of time. And only those who are able to take it up in such a way that they are able to transform it for their own time will understand it in a later age. That is enough on this point. Now, because three questions were asked, I would just like to make a few comments about these three questions. All three questions relate to foreign policy. Of course, I could answer them individually, but perhaps it would be better not to answer these three questions in particular in the form in which the questioner wants them, given the events that are still pending. It is necessary to withhold information about current events, although it is not likely that what I am saying here will be in the newspaper tomorrow. But it is better if certain things are not spoiled by being talked about. But I will tell you the following about it, so that you do not think that something can be withheld lightly with regard to answering this question. You see, what is now presented as the threefold social order was initially treated as a foreign policy matter during the terribly difficult war period. At a time when it was out of the question to tackle socialization within Germany just before the end of the war, when the only question was what Germany would do in response to Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, for example, if there was to be a possible end to the terrible events? Today, even more than in the past, I am of the opinion that much could have been helped if people had shown understanding for that foreign policy, which, in addition to socialization, lies in this threefold structure of a healthy social organism. That, I would say, is precisely what stands before me today with such sadness. This structure would, I believe, have been the only way to avoid such a terrible end to the war as we have come to. May that lack of understanding which the relevant circles showed in the past not also become what those who matter, the broadest sections of the people, make it theirs today. If only we could find the hearts of the broad masses of the people more than we could find the hearts of those who, instead of seeking some kind of sensible foreign policy under the influence of these impulses, have wreaked havoc at Brest-Litovsk and in the aftermath.

I cannot give you a second lecture on foreign policy now. But one day we will study the real causes, the more distant and more proximate ones, of these unfortunate European events of the last five years. In the future, we will study, for example, the web of so-called causes of war that led to the Austro-Serbian conflict. Interwoven into this conflict as foreign policy are chaotic economic and political causes. And anyone who, like me, has spent half their life, that is three decades, in Austria, who is familiar with Austrian conditions, knows that this was bound to happen from the unfortunate development of these Austrian conditions, because these conditions could only have been maintained if the economic and political-legal conditions could have been disentangled at the right time, also in relation to foreign policy. You see, I came to Vienna once during the war. Various people approached me and said, emphasizing only the economic side of the causes of the war: “Oh, this war with Serbia is only a pig war.” Of course, this only expresses the economic cause in terms of one area, but it was present. In addition, there were the political and even the cultural causes, even if they lay in different languages, of which Austria officially had thirteen. In short, as I said, I would have to give a very detailed lecture if I wanted to show you how these things have crossed the former state borders, which I call an inorganic, chaotic jumble of the three branches of life, which must first be separated in the future. So today, for easily understandable reasons, I can only hint at all this.

You see, what is now called war guilt, what is now called the terms of peace, which are the subject of the question at hand here – well, is that an impossibility when you think of the realization? No, that is not an impossibility, but mere nonsense, because it is something like sailing into a dead end. It is absolutely incomprehensible how people in Versailles can even imagine such things. Of course, one might not look clearly enough, not concretely enough into the circumstances, but just consider this. Let us leave aside the war debt. Let us assume that which has arisen from the old conditions, the debts that are to be repaid within the German borders themselves. So let's leave the war guilt aside for the time being. Then, for the next few years, the mere interest, listen carefully, ladies and gentlemen, the interest, as I believe, is 28 billion marks annually. So not only is it impossible, but it is really nonsense. Things that cannot be realized.

This is a typical phenomenon of the present time: we have sailed into something under the influence of the old conditions, and it can only develop further if we build something completely, completely new, from completely new foundations. Now, people will very soon be convinced that they have to build on completely new foundations. Those who today still do not want to know about the threefold social order will have to learn it from the field of foreign policy, when it becomes impossible to escape the calamities if we do not manage to establish international relations that go beyond all political and spiritual conditions and arise out of the necessities of economic life. Of course, this must be studied in detail. If it is studied, it will be seen that recovery can only come if we try to build international economic relations on the basis of the tripartite structure of the social organism, at least for us. It is no obstacle that the Entente states do not have a tripartite structure. For us, it would only be necessary for us to make progress, to get some air and the possibility of life again, that Russia and the Ukraine could also enter into the tripartite division to the east.

But anyone who, on deeper grounds, is familiar with the intentions of the Russian national soul also knows how much has actually been achieved by the peace of Brest-Litovsk and how it would have been possible, had not so much been buried, to win adherents with this threefold organism, especially in Russia. This is something for which, of course, ways must be sought to make up for it. But for those who do not take things according to programs, not according to preconceived ideas, but as they present themselves in reality, including in foreign policy, there is only one possibility, to gain strength over a sufficiently large territory in Eastern and Central Europe, so that we find the possibility of not being harmed by the fact that in the West there is that intention, which is expressed in the dreadful peace conditions. I would like to point out to you that the impulses of this tripartite division were first thought of during the course of the war as a foreign policy, and that is what can weigh heavily on us today: After these terrible and bloody experiences, are we to go back to the way things were during the war? At the time, I tried to make it clear how people would have reacted quite differently to everything else if there had been a manifestation in this direction, which of course would not have been worded as one has to speak about these things now, according to the demands of the times. But that is something one would wish for, that now that a new era has dawned, this new era would understand these things better than they were understood by those people who were the last stragglers of the old era and who, because they were these stragglers, led European humanity into terrible misfortune. May as many people as possible now open their hearts, so that they may not be among the stragglers, but may be the forerunners of that which alone can help, namely, that which really cures the inner organism. And the healthy inner organism will also find the ways and means to assert itself in the right way on the outside.

In a series of lectures, I tried to explain the extent to which the present should strive for a division of the social organism into an area of the spirit with independent administration, an area of law on a democratic basis, and an independent economic area. The idea and practical formulation of this view of the threefold social organism, when it attempted to place itself in today's cultural and intellectual life, was expressed to those people who could be expected to have learned something for their work in relation to human development from the loud and clear facts of the last four to five years and also from our present. And one should actually believe that in the present time everyone living with a truly awakened soul should learn from these facts that speak loudly and clearly about the reorganization of social matters. Naturally, the idea could not actually arise in the mind of the bearer of this threefold thinking that those who, by virtue of their entire mental makeup – mentality is what one has been accustomed to calling it in recent times – want to hold on to old programs, to old party opinions, will readily profess their support for this idea of the threefold order of the social organism. For what must one actually have within oneself in order to grasp this idea as one that has really been plucked out of the life of the present in a practical way?

You have to be able to say: the terrible events of the world war catastrophe have shown how the old views on economic life have driven this economic life of humanity into external institutions, which, in the end, by combining the individual institutions into the great state imperialisms, had to lead to the world catastrophe. They were driven to this because economic life developed in a certain sense in such a way that it was, I might say, left to its own driving forces; that we neglected to arrive at truly comprehensive economic ideas which could have lived through themselves through economic measures. A man who is officially responsible for the reorganization of economic life in the Reich Ministry, Wichard von Moellendorff, recently stated that it was his conviction that, under all circumstances, even if the world war catastrophe had not occurred, or had not occurred in the form in which it did, economic life would inevitably have driven itself into a crisis of the most terrible kind, to the detriment of humanity and of nations, for the simple reason that this economic life lacked truly fruitful guiding ideas. And the forces that operated in the states and in the legal conceptions of nations were closely allied with this economic life. In the final analysis it had come about that only economic interests were reflected in the legal systems of the nations. And we had to experience that in 1914 the mutual relations between the states ran into such unclear currents that basically no state power, even with the most earnest goodwill, was actually in a position to avert the terrible threat at that time.

So it might seem that for economic life as for state life, there is much to be learned from the course of events that led to the impossibility of their own destruction for the inner drive that says: A new idea, a new willpower must be found if humanity is to flourish in its development; a new idea for economic life, a new idea for political or legal life. And is not, after all, the whole of political and legal life and of economic life based on the spiritual powers that humanity can unfold, that humanity can cultivate in the growing generation, and which can then intervene in the economy and in the legal life as rational thoughts? Can we not also say that intellectual life also shows how we have arrived at a critical epoch, and how we can learn from it, that we must reflect on and contemplate its further fruitful development and on a new foundation for it?

In the three most important areas of human life – economic, political and legal, and spiritual life – the big question arose, the question of the world war catastrophe and its aftermath. People should actually be around who have learned from the course of events. The fact that humanity's new phase of development cannot be mastered with old thoughts and old party opinions should actually be a basic conviction of the modern human being, based on the world of facts itself. It is out of this attitude, out of this conviction, that the lectures have been given so far here by me. In today's lecture and the one the day after tomorrow, I would like to add a few things to what has already been said, which could serve as a supplement to what has been said so far, from a more spiritual point of view today and from a more practical point of view the day after tomorrow. One thing has emerged that is, in essence, extremely instructive in view of the conviction and attitude just expressed.

What I would characterize as a strange alliance has emerged, a kind of coalition from the far right to the far left. In terms of their opposition to what has been presented here as the basic ideas of the tripartite social organism, Spartacists, independents, majority socialists, the Civic Party and extreme reactionaries are marching in complete agreement with each other today. It could hardly have seemed better, as it could have, to let the Spartacists and the bourgeois and the reactionaries converge in their attitudes.

This peculiarity therefore exists, that basically, at least in form and in attitude, the most amicable harmony reigns from left to right. From the extreme left, we could hear the following judgment about what has been said in these lectures very recently. We could hear that people agree, completely agree, with my criticism of the previous economic order, that they also completely agree with the threefold social order, that they even believe that this threefold order must come about, but – now comes the other thing: they will summon up all their strength to fight tooth and nail against what has been said here in criticism of the previous economic system and about the threefold social organism.

Strange things – one declares one's full agreement with the matter and at the same time declares that one must fight the matter at all costs! Similar arguments can also be heard from the extreme right. So there could perhaps have been no better opportunity for those who, whether from this or that hole of old views, wanted to come together to fight against that which absolutely does not and will not compromise with old views.

Today, by way of introduction to what I will have to say in detail the day after tomorrow, I would like to draw attention to a side of the modern social movement that has actually always been misunderstood, and which has been taken into account precisely in the formulation, in the conception of the idea and the practice of the tripartite organism. Today, I would like to touch on the spiritual basis of the current development of humanity, because I have to be aware that this spiritual basis is of the utmost importance and that the misunderstandings that arise with regard to what can and should be socially desired today stem precisely from the failure to take this spiritual basis into account.

And there is another reason why it is necessary, urgently necessary, to place a movement that today merely wants to be economic or, at most, political, on a spiritual foundation. For anyone who follows today's events as they unfold, not only on the surface, but who tries to penetrate deeper into what is actually happening in the depths of the development of nations today, must surely say to himself: the mighty, the terrible terrible, blood-drenched battle that has taken place is only a wave that has arisen from something in the depths of human nature, something that has been building for a long time. It is an inner restlessness in human nature that is showing itself almost everywhere in the world. One could feel it all these years since the outbreak of this world catastrophe by the facts, as more and more populations across the continents joined in what was actually taking place, joined in such a way that sometimes one truly did not know why, or that the reasons they put forward for joining made a very dubious impression. One could see from this that something elementary lies in this world catastrophe, something that is emerging from the depths of human existence over the whole earth. And it seems to me that nowhere is there more opportunity for a real recognition of what is actually taking place in the depths of humanity than in Central Europe, which has recently found itself squeezed between the whole of the Orient and the whole of the Occident.

This prompts us to ask: What is actually at the root of this? And it should be understandable that the understanding of such things must be based on a certain inner contemplation of the circumstances, on a certain experiential grasping of the facts, that something like instinctive, intuitive contemplation is needed to understand these things. Therefore, one should be understood when one draws attention to what arises from such a view, so that one encounters, I would like to say, what is happening to people. It will not be too much to say today that what has developed out of the world war catastrophe in terms of moods through Central Europe towards the East, towards Russia, towards Asia, and what is developing in terms of moods towards the West and across to America, if one understands that one sees in it only the continuation of that elementary restlessness of humanity that first found its horrific expression in the world war catastrophe. That was, as many have said, the most terrible external armed conflict that has taken place since the time when people have been talking about history. And this armed conflict has been waged with the most physical means by a large part of contemporary humanity. But we can see emerging, rising out of what has produced this armed conflict, something that will take hold of humanity with equal significance and equal impact, and we are actually only at the beginning of it. If what we have experienced was the most terrible armed conflict, then we will also experience - all the signs, which are present in the moods of the people, show it - the greatest spiritual battle, the greatest, the most terrible spiritual confrontation between the East, the Orient and the Occident. We are at the beginning of great and comprehensive spiritual struggles for humanity. And what is now taking place in social demands seems only to be the wave of a spiritual struggle of humanity that has been driven to the surface. Even those contemporaries who have already reached a respectable age will have to engage themselves in this spiritual struggle of humanity. In particular, however, the younger generations will have to engage themselves in this spiritual struggle that encompasses humanity. And what we can say to these growing generations about what we learn from the events, much, very much, will depend on the shaping of human development in the future. Today, the coming event is first announced by something that is outwardly connected with things: half of India, more than half of India, is half starved, and from starved India, the call goes up from a thousand and a thousand souls today: “Away from England!” This must not be judged merely from the political point of view that one is accustomed to from elsewhere today; it must be judged from a broader, more incisive point of view, one that is effective in the development of humanity. For what lives in the Orient is imbued with the heritage, with the heirloom of ancient spiritual life, which has only declined.

Expressed through the deeds of men, the heritage of ancient Oriental spiritual life will come into conflict with the spiritual aspirations of the Occident as far as America, and it remains to be seen whether those forces in the Anglo-American population that their tenacity and generous comprehension of their own selfish national interests have dealt with Central Europe in the well-known way, whether they will also be able to cope with Asia when, driven by the hunger of India, quite different forces will speak than those which the West has heard so far? This is only a hint of what is alive in the cultural atmosphere of the earth today. Because this is alive within, it is not enough today to judge what is actually happening from the traditional political and economic concepts. Therefore, it is necessary to extract the impulses for a new development of human conditions from a spiritual understanding of what is taking place in human moods across the whole earth today. Today, we must not only look at how the proletariat of Russia or Central Europe or the Entente is faring, although these are of course the most pressing questions for us.

Today, we must not just look at how certain people want to sit on their money bags. Today, if we do not want to miss the most important event, we must see as essentially involved in the social forces of the present that which the still half-asleep Orient will pour over the world. It is not necessary to say more than a few words, but when these few words are taken with all the weight that they carry for the spiritual development of mankind, then in these few words one will hear something that has a say in the reshaping of human development. The Orient, in so far as it is the cultured Orient – if we may apply this Occidental expression to the Orient – the Orient lived through thousands of years and, basically, to this day, yes, today, especially in its most spiritually minded representatives in the view that reality, true only that which man can experience spiritually and soulfully within himself, that which rises within the human being as inner soul content, that which can fill the human being so that he draws his true human consciousness from this inner soul content. This is true reality for the Orient, as far as it is the educated Orient. And the external, physical-sensual world, the world in which we work, the world in which the land for our work lies, in which we place the means of production for our work, this world is for the Oriental the Maja, the great appearance, that which is not real, which lives like a minor planet of the true spiritual-soul reality that arises only within. The Oriental is one with this view. He lives with it in his social community. This view fills him at all times, whether he withdraws in solitude for contemplation or whether he lends a hand in the oriental way to his fellow human beings in the physical world. One must consider such things if one really wants to see the world that presents itself to us in people living east of us, because basically, in Russia, it is already beginning to be as I have just characterized it. It only reaches its culmination, its peak, when one looks further east. On the other side, we see a completely different human disposition, a completely different inner life, when we cross the Rhine to the west, when we look in particular at the Anglo-American world. But on the other hand, everything that actually characterizes the attitude and the state of mind of the Western world is increasingly being shared by the basic character of Central European people, and there it reaches its peak in the attitude and state of mind of the present-day socialists, of socialists of all colors, basically.

We can find it again and again when we look at the people of the West and now also the people of Central Europe, as we have just looked at the people of the Orient. We will recognize what underlies the West when we grasp it in the way in which it has come to expression most clearly and most radically, when we grasp it precisely in the modern socialist mentality. What now prevails, no longer as a theoretical view but as a fundamental mood of the soul, is that the only reality is that which surrounds us in the physical, sensual world, that which we grasp when we do our work in the physical world for our fellow human beings. What is expressed in the land on which our work is done, what is expressed in the means of production with which our work is done, that is the only reality, and what appears in human souls as right, as custom, as art, as science, in short, as spiritual life, is only a result, a smoke, so to speak, of this single sensual-physical reality; this is, as every socialist thinker of the present day is firmly convinced, ideology. Ideology is the same thing seen from within, just as the Maya is for the Oriental. The Oriental says: physical sensuality, the physical world around us, the economic world, material existence, is Maya, it is an ideology, and reality is solely that which arises within the soul. And the Westerner says: Reality is only that which surrounds us externally, what is in the economic life, and an ideology, a maja, is what arises inwardly in the soul. If we know how such a basic mood of the soul actually makes a person, how it places him in life, then we see in what is happening today as a mood within the human race on earth this great, powerful contrast that I have just described. And this contrast has an enormous historical impact. From this contrast, not only a struggle between nations will develop, not only a race war, but a struggle of humanity, in which we and those who follow us will be placed. He who can see in the present mood of humanity the preparations for this struggle of humanity will not fail to be able to let himself be fertilized by what is really going on in present-day humanity in terms of the ideas and forces necessary for a social world view. What can be grasped in the present, I would like to say, as two abstract thoughts, but what will become reality, will grow out of fighting forces, although of a different form than the physical fighting forces of armed combat were, but to fighting forces that challenge the inner strength, the inner resistance of man to an even greater extent than the past armed combat did.

And further: a remarkable parallelism arises when one follows the moods that have just been indicated to you with more or less abstract but very real thoughts. We look towards the Orient and rightly ask ourselves today: What has become of the mood that created the greatest spiritual wealth in the ancient world of the Orient? Those in the know are aware of this. What has become of all this for today's cultural humanity of the Orient? The man of the Orient is weighed down in mystical-dark rapture, in half-sleepiness. That which used to give strength to the Oriental under the influence of the thought “sensuality is Maya, inner soul is reality, divine reality” used to give the Oriental strength and power, today it gives him weakness, it makes him a fatalist, someone who surrenders without will to the fate of the world. This is the fruit of a spiritual life that was directed specifically at the human, spiritual and soul. If one paints the corresponding counter-image of the Occident, then one says something highly, highly uncomfortable for very many people today – I am well aware of this – something that strongly provokes their antagonism. But I have often said: We are not living in the time of the small, but in the time of the great reckoning, and one must not shy away from telling people the truth.

We have seen how, in a certain higher development, what has been prepared for centuries in the West has found a particularly characteristic expression in modern socialism. Through Western development, the human mood has gradually emerged that actually sees the only reality in the physical-sensual world of economic life. And the leading and governing circles, that is, those who were there before, were the first to feel that the physical-sensual world and its material economic factors are the only reality, that the other things that arise in the soul are Maya, ideology. Socialism merely articulated what others also felt but did not dare to express. Under socialism, it has only emerged that the whole world of law, of custom, of art, of science, all that is called the spiritual life of man, is an ideology, a maja, for the newer humanity of the West. How did this basically genuinely Western view come to this climax? It has come about because more and more has emerged within modern economic life that which is referred to as modern private capitalism. This modern private capitalism has created the mood in economic life that has ultimately transformed our entire social system into a kind of acquisition society. Bit by bit, we have seen it come about over the last few centuries, how the current economic conditions have arisen from earlier ones. Even if people today do not pay attention to it, in earlier centuries there was a much greater interest in the objects and products of the environment, in everything that was part of the law and the economy, than there is today.

There was a much deeper factual interest than there is today. Owning this or that object because it has this or that form, because it has this or that origin, because it bears this or that signature, that was a human interest in earlier times to a much greater degree than it is today, where this objective human interest in external arrangements is often clouded and obscured by the fact that people arrange their home according to what they acquire purely for the sake of money and capital in the competitive struggle for survival. Torn away from the admiration for the beauty of what people create, torn away from the value of something simply because it was made by a human being, the interest of a large number of people today is in being able to see from their annual balance sheet whether they are in an active balance with their surroundings. That is a somewhat radical way of putting it, but it is the economic signature of the present. And this economic signature has given rise to another with regard to the concept of human labor. If we look back just a short time, we find how people, so to speak, allowed their work to grow together with their products. You can feel this when you are in a museum, standing in front of old door handles, old locks, even old boots. You can tell from the objects how the work of man has flowed into them. Today, the work of man is separate from the product; that is why most of the products that people delight in are so ugly. Today, human labor is something that has market value only in that it is rewarded with a certain payment. Today, human labor is what is calculated primarily according to its market value. And so, with regard to the administration of goods, the capitalist competition for the administration of goods, and with regard to his relationship to his work, man has become detached from the world. He stands, as it were, beside the machine, stuck in the soul-deserting capitalism of modern times, without connection to the external reality that he sees around him, which he cannot deny, and which has even become the only reality for him. And he cannot believe that what arises within him, the spiritual and soul-like, torn away from nature and economic order, is anything other than a Maja, an ideology. This is what the modern economic order has done.

The modern proletariat has grown into this modern economic order, has been pushed into it, especially over the last three to four centuries, gradually pushed in to the extent that it is in it today. This detachment from external reality has reached a climax in the development of humanity in modern times. One could demonstrate this in detail, how man has gradually, I might say, been alienated from himself. You see, today one can speak with countless members of the proletariat – if one has learned to think and feel with the proletariat, then one hears from their mouths also that which moves them above all – but then one hears you often hear: Above all, it must not be the case that we work all day and work with our hands and that our souls remain empty, because we come home tired in the evening and can do nothing but fall down and lie down. We want a reasonable working hours. And from what has been done with the working hours of people in recent centuries, which has now improved, the demand for an eight-hour working day emerges: 6 X 8 is 48, the 48-hour week. This is something that people who work want to achieve today. People talk about it: yes, of course, something like that is being striven for, humanity must move forward, but in the old days people had it even worse. In the old days, people had to work even harder, they were even more like beasts of burden. – I can share with you a decree from King Ferdinand I of Austria from the year 1550. In this decree it says: Every worker shall – and I ask you to pay particular attention to the following words – every worker shall work as has been the custom for many years, mornings and afternoons, with the exception of Sunday and Saturday afternoons, half a shift, that is, four hours. That makes 1550 hours for the year: 5 mornings of 8 hours (a half-shift in the morning and a half-shift in the afternoon, each of 4 hours) and 1 half-shift on Saturday of 4 hours, which adds up to 44 hours in the week for the year 1550. And of these 44 hours in the week, it is said: each laborer should work “as has been the custom for ages.” It is pointed out that this is the old custom. The modern age has not only brought us what is so celebrated from the progress of humanity; the modern age has also brought us the fact that we have to reclaim what already existed. These things should, I think, make us think! And under the influence of such things, especially the influence of the endeavor to extract as much as possible from work, this clinging of the Western man to physical sensual reality as the only reality has arisen. From this arose the feeling that the spiritual and soul is Maya, is ideology. But this has also brought about the modern proletariat's being placed in mere economic life. And so the great error of the modern proletariat has arisen. This modern proletariat was harnessed into economic life by the leading and guiding circles. They had to say to themselves: In this economic life, the soul is desolate, in this economic life, spirit is only smoke and sound, maya. We must have a different economic life. We must reshape economic life. From the reshaped economic life will emerge a spiritual life that is not a class spiritual life, but a universal human spiritual life.

It is not surprising that the modern proletariat has fallen prey to this error, because it was completely pushed into economic life. What it had was only born out of economic life. For the proletariat, the other world was a Maja, an ideology. As a proletariat, it could believe nothing other than that the only economic life it knew was merely to be transformed. Then everything else would fall into place by itself. Instead of – and this could not be the case at first, it could only arise from the lessons of the bloody world war – instead of saying to themselves, it is our situation that is to blame for the fact that we have only and solely entered into economic life, that this economic life has made the spiritual life dependent on itself, so in the future the spiritual life must no longer be dependent on the economic life, it must be freely based on itself - instead of drawing these radical conclusions, the proletariat drew the other: a different economic life will certainly arise, that will certainly produce a different spiritual life.

Today we are facing a great turning-point: either the proletariat will bring about its own misfortune if it remains only in the economic sphere and wants to transform only that, or it must realize what other people must realize with it , namely that spiritual life, as it is projected by the threefold social organism, must be taken out of the state and economic life, so that it is detached from them and placed on its own feet, in its own self-government.

And what has become of it? Through these influences, which I have just characterized, what has become of this Occidental belief that the spiritual-mental is Maya, the ideology, and that the outer economic life is the only reality? This has become what then found its ingenious expression in Marxism, because ingeniousness is also characterized by the fact that it produces not only the greatest positive achievements of humanity, but also the greatest errors. The view has become: Since you can't conjure into reality with the mind, with the thought, with what you ideologically develop – because only spiritualists believe that you just need to have a thought and then machines will move – since you can't work with thoughts, can't produce physical products, you can't control economic life with thoughts either. Therefore, economic life moves forward by itself alone. And if that is the only reality, then it must produce by itself what is to be achieved for humanity. Hence the Marxist doctrine – even if it is not stated by Marx, because Marx was not a “Marxist”, as he himself said, in the sense of many of his followers – hence the doctrine that at most can be promoted by man, what is brought about by the production process, by the economic-material process, by the external institutions themselves, but that all real progress actually takes place independently of man through the economic forces and factors themselves. This has developed into Western fatalism, into the belief that external reality will take care of itself without humans. The capitalists, for example, will concentrate the means of production more and more; the concentration of the means of production is taking place, and when these are sufficiently concentrated, they will automatically enter into the new socialization. The expropriation of the expropriators will take place. Fatalistic belief, combating as utopian all that is aware and convinced that man is the one who makes history, that what is to become action must first live in human thought – the drowsiness of the Oriental from his ancient spiritual life goes parallel to the fatalism of the Western majority in the belief that economic conditions will do it, one has only to wait and see how the development takes place. Is it not the case that we are clearly at a major turning point in human development? Fatalism in the East – fatalism among the most advanced people in the West. Fatalism here, fatalism there. A new force must flourish from what is in decline on both sides. How can we muster faith in the further development of humanity if we are unable to believe that something can arise from this mutual fatalism that will bring new impulses and new developmental forces for humanity? It is out of this faith that the ideas for the threefold social organism arose. Out of this belief, out of this belief in progress and in the development of humanity, arose the consideration of the world from two points of view: How does one engage with modern institutions, especially in economic life? How does one engage with modern spiritual life, so that it does not remain an appendage of economic and state life, but so that it becomes a free impulse in the development of humanity?

I believed that in the early 1890s the world would understand from the events of the time the impulse to point to the depths of human nature, from which a new, liberated spiritual life can gradually develop. And I tried to express this belief in my Philosophy of Freedom, which was first published in 1894. I did not reprint this Philosophy of Freedom even though it had long been out of print, because I could see that the ideas contained in it were not met with understanding, at least not during the decades immediately preceding the world war catastrophe. In particular, there was no response in Central Europe, where people were always saying, “We need the sun,” but they did not want to include the longing for a spiritual sun in this saying. And it was only when the belief arose that people could gain a new understanding of spiritual freedom from the lessons of the terrible world war catastrophe that I was impelled to produce the new edition of my “Philosophy of Freedom” that is now available. For in what has been expressed, again and again, from subconscious, not conscious, depths of human nature in modern times, which is particularly expressed in the things that the modern proletariat now feels, although it cannot yet consciously express them because it has been deprived of education to do so, there is a threefold. There is the dark feeling that the external institutions of legal and economic life have taken on a form in which I, as a human being, am so constrained that I am merely inhibited, and that there is basically no point in of free will in the modern competitive market, where everyone must either acquire capitalistically or by wage labor, where all connection is dead between what man must do, that is, what he works, and what is then the product. There is no sense of connection: I am connected to the world in such a way that my will is free. One felt an inhibition of the will. And then, when one looked at one's relationship to other people: to a climax seems to have come under modern capitalist competition, under the forced labor of the newer times in the wage relationship, to a climax seems to have come what one can call a dwindling of trust from person to person. In the most extreme sense, anti-social instincts have taken the place of the old social instincts, which at least still existed in some form. These anti-social instincts have finally led to a lack of understanding between the modern classes of humanity, and have created the abyss between the proletariat and the non-proletariat, which is so difficult to bridge in modern times. This has given rise to the second experience of the inner man in modern times, the oppression with regard to the sense of right and wrong. And to this was added a third, which I already hinted at at the beginning of my discussion today: People saw each other exchanging their economic goods, they saw what lived in the exchange of these economic goods being entered on the left and right side of the books. But, as even Mr. von Moellendorff had to admit, no thought was given to the institutions of economic life. The third experience of the soul: It was as if one were plunged into darkness when looking into the maelstrom of modern markets, where the real thing for people was only what was acquired in a capitalist way. These have been the three experiences in modern times: the inhibition of free will, because there was nothing in which one could develop free will; complete oppression of the sense of right and obscuration of thought with regard to the external institutions of legal and economic life.

That was the feeling that gave rise to the impulse – it may have been weak and clumsy, it may still be weak and clumsy today, I readily admit – that gave rise to the impulse to seek the essence of the free human being, the human being who feels so integrated into the human order that he can say to himself: I lead a dignified human existence. The impulse to seek the essence of this free human being, the essence of the free spiritual human being, in the sense that all people can be such free spiritual human beings within the institutions of modern legal and economic life. One thing emerged above all others. People ask so easily and have asked again and again for centuries, and philosophers have speculated about it and countless opinions have been formed about it: Is man free according to his will, or is he not free? Is he a mere creature of nature who can only act out of the mechanical impulses of his inner being? The question has always been approached wrongly because more and more in the West the feeling for the actual reality of spiritual life has faded. For the Orient, the question of freedom or unfreedom has almost no significance; it plays no role at all there. In the West, it became the fundamental question of world view and ultimately even of political life, yes, of criminal law and so on. And one thing was not realized – you can read in detail about the individual steps that lead to this train of thought and this realization in my book “The Philosophy of Freedom” – one thing was not realized, namely that the question “Is man free or is he not free?” actually makes no sense at all, that it must be put differently, that it must be put like this: Is man, from his birth onward, through an education appropriate to his nature, to be developed in accordance with education and schooling in such a way that, despite external legal and economic institutions, something can arise within him as an experience that makes him a free being? Yes, that not only makes him a free being inwardly, but that develops the power of freedom in him to such a strength that he can then also set up the external legal and economic life in his own way? This arose as a basic impulse in modern developing humanity, on the one hand the democratic urge for equal rights for all, on the other hand the social urge: I will help you as you should help me. But one felt: such a social order with “equal rights for all” and with “help me as I want and must help you,” such a social order can only be established by people who, as free people, as free spiritual people, develop a true relationship to the whole of reality.

One must first understand that man is born neither free nor unfree, but that he can be educated and developed towards freedom, towards an understanding of freedom, towards experiencing freedom, if one brings him into contact with that spiritual life that imbues him with forces that first set him free in his development as a human being; that one can develop up to the point where our thoughts are no longer abstract, unreal, ideological, but thoughts that are grasped by the will. This is what I tried to present to the world as a realization in my Philosophy of Freedom: the marriage of the will with thoughts that have become inwardly free. And from this marriage of the will with the inwardly freed thoughts, it is to be hoped that the human being emerges who also develops the abilities, in living together with others, that is, in a social community, each for himself and each socially with each other, to produce such legal and economic orders that one accepts as necessary, just as one accepts the necessity of having to carry one's physical body, of obeying its laws, and not being free to grow one's right hand on the left side and vice versa, or one's head in the middle of one's chest. We do not fight against what is naturally reasonable out of our freedom. We fight against what is inhuman and unnatural about human legal and economic institutions with our freedom when we have come to the appropriate awareness, because we know that it can be done differently. And we know and want to know, as modern people, that every human being should work democratically on this transformation of the external economic and legal order to such a rationality that it does not impair our freedom any more than it impairs the natural lawfulness of our physical body. To understand this, however, one must have a heart and mind for the reality of spiritual life, because the kind of spiritual life that is an appendage of state and economic life, the kind of spiritual life that one acquires only if one is the son of rich people or has received state scholarships, or for the sake of acquiring a state position, this kind of spiritual life does not make one free. A spiritual life that stands on its own, that works out of its own strength, that is free, and that produces, in contrast to those moods, those three moods: inhibition of the will, oppression of the sense of right, obscuration of thoughts, which are present when the will is unfree, the other mood: the free development of the will in spiritual life.

If what I have described here in a series of lectures comes about as a free spiritual life, a spiritual life with self-administration of the pedagogical-didactic in the threefolded social organism, then the human being will no longer feel his will inhibited, but will be surrounded by an atmosphere generated from this free spiritual life, so that he will say to himself, this free spiritual life also accepts my will as a free one. And from the understanding of the self-governing spiritual life will emerge what the new social impulses are, which consist in the mutual, true, objective tolerance and understanding of one person by another in the field of the second link of the social organism, the constitutional state, where every person, provided they are mature, faces every other person as an equal. And thirdly, as we shall see in more detail the day after tomorrow, there will emerge a structure of economic life such that those who work in this economic life, from the highest intellectual worker to the last manual laborer, will participate socially as independent, free human individuals, so that the time when people were plunged into darkness at the thought of economic life will be replaced by the time when the reasonable action of works councils, the economy will be regulated by the rational activity of workers' councils, transport councils and economic councils, where the individual human being will no longer be at the mercy of the hazards of supply and demand and the crisis-prone nature of the capital economy, but where the individual human being will stand in life as an economic agent alongside other human beings; where fair distribution of prices and work will arise out of reason, so that we can place ourselves as free human beings in that which is once necessary in economic life. And just as we place ourselves in the body in its natural necessity, so man will achieve his freedom in modern democratic socialism, in modern social democracy.

To achieve this true humanity, it is necessary to overcome the old party patterns, the old party opinions, which, in the face of today's human demands, are nothing but mummies of thought and judgment. Truly, those who constantly speak of the fact that I want to use what underlies the threefold social organism to promote myself, know me badly. Oh, I would much rather have remained in quiet Dornach, where I worked before coming here, on a work that is very close to my heart, and I stand here only against my subjective will, out of the realization that today, in the face of the old party programs and party thoughts, which are mummies and which gather in the holiest unity from the extreme right to the extreme left, that it is a duty to work against these mummies as far as I can. I admit that it may be weak, then it may be fought factually and something better may be put in its place, but as a duty one must feel it towards the old and towards the new facts, to put a new thing before humanity. It does not seem to me at all as if humanity would not long for this new thing, as if humanity would not actually want this new thing to appear. For what is the real aim of this idea, this practice of the threefold social organism? They want people to finally understand that we are living in a time of great reckoning, in which the three main areas of human life, spiritual life, political or legal life, and economic life, have been set in motion and have become restless, and that we need a reorganization, a transformation of these three areas of our general human life.

So what does the idea of the threefold social organism want? Perhaps with weak, insufficient, or defective forces, then one may improve them objectively, may deal with them objectively. It wants a formulation of what is to become reality in order to bring about the necessary transformation of political life, economic life, and spiritual life.

Now, the Social Democratic Party Congress is meeting in Weimar, the party congress of the party that professes to want to transform modern life in the appropriate sense. And a minister, even the Reich Minister for Socialization, spoke the following words to the Social Democrats in Weimar: We need not only a political revolution, but also an economic and spiritual one. Whoever finds the formulation that also mobilizes the spiritual and moral forces in the people will bind them to his banners. The League for the Threefold Social Organism may still be insufficient, then it will be happy to make way for others who can do better, but the fact that at least the same direction must be taken as the League for the Threefold Social Organism is acting in, is admitted before its party members even by the present Reich Minister for Socialization, Wissell. And from his words: We need not only a political, but also an economic and spiritual revolution —, one may well hear that we at least, even if we cannot do it in a sufficient sense, at least we want what these people must also want when they are clear about the demands of the present in a spiritually clear moment. But then, if that is the case, it must not happen, as I very much fear it will, that people of Mr. Wissell's ilk, when they get hold of the writings of the Federation for the Threefolding of the Social Organism, do as other party members do: they say, “Well, we agree completely, but we will fight it tooth and nail.” We would agree if someone came along who did it better so that we could step down. But that is not the point. The point is not to fight things that you yourself have to describe as necessary, but if you want to do something about them, to do it better. And you can be sure that the appearance of this idea of the threefold social order is based on the attitude that arises, firstly, from the necessity of this threefold order in the present, and that arises from the realization that something must happen before it is too late. Therefore, she calls out to all those who want to fight this threefold order of the social organism: All right, we'll step down, but you do better if you yourselves have to admit that the threefold order of the social organism is a necessity!

Closing remarks.

No one wishes to join the discussion. Dr. Unger therefore asks Dr. Steiner to say a few final words.

Dr. Steiner: Dear attendees! I would just like to point out that despite some resistance, which has come precisely from party circles, it is nevertheless a success that some impulses in the field of economic life have already come from the Federation for the Threefold Social Order, and that, after all, some things have already happened in the direction of taking economic life into hand, of taking economic institutions into hand on the part of the people involved in this economic life. What form this should and must take will be discussed further the day after tomorrow. But the matter must not be taken in such a way that if one of the three limbs of the social organism shows a little that it is actually taking effect, then the others can sleep. If something is conceived as seriously as this threefold social order, then the one-sided success of one part of it is the greatest failure of the whole. Nothing endangers the threefold social order more than if only the advancement of one area, such as the economic, succeeds. Therefore, the present most serious concern of the Federation for the Threefold Social Organism is that a spiritual movement should join the economic movement, within which we stand as the Federation for the Threefold Social Organism, whether it is called a “cultural council” or a “spiritual council” or whatever, it is unimportant, that a large number of people should join, we have once distributed an appeal here “To All People,” because culture is actually a matter for all people —, an association of people, then, for whom the reorganization of our school and education system, in particular, is close to their hearts, so close to their hearts that they see how the free development of human physical and spiritual abilities is inhibited in the school system, which is clamped by the state. Therefore, the Federation for Threefolding fights for the liberation of the school system, for the self-administration of the school system from bottom to top. For this to happen in the right way, it is necessary that as many people as possible demand this self-administration of the entire educational system, indeed of the entire spiritual life, in public. To avoid the one-sided pursuit of economic forces from becoming a failure, it is the concern of the alliance to now bring together people who will work on this liberation of the school and spiritual life, the educational system. In doing so, there should be no dogmatism whatsoever. On the contrary, the more opinions are expressed and the more intelligent ideas are brought forward, the better. We shall not become inflexible in any self-made dogma, but shall be open to everything that may come from an informed mind. But anyone who believes that the new formations today also include those of intellectual life should actually feel the inclination, feel the necessity, to join others in such a union of people to form a kind of intellectual or cultural council, or whatever one wants to call it.

We have by no means failed to approach the positive as much as we can with our forces. There is a project here in Stuttgart that will probably be implemented as early as the fall: with the help of teachers who understand a truly humanistic concept of development conceived in the sense of a spiritualized anthropology, to bring about a truly comprehensive school that is not based on state omnipotence but on the development of the free human being. We hope that we will be able to bring such a school into existence here in Stuttgart for a small group – it should not be a “class school”, it will be a proletarian school – a school that, as far as it is already possible under today's conditions, will strictly reflect the views of the threefold social order in its pedagogy and didactics. The aim will be to develop the human being so that he grows into a truly free spiritual being. The aim will be to develop the forces that one has to develop in a human being between the ages of seven and fifteen in such a way that thinking, feeling and willing are cultivated to the full extent that they can be cultivated in these years of life, so that later life and its destiny cannot break these forces again. For anyone with sufficient psychological insight will notice how much of our present time, how much of the damage of our present time depends on the fact that thinking, feeling and willing are not developed with sufficient strength in the corresponding very young years of life, so that they cannot be broken later by the blows of fate in life. More than one might think, the undeveloped powers of the soul are crushed by our present-day cultural conditions; and more than one might think depends on these things in our circumstances, in relation to our decline.

I only want to point out this one example so that you can see that we are not visionaries, not ideologues, but that we want to work practically in all areas as far as our limited strength allows. But in order that such things may not remain isolated, and that by degrees our whole spiritual life may become free, it is necessary that many people with many opinions, many insights and knowledge and practices should join us in the cultural council or similar organization. This is what I did not clearly express in today's lecture, but it was the underlying desire that there should also be enough people in this spiritual link of the three-part social organism who, working together in this field, might achieve something of what is necessary in our time, which is not a small reckoning but a great one. For we do indeed need a transformation of conditions in the economic, political and spiritual spheres. If we cannot bring ourselves to work actively in this direction before it is too late, then it will have to be too late! And that would be the most terrible thing that could arise from this world war catastrophe. But if it leads many people to the realization that we must develop the strong will to reshape all three areas of life, then, even if not for the immediate present, then at least for the future of humanity, something great will come out of this will, and thus something great will come out of the disaster of the world war, even if it is not in the full sense. And we, as Germans, wedged between the Orient and the Occident, have this great task, to understand what is most in danger of falling asleep there and there and to awaken it from the center. And I believe that this is the best patriotism today, which will ultimately prevail against all that threatens us from the murky swamps of Versailles, in that what can prevail in the center between the East and the West will be that we will let arise from Germany's great time - from our Lessing , Herder, Schiller, Goethe, from the great period of our German philosophy, which summarizes German essence in its own way, the philosophy of Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, from the period of the German Romantics - that we allow to emerge, to shine forth, what our task is after the terrible experiences of the last years. This task is to awaken a spiritual life that is capable of shaping the material world reasonably and humanely and an economic life, a material life, that is capable of giving people the freedom to live a free spiritual life!

Yesterday I gave you pictures of two or three personalities. In order to allow for the possibility of proof and confirmation, at least as far as external details are concerned, it is necessary to choose fairly well-known personalities and in describing them to you I have pointed in each case to characteristic qualities which can afford clues for the spiritual scientific investigator and help him to follow up the karmic relationships. This time I have chosen subjects which will also enable me to deal with a problem that has been put to me by members of our Society. Simply stated, it is as follows. Constantly, on every suitable occasion, reference is made—and of course correctly—to the fact that in very early times there were Initiates possessed of a lofty wisdom and at a high stage of development, and the question arises: If human beings pass through repeated earth-lives, where are these highly-initiated personalities? Where are they today? Are they to be found among the human beings who have been led to reincarnation at the present time? I have accordingly chosen examples which will enable me to deal with this very problem.

I gave you, as far as was necessary, a picture of the hero of the freedom of Italy, Garibaldi; and if you take what I said yesterday and add to it all that is well-known to you about this personality—a whole wealth of information is available about him—I think you will still find a very great deal in Garibaldi that is puzzling and that opens up significant questions.

Take two events of his life which amused you yesterday.—He became acquainted through a telescope with the girl who was to be his life-companion for many years, and he learnt of his own death-sentence when reading his name for the first time in print. There is still another very striking event in his life. The life-companion whom he found in the way I have described, and who stood at his side with such heroism, was the sharer of his life for many years. He certainly managed to see something very good through his telescope! Later, she died, leaving him alone, and he married a second time, this time not through a telescope—not even a Garibaldi is likely to do such a thing more than once!—this time he married, shall I say, in a perfectly conventional bourgeois manner. But for Garibaldi the marriage lasted no longer than one day. So you see, there is this other very striking fact in Garibaldi's relations with the ordinary bourgeois conditions of this world.

And now we come to something else of importance. The things I am describing to you come, as it were, with a sudden jerk to one accustomed to occult researches of this kind; they are clues that enable his vision to penetrate right into an earlier life or into a number of earlier lives. And in Garibaldi's life there is still another circumstance which raises a formidable problem.

Garibaldi, you know, was a Republican in his very bones; he was a Republican through and through. I made that abundantly clear in yesterday's lecture. And yet in all his plans for the liberation of Italy he never set out to make Italy into a Republic, but rather into an Empire under Victor Emanuel. That is an astonishing fact. When one looks at Garibaldi's whole life and character and then considers this fact, it really does astonish one.

There we have on the one hand Victor Emmanuel, who could of course reign as king only over a liberated Italy. And we have on the other hand Mazzini—also deeply united in friendship with Garibaldi—who, as you know, stood for a long time at the head of what was intended to be an Italian Republic, for he was willing to come forward only as the founder of an Italian Republic. The karmic relationships of Garibaldi will never be solved unless we take note here of a special set of circumstances.

In the course of a few years—Garibaldi, you know, was born at Nice in 1807—there were born within an area of a comparatively few square miles, four men who had a significant connection with one another in the wider course of European circumstances. In Nice, at the beginning of the 19th century, Garibaldi was born; in Genoa, not far away, Mazzini; in Turin, again not far, away, Cavour; and from the House of Savoy, once more at no great distance, Victor Emanuel. These four men are all quite near to one another in respect of the times and places of their births. And it is these four men together who, if not agreeing in thought, if not even acting always in mutual agreement, nevertheless established the country which became modern Italy.

You can see how the very way in which these four personalities are brought together in history suggests that they have, not only for themselves, but for the world, a common destiny. The most significant among them is, without doubt, Garibaldi himself. Taking into consideration all human conditions and relationships, we cannot but agree that he is by far the most significant figure of the four. Garibaldi's mentality, however, expresses itself in an elemental way. Mazzini's mentality is that of a learned philosopher; Cavour's that of a learned lawyer. And as for Victor Emmanuel's mentality ... well, there is no doubt about it, the most important among them all is Garibaldi. He possesses a quality of mind and spirit that expresses itself with elemental force, so that one cannot remain indifferent towards it. One cannot remain indifferent, for one simply doesn't know whence these traits come ... as long as they are looked at from the standpoint of the personal psychology of a single earth-life.

Now I come back to the question: Where are the earlier Initiates? For certainly it will be said that they are not to be found. But, my dear friends—I shall have to say something paradoxical here!—if it were possible for a number of human beings to be born today at the age of seventeen or eighteen, so that when they descended from the spiritual world they would in some way or other find and enter seventeen- or eighteen-year-old bodies, or if at least human beings could in some way be spared from going to school (as schools are constituted today), then you would find that those who were once Initiates would be able to appear in the human being of the present day. But just as little as it is possible, under the conditions obtaining on earth today, for an Initiate, when he needs bread, to nourish himself from a piece of ice, just as little is it possible for the wisdom of an older time to manifest directly, in the form that you would expect, in a body that has received education—in the present-day accepted sense of the word—up to his seventeenth or eighteenth year. Nowhere in the world is this possible; at all events, nowhere in the civilised world. We have here to take account of things that lie altogether beyond the outlook of the educated men of modern times.

When, as is the custom today, a child is obliged as early as the sixth or seventh year to learn to read and write, it is torture for the soul that wants to develop and unfold in accordance with its own nature. I can only repeat what I have already told you in my autobiography, that I owe the removal of many hindrances to the circumstance that when I was twelve years old I was still unable to write properly. For the capacity of being able to write, in the way that is demanded today, kills certain qualities in the human being.

It is necessary to say such a thing, paradoxical though it may sound, for it is the truth. There is no help for it—it is a fact. Hence it is that a highly evolved individual can be recognised in his reincarnation only if one looks at manifestations of human nature which are not directly apparent in a man, if he has gone through a modern education, but reveal themselves, so to speak, behind him. We have in Garibaldi a most striking example of this. What did civilised men, including Cavour, or at all events the followers of Cavour, think of Garibaldi? They regarded him as a madcap with whom it was useless to discuss anything in a sensible manner. That is a point of which we must take note; for there was much in his arguments and in his whole way of speaking that was bound to appear illogical, to say the least, to people enamoured of modern civilisation. Very often the things he says simply do not hold together. But when we are able to see behind a personality, and can look at that which in an earlier earth-life was able to enter into the body, but in this earth-life, because modern civilisation makes the bodies unfit, was not able to enter into the body—then we can begin to have an idea of what such a personality really is. Otherwise we are right off the track, for what is of most importance in such a personality lies right behind the things he can reveal externally. A good conventional man of the world, who simply expresses himself in the way he has learned to do, and in whom we see merely a reflection of the teaching and education he has received at school and elsewhere—such a man you can “photograph” in his moral and spiritual nature. He is there. A man, however, who comes over from other times bearing a soul filled with great and far-reaching wisdom, so that the soul cannot express itself in the body, can never be estimated with the means afforded by modern civilisation by what he does in the body. Above all, Garibaldi cannot be judged in that way. In his case it is rather like having to do—I am speaking metaphorically—with spiritualistic pictures, where a phantom becomes visible behind. With a personality like Garibaldi, you see him first as he is according to conventional standards, and behind you see something spiritual, a spirit-portrait, as it were, of that which in this incarnation cannot enter fully into the body.

When we take all this into consideration, and particularly if we meditate upon the special facts I have mentioned, then our vision is indeed led back from Garibaldi to a true Initiate who to all appearance lives out his Garibaldi-life in a quite different way, because he is unable to come down into his body.

If you consider the peculiar characteristics of Garibaldi's life to which I drew your attention, you will not find this so astonishing after all. A man must surely be somewhat of a stranger to earthly conventions if he finds his way into family relations through a telescope! Such a happening is certainly not usual, and it was not the only one in Garibaldi's life. In the characteristic style of his life there is something that points right away from ordinary alignment with bourgeois conventions.

Thus, in the case of Garibaldi, we are led back to an Initiate-life, and it was a life in those Mysteries which I described to you some months ago as proceeding from Ireland. Garibaldi, however, is to be found in an offshoot of those Mysteries at no great distance from here, in Alsace. There we find him, as an Initiate of a certain degree. And it is moreover fairly certain that between this incarnation in the 9th century, A.D., and his last incarnation in the 19th century, there was no further incarnation, but a long sojourn in the spiritual world. There you have the secret of this personality. He received all that I have described to you as the wisdom of Hibernia, and he received it at a very high stage of Initiation. He was within the places of the Mysteries in Ireland, and was actually the leader of the colony that came over later into Europe.

It goes without saying that just as an object reflected in a mirror becomes different in its reflected form, so all the wisdom of that time and place, embracing as it did the physical world and the spiritual world above it—all the wisdom in which an Initiate of those times participated, as I described it to you a few months ago—had to express itself during the 19th century in accordance with the civilisation of that period. You must accustom yourselves, when you find a philosopher in bygone times, or when you find a poet or an artist, not to look for the same individuality in the present epoch as a philosopher, poet or artist. The individuality passes from earth-life to earth-life, but the way in which he is able to live out his life depends upon what is possible in a particular epoch. Let me here insert an instance that will make this plain.

We will take another very well-known personality, Ernst Haeckel. Ernst Haeckel is famous as an enthusiastic adherent of a certain materialistic Monism—enthusiastic, one may say, to the point of fanaticism. He is well enough known to you; I need not give you any description of Haeckel. Now when we are led back from this personality to a former incarnation, we come to Pope Gregory VII, the monk Hildebrand, who afterwards became Pope Gregory VII.

I have chosen this instance so that you may see how differently the same individuality may express himself externally, in accordance with the cultural “climate” of the period. One would certainly not expect to look for the reincarnation of Pope Gregory VII in the 19th century representative of materialistic Monism.

The things that a man brings to manifestation on the physical plane, with the means afforded by external civilisation, are far less important to the spiritual world than one is inclined to suppose. Behind the personalities of the monk Hildebrand and Haeckel lies something wherein they are alike and this is of much greater account than the differences between them. One of them fights to the utmost to enhance the power of Roman Catholicism, and the other fights to the utmost against Roman Catholicism, but for the spiritual world it makes little difference. These things, fundamentally speaking, are important for the physical world only; they are quite different from the underlying elements in human nature which count in the spiritual world. And so we need not be astonished, my dear friends, if we have to see in Garibaldi an Initiate from an earlier age, an Initiate, as I said, of the 9th century. In the 19th century this comes to expression in the only way possible during that century. You will agree that for the whole way in which a man takes his place in the world, his temperament, his qualities of character are of importance. But if everything that made up Garibaldi's soul in an earlier incarnation had emerged in the 19th century, together with his temperament, he would most certainly have been regarded as a lunatic by the men of the 19th century. He would have been considered quite mad. As much of him as could emerge—that, externally, was Garibaldi.

And now, once we have been led in a certain direction, explanations light up for other karmic connections. The other three men of whom I have spoken, who were brought together again with Garibaldi in one region and approximately in the same decade, had been his pupils in that distant time—mark well, his pupils, assembled from distant parts of the earth, one from far away in the North, another from far away in the East and the third from far away in the West, called from all corners of the earth to be his pupils.

Now in the Irish Mysteries a definite obligation went with a certain degree of Initiation. It consisted in this, that the Initiate was bound to help on his pupils in all future earth-lives; he must not desert them. When, therefore, owing to their special karmic connections they make their appearance again on earth at the same time as their teacher, this means that he must experience the course of destiny with them; their karma has to be brought into reckoning with his own. If Garibaldi had not, at an earlier time, been associated as teacher with the individuality who came in Victor Emmanuel, then he would have been in very deed a Republican and would have founded the Republic of Italy. But behind all abstract principles are actual human lives passing from one earth-existence to another. Behind lies the duty of the Initiate of old towards his pupils. Hence the contradiction, for in accordance with the conceptions and ideas facing Garibaldi in the 19th century, he became quite naturally a Republican. What else should he have been? I have known a number of Republicans who were faithful servants of royalty. Inwardly they were Republicans, for the simple reason that in a certain period of the 19th century—it is long past now, at the time when I was a boy—everyone who counted himself an intelligent person was a Republican. People said: Of course we are Republicans, only we must not show it in the outer world. Inwardly, however, they were Republicans. So, of course, was Garibaldi, except that he did not show it in the outer world. He did not carry his republicanism into effect and those who were inspired by him could not understand this. Why was it? Because, as I have explained to you, he could not desert Victor Emmanuel, who was karmically united with him. He was obliged to help him on; and this was the only way he could do it.

Similarly the others, Cavour and Mazzini, were karmically united with Garibaldi, and he was able to do for them only as much as their capacities allowed. Whatever could proceed from all four of them, that alone Garibaldi was able to bring to fulfilment. He could not go his own way independently.

From this deeply significant fact, my dear friends, you can see that many things in life can be explained only from out of an occult background.

Have you not often experienced how at some moment of his life a person does something that is quite incomprehensible to you? You would not have expected it of him; you cannot possibly explain it from his character. You feel that if he were to follow his personal character, he would do something different. And you may be right. But there is another man living near him, with whom he is karmically united, as in Garibaldi's case. Why does he act as he does? It is really only against an occult background. that life becomes explicable. And so, in the case of Garibaldi, for example, we can truly say that we are led back to the Hibernian Mysteries—it sounds like a paradox but it is a fact. If we turn our gaze to the spiritual, we find that what meets us in external life on earth is, in many of its aspects, Maya. Many people with whom you are constantly together in ordinary life—if you could tell them what you are able to learn about them by looking through to the individuality behind—would be exceedingly astonished, they would be utterly bewildered. For what a man expresses outwardly—and this is particularly so in the present age, for the reasons I have given—is the merest fraction of what he really is, in terms of his former earth-lives. Many secrets are hidden in the things of which I am now speaking.

And now let us take the second personality of whom I gave you yesterday a brief characterisation—Lessing, who at the end of his life came forward with his pronouncement on repeated earth-lives. In his case we are led very far back, right back into Greek antiquity, when the ancient Mysteries of Greece were in their prime. Lessing was an Initiate in these Mysteries. And with him, too, we find that in the 18th century he was unable, so to speak, to come right down into his body. In the 13th century, as a repetition of his life in ancient Greece, we find an incarnation when he was a member of the Dominican Order, a distinguished Schoolman with subtle and penetrating concepts; and then, in the 18th century, he became the journalist par excellence of Middle Europe.

Take that drama of tolerance, Nathan the Wise, or such a book as The Dramatic Art of Hamburg—read for yourselves certain chapters of that book and then read The Education of the Human Race. These writings are comprehensible only on the assumption that all three incarnations of this personality have worked upon them: the Greek Initiate of olden times (read Lessing's treatise, How the men of old pictured death); the Schoolman, versed in medieval Aristotelianism; and lastly he who, with all this resting in his soul, found his way into the civilisation of the 18th century. Then, if you will keep in mind what I have just told you, a certain fact will become clear, a most striking and surprising fact.

It is remarkable how Lessing's life gives one the impression of a continual search. He himself brought this characteristic of his spiritual nature to expression when he uttered the famous saying, which has been quoted again and again (quoted, however, with very little understanding, by people who have no particular desire to strive after anything at all): “If God held in his right hand the whole full Truth, and in his left the everlasting striving after Truth, I would fall down before Him and say, ‘Father, give me what thou hast in thy left hand’.” A Lessing could say that. But when a mere pedant says it after him, it is of course intolerable. Lessing's whole life was indeed a search, an intense search. This comes to expression again and again in his works, and if we were honest with ourselves we should have to admit that many of Lessing's utterances are clumsy on this account, precisely those that are the most full of genius. People do not dare to admit that they stumble over them, because in history and literature Lessing is accounted a great man. In truth, however, his sayings often trip one up, so to speak; or, rather, they give one a feeling of being stabbed. You must, of course, become acquainted with Lessing himself to understand this. If you take up the book by Erich Schmidt, the two volumes on Lessing, then even when Erich Schmidt quotes him word for word you will not feel as though his utterances impaled you. Not at all! They may be the utterances of Lessing as far as the sound of the words goes, but what is written in the book before and after them takes away their edge.

It was not until the end of his earthly life that this seeker came to write The Education of the Human Race, which closes with the idea of repeated earth-lives. What is the explanation?

My dear friends, the way to understand this fact is through another fact I once mentioned. In the quarterly periodical [Das Reich. The articles are contained in the volume of the Complete Edition of Rudolf Steiner's works entitled, Philosophie und Anthroposophie. (Bibliographical No. 35.)] now discontinued, edited by our friend Bernus, I wrote an article on The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and I drew attention to the fact that it was written down by a boy of seventeen or eighteen. The boy himself understood not a word of it. We have external proof of that. He wrote down this Chymical Wedding from beginning to end. The last page is not extant, but he wrote down the whole of the Chymical Wedding, without understanding a word of it. If he had understood it, he would have been bound to retain the understanding in later years. The boy, however, became a pastor, a good, honest pastor of the Württemberg-Swabian type, who wrote exhortations and theological treatises which are distinctly below the average, and very far indeed from having anything to do with the content of the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. Life itself proves to us that it was not the Swabian pastor-to-be who wrote this Chymical Wedding out of his own soul. It is an inspired writing throughout.

So we may not always have to do with a man's own personality; there may be times when a spirit expresses itself through him. But there is a difference between the good Swabian pastor Valentin Andreae, who wrote those conventional theological treatises, and Lessing. Had Lessing been Valentin Andreae, merely transported into the 18th century, he might perhaps have written in his youth a beautiful treatise on the Education of the Human Race, bringing in the idea of repeated earth-lives. But he was not Valentin Andreae; he was Lessing, Lessing who had no visions, who even—so it is said—had no dreams. He banished the inspirer—unconsciously of course. If the inspirer had wanted to take possession of him in his youth, Lessing would have said: Go away, I have nothing to do with you. He followed the path that was normal for an educated man in the 18th century. And so it was only in extreme old age that he was mature enough to understand what had been in him throughout his life. It was with him as it would have been with Valentin Andreae if the latter had also banished the inspirer, had written no trivial, edifying sermons and theological treatises, but had waited until he reached a grey old age and had then written the Chymical Marriage of Christian Rosenkreutz consciously.

Such are the links that unite successive earth-lives. And the day must come when this will be clearly understood. If we take a single earth-life, whether it be that of Goethe, or Lessing or Herbert Spencer or Shakespeare or Darwin, and look at what emerges from that life alone, it is just as though we were to pluck off a flower from a plant and imagine that it can exist by itself. A single life on earth is not comprehensible by itself; the explanation for it must be sought on the basis of repeated earth-lives.

And now we shall find it most interesting to study the two personalities of whom I spoke yesterday, Lord Byron and my geometry teacher. (You will pardon me if I become personal here.) They had in common only the construction of the foot, but this is a feature that specially repays attention. If one follows it up in an occult sense, it leads one to a peculiar condition of the head in an earlier earth-life. I have shown you a similar connection in the case of Eduard von Hartmann.—There is no getting over it. One can do no other than simply relate such things, as vision reveals them to one. No external, logical proofs, no proofs in the ordinary sense, can be given for these things.—When we follow the lives of these two men, it appears to us as though the lives they led in the 19th century had been shifted out of place. For we find, first of all, a contradiction of something mentioned here a few weeks ago—that in the course of certain cycles of time, those who were once contemporaries will incarnate again as contemporaries. Everything, of course, has its exceptions. In the spiritual world there are rules, but there are no rigid schemes. Everything is individual.

Thus in the case of these two personalities one is led back to a period when their lives ran together. I would never have found Byron in this earlier life if I had not found this geometry teacher of mine at his side. Byron was a genius. My geometry teacher was not even a genius in his own way. He was not a genius at all, but he was an excellent geometrician, quite the best I have ever come across, because he was a genuine geometrician and nothing else. In the case of a painter or a musician, you know that you are dealing with a one-sided man. For as a matter of fact, people are significant only when they are one-sided. As a rule, however, a geometrician in our time is not one-sided. A geometrician knows the whole of mathematics; when he constructs something in geometry, he always knows how to state the equations for it. He knows the mathematical, calculating side of it all. But this geometry teacher, though an excellent geometrician, was properly speaking no mathematician at all. He understood, for example, nothing whatever of analytical geometry. He knew nothing of the geometry that has to do with calculating and equations; in that respect he sometimes did the most childish things. On one occasion it was really very humorous. The man was so entirely a constructive geometrician and nothing else that he arrived by means of constructive geometry at the fact that the circle is the locus of the constant quotient. He found it out by construction, and since no one had found it before by construction, he regarded himself as its discoverer. We boys, who were as yet unsophisticated and had a good store of high spirits left in us, knew that in our book of analytical geometry it is shown how one sets up such and such an equation and the circle comes. We took the occasion to change the name of the circle and to start calling it by the name of our geometry teacher. The “N.N. line” we called it (I won't give his real name). This man had in fact the one-sidedness of the constructive geometrician to the point of genius. That was what was so significant about him; his character and talents were so clearly defined. People of the present day are not like that at all; you cannot get hold of them; they are like slippery eels! My teacher was anything but a slippery eel; he was a man with sharp corners, and that even in his external appearance. He had a face shaped like this—quite square, a most interesting head, absolutely four-angled, nowhere round. Really, you could study in the face of the man the right-angled nature of his peculiar constructive talent. It was most interesting.

Now, in vision, this personality is found directly by the side of Byron, and one is led back to early times in Eastern Europe, one or two hundred years before the Crusades. I once told you how, when the Roman Emperor Constantine founded Constantinople, he had the Palladium—which had been taken originally to Rome from Troy—removed from Rome to Constantinople. The transference was carried out with tremendous pomp and ceremony. For the Palladium was regarded as a particularly sacred object, which bestowed power upon whoever had it. It was firmly believed in Rome that as long as the Palladium lay beneath a pillar in the city, the power of Rome resided in it, and that this power had been brought across to Rome from the once mighty city of Troy, devastated by the Greeks. And so Constantine, whose destiny it was to transplant the power of Rome to Constantinople, caused the Palladium to be taken across to Constantinople with great pomp and ceremony, though to begin with, quite secretly. He caused it to be buried, a wall built about it, and set up an ancient pillar that came from Egypt, over the spot where the Palladium lay. On the top of the pillar he placed an ancient statue of Apollo, so arranged as to look like himself. Then he had nails brought from the Cross of Christ. And out of these he made a sort of halo for the statue, which was, as I have said, an ancient statue of Apollo and at the same time was supposed to represent himself. And so there the Palladium lay, in Constantinople.

Now there is a legend which has later assumed strange forms, but is in reality very, very ancient. Later, in connection with the Testament of Peter the Great, it was revived and transformed, but it goes back to very ancient times. The legend tells how at some time in the future the Palladium would leave Constantinople and come further up towards the North-East. Hence the idea in the Russia of a later time that the Palladium must be brought from the city of Constantinople into Russia, in order that all that is connected with the Palladium, and had been corrupted under the rule of the Turks, might have its place in the rule of Eastern Europe. Now these two personalities in olden times—it was one or two hundred years before the Crusades but I have not been able to fix the exact year—resolved to go out from what is now Russia to Constantinople in order, by some means or other, to capture the Palladium and bring it into the East of Europe.

They did not succeed. Such a project could never have succeeded, for the Palladium was well guarded. There was no possibility of getting hold of it, and those who knew how it was guarded were not to be won over. But an overwhelming pain took possession of these two men. And the pain that entered into them like a piercing ray, paralysing them both in the head, manifested in Lord Byron in his being somewhat like Achilles who was vulnerable in the heel, for Byron had a defect in his foot. On the other hand he was a genius in his head, which was a compensation for the paralysis he had suffered in that earlier earth-life. The other man also, on account of the paralysed head, had a defective foot, a clubfoot. But let me tell you (for it is not generally realised) that man does not get geometry or mathematics out of his head. If you did not step the angle with your feet, your head would not have the perception of it. You would have no geometry at all if you did not walk and grasp hold of things. Geometry pushes its way up through the head and comes forth in ideas. And in anyone who has a foot such as my geometry teacher had, there resides a strong capacity to be alive to the geometrical constitution of his limbs and his motor organism and to re-create it in his head.

If one penetrated more deeply into this geometry teacher of mine, into his whole spiritual configuration, one gained a significant impression of him as a human being. There was something really delightful about his way of doing things! Fundamentally speaking, he did everything from the point of view of a constructive geometrician and it was as if the rest of the world were simply not there. He was a singularly free human being, but one had only to observe him closely enough to feel as though some inner spell had once held sway over him and had brought him to the one-sided condition I have described.

But now in Lord Byron—I have mentioned the other man only because I should not have been able to get at the truth about Lord Byron if he had not put me on the track—in Lord Byron you can truly see karma working itself out. Once, long ago, he goes across from the East to fetch the Palladium. When he is born in the West, he goes eastward to help the cause of freedom, the spiritual Palladium of the 19th century. And he is drawn to the very same region of the earth to which he had gone long ago, from the other side. It is really staggering to see how the same individuality comes to the same locality in one life from one direction, in another life from another direction; first, attracted by something that is still deeply veiled in myth, and later by what had become the great ideal of the “age of enlightenment.” There is something in all this that stirs one very deeply.

The things that come to light out of karmic connections are indeed startling. They always are. And in this realm we shall come to know of many other striking, paradoxical things. Today I wanted to give you a grasp of the remarkable way in which the connections between earlier and later earth-lives can play into human existence.

Extract from a lecture given by Rudolf Steiner at Dornach, 22nd June, 1924.

The study of problems connected with karma is by no means easy and discussion of anything that has to do with this subject entails—or ought at any rate to entail—a sense of deep responsibility. Such study is in truth a matter of penetrating into the most profound relationships of existence, for within the sphere of karma and the course it takes lie those processes which are the basis of the other phenomena of world-existence, even of the phenomena of nature. Without insight into the course taken by karma in the world and in the evolution of humanity it is quite impossible to understand why external nature is displayed before us in the form in which we behold it ...

What has been said in the lectures here since the Christmas Foundation Meeting should not really be passed on to any audience otherwise than by reading an exact transcript of what has been said here.

A free exposition of this particular subject-matter is not possible at the present stage. If such a course were proposed I should have to take exception to it. These difficult and weighty matters entail grave consideration of every word and every sentence spoken here, in order that the limits within which the statements are made shall be absolutely clear ...

In the fullest meaning of the words, a sense of responsibility in regard to communications from the spiritual worlds begins the moment things are spoken of in the way we are speaking of them now. It is in any case very difficult to speak about these matters here in view of the limitations of our present organisation which do not, however, admit of any other arrangement. It is difficult to speak about these things because such lectures ought really to be given only to listeners who attend the series from beginning to end. Understanding will inevitably be difficult for anyone who comes in later.

If, however, friends are fully conscious that such difficulties exist, a certain balance can be established. Provided this consciousness is present, then all will be well. But it is not always there ...

I think that the meaning of what I have said will be understood. I have spoken as I have in order that the necessary earnestness may prevail in regard to lectures of the kind now being given ...

We will now continue our study of karma. I have pointed out to you how the impulses in the souls of human beings work on and are transplanted, as it were, from one earthly life into another, so that the fruits of an earlier epoch are carried over to a later one by men themselves.

An idea such as this must not be received merely as a theory; it should take hold of our very hearts and souls. We should feel that we who are now here have been many times in earthly existence, and that in every life we assimilated the culture and civilisation then around us; we took it into our souls and carried it over into the next incarnation, after working upon it spiritually between death and a new birth. Only when we look back in this way do we really feel ourselves standing within the community of mankind.

In order to be able to feel this, in order that in the coming lectures we may pass on to questions which concern us more intimately and will bring home to us the actual effects of karmic connections, I have found it necessary to give concrete examples. And I have tried to show you by these examples how the effects of what a man experienced and achieved in olden times, remain, and continue to work into the present, inasmuch as his achievements and experiences form part of his karma.

I spoke, for example, of Haroun al Raschid, that illustrious follower of Mohammed in the 8th and 9th centuries, who was the figure-head of a wonderful life of culture far surpassing anything to be found in Europe in those days.¹ Such culture as existed in Europe at that time—it was during the reign of Charlemagne—was extremely primitive; whereas over in the East at the Court of Haroun al Raschid there came together everything that an Asiatic civilisation fructified from Europe could produce—the fruits of Greek culture and of ancient Oriental culture in practically every domain of life and knowledge. Architecture, astronomy (in the form in which it was pursued in those days), philosophy, mysticism, the arts, geography, poetry—all these branches of culture flourished at the Court of Haroun al Raschid.

Haroun al Raschid gathered around him the best of those who were of real account in Asia at that time. For the most part they were men who had been trained and educated in the Initiate Schools. Let me tell you of one of these personalities at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. The East, too, had reached its own Middle Ages, and this personality had been able to assimilate, in a rather more intellectual way, wonderful treasures of the spirit that had been carried over from long past ages into those later times. In a much earlier period he had himself been an Initiate.

Now as I have told you, it may easily happen that a personality who was an Initiate in a former age does not appear as one when he reincarnates, because he is obliged to adapt himself to the body at his disposal and to the educational facilities available at the time. Nevertheless he bears within him all that he acquired and experienced during his life as an Initiate.

In the case of Garibaldi, we have seen how in that he became a kind of seer in his life of will, giving himself up to the circumstances of the immediate present, he lived out all that he had been as an Irish Initiate.² We can see that while participating in the events of the day he bears within him impulses of quite a different character from those which an ordinary man could have gained from his education and environment. The impulse of Garibaldi's Irish initiation was still active; it was merely under the surface. And when some special experience or stroke of destiny befell Garibaldi there may very probably have welled up in him in the form of Imaginations, all that he bore within him from his life as an Irish Initiate.

So it has always been; and so it is to this day. A man may have been an Initiate in a certain epoch, and because in a later epoch he must make use of a body unable to contain all the impulses that are alive in his soul, he does not appear as an Initiate; nevertheless the impulse of initiation is at work in his deeds or relationships in life. So it was in the case of the personality who lived at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. He had once been an Initiate of a very high degree. He was not able to carry over in outwardly perceptible form the whole content of his earlier initiation, but nevertheless he was a shining light in the Oriental culture of the 8th and 9th centuries. For he was, so to speak, the organiser of all the sciences and arts studied and practised at the Court of Haroun al Raschid.

We have already spoken of the path taken by the individuality of Haroun al Raschid in later times. When he passed through the gate of death there remained with him the urge to carry further into the West the Arabism that was already spreading in that direction. And, as you know, Haroun al Raschid, whose field of vision embraced all the several arts and sciences, reincarnated as Lord Bacon of Verulam, the famous reformer of modern philosophy and science. All that had been within Haroun al Raschid's field of vision came forth again, in a Western guise, in Bacon.

The spiritual path taken by Bacon led from Bagdad, his home in Asia, to England. And from England, Bacon's work for the sciences spread over Europe more widely and with greater force than is generally realised.

After they had passed through the gate of death, these two personalities, Haroun al Raschid and his great counsellor—the outstanding personality who had been a high Initiate in earlier times—separated, in order to carry out a common work. As I have told you, Haroun al Raschid himself, who had occupied a position of great power and splendour, chose the path which led to England, where, as Lord Bacon of Verulam, he accomplished what he did for science, for the sphere of knowledge in general. The other soul, the soul of the man who had been his counsellor chose the path leading to Middle Europe, in order to meet there what was coming over from Bacon. The dates do not, it is true, absolutely coincide; but that is not important in a matter where actual time means little. Impulses separated by hundreds of years may often work simultaneously in a later civilisation.

The counsellor of Haroun al Raschid chose the path through Eastern to Middle Europe—chose it during his life between death and a new birth. And he was born again in Middle Europe; he was born into the spiritual life of Middle Europe as Amos Comenius.

These are remarkable events, of profound significance in history. Haroun al Raschid goes through his later evolution in such a way as to lead over from West to East a stream of culture that is abstract and bound up with the outer senses; whereas Amos Comenius unfolds his activity from the East, from Siebenbürgen in what is now Czechoslovakia, coming to Germany and afterwards undergoing exile in Holland, bringing with him his profoundly significant impulses for the development of thought and knowledge. If you follow his life you will see how he comes forward as the champion of the new pedagogy and as the author and originator of the so-called Pansophia. What he had formerly brought from his initiation in very ancient times and developed at the Court of Haroun al Raschid—all this he now brought to the movements of the day. It was the time when the Order of the Moravian Brothers had been founded, when Rosicrucianism had already been at work for several centuries; it was the time, too, when the Chymical Wedding had appeared, and also the Reformation of Science, by Valentin Andreae. And into the midst of all these movements which sprang from the selfsame source, came Comenius, that significant figure of the l7th century, with his message and his impulse.

You have there three successive earthly lives of importance, and it is by studying the more significant incarnations that one can learn how to study those of less importance and finally begin to understand one's own karma.—Three significant earthly lives follow one another. First we see, far away in Asia, the very same individuality who afterwards appears in Amos Comenius; we see him receiving in the places of the ancient Mysteries all the wisdom possessed by Asia in far distant ages; we see him carrying this over into his next incarnation, living at the Court of Haroun al Raschid, becoming there the great organiser and administrator of all that flourished under the aegis and protection of Haroun al Raschid. And then he appears again, this time going forth as it were to meet Bacon, who is the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid; he meets him in European civilisation where the impulses which both of them had caused to flow into this European civilisation are at work.

What I am now saying, my dear friends, has really great point and meaning. For if you will study the letters that were written and that build, as it were, a road from Bacon to Comenius—naturally they do so in a roundabout way, as is also the case with letters to-day!—if you will study the letters that were exchanged between Baconians, or between people in very close connection with the Baconian culture and the followers of the Comenius school, of the Comenius wisdom, you will be able to discern in the writing and answering of these letters the very same event that I have sketched diagrammatically on the blackboard.

The letters that were written from West to East and from East to West represent the living confluence of the two souls who meet one another in this way, having themselves laid the foundation for this meeting when they worked together over in the East during the 8th and 9th centuries. Now they unite again, to work once more in co-operation; this time they work from opposite directions, yet no less harmoniously.

This is the way in which history should be studied in order to gain insight into the working of human forces and the part they play in history.

Again, let us take another case.—It happened that peculiar circumstances drew my attention to certain events that occurred in the region we should now call the north-east of France. These events also took place in the 8th–9th century—a little later, however, than the time of which we were just now speaking. It was before the formation of large States, in the days when events took place more within smaller circles of people.

In the region, then, which to-day we should call the north-east of France, lived a personality who was full of ambitions. He had a large estate and he governed it remarkably well, quite unusually systematically for the time in which he lived. He knew what he wanted; there was a strange mixture of adventurousness and conscious purpose in him. And he made expeditions, some of which were more and some less successful; he would gather soldiers and make predatory expeditions, minor campaigns carried out with a small troop of men with the object of plunder.

With such a band of men he once set out from north-east France. Now it happened that during his absence another personality, somewhat less of an adventurer than himself, but full of energy, took possession of all his land and property.—It sounds fictitious to-day, but such things actually happened in those days.—And when the owner returned home—he was all alone—he found another man in possession of his estate. In the situation that developed he was no match for the man who had seized his property. The new possessor was more powerful; he had more men, more soldiers. The rightful owner was no match for him.

In those times it did not happen that if anyone were unable to go on living in his own home and estate he immediately went away into some foreign country. The rightful owner was an adventurer, certainly, but emigration was not such an easy matter then; he had neither the wherewithal nor the facilities. And so he became a kind of serf, he with his followers—a kind of serf attached to his own estate. His own property had been wrested from him and he, together with a number of those who once used to accompany him on adventures were forced to work as serfs.

In all these people who were now serfs where formerly they had been masters, a certain attitude of mind began to assert itself, an attitude of mind most derogatory to the principle of overlordship. On many a night in those well wooded parts, fires were burning, and round the fires these men came together and hatched all manner of plots against those who had taken possession of their property.

In point of fact, the dispossessed owner, who from being the master of a large estate had become a serf, more or less a slave, filled all the rest of his life—as much of it as he was not compelled to give to his work—with making plans for regaining his property. He hated the man who had seized it from him.

And then, when these two personalities passed through the gate of death, they experienced in the spiritual world between death and rebirth, all that souls have been able to experience since that time, shared in it all, and came again to earth in the 19th century. The man who had lost home and property and had become a kind of slave, appeared as Karl Marx, the founder of modern socialism. And the man who had seized his estate appeared as his friend Engels. The actions which had brought them into conflict were metamorphosed in the course of the long journey between death and a new birth into an impulse and urge to balance out and set right what they had done to one another.

Read what went on between Marx and Engels, observe the peculiar configuration of Marx's mind, and remember at the same time what I have told you of the relationship between these two individuals in the 8th–9th century, and you will find a new light falling upon every sentence written by Marx and Engels. You will not be in danger of saying, in abstract fashion: This thing in history is due to this cause, and the other to the other cause. Rather will you see the human beings who carry over the past into another age, in such a way that although admittedly it appears in a somewhat different form, there is nevertheless a certain similarity.

And what else could be expected? In the 8th–9th century, when men sat together at night around a fire in the forest, they spoke in quite a different style from that customary in the 19th century, when Hegel had lived, when things were settled by dialectic. Try all the same to picture to yourselves the forest in north-eastern France in the 9th century. There sit the conspirators, cursing, railing in the language of the period. Translate it into the mathematical-dialectical mode of speech of the 19th century, and you have what comes to expression in Marx and Engels.

Such things lead us away from sensationalism—which creeps all too easily into ideas relating to the concrete facts of reincarnation—towards a true understanding of history. And the best way to steer clear of sensationalism is, instead of giving way to a feverish desire to know the details of reincarnation, instead of that, to try to understand in the light of the repeated earthly lives of individual human beings, those things in history that bring weal or woe, happiness or grief to mankind.

It was this point of view that while I was still living in Austria—although in Austria one is really within the German world—I was particularly interested in a certain personality who was a Polish member of the Reichstag. Those of you who have been attending lectures for a long time will remember that I have often spoken of Otto Hausner, the Austrian-Polish member of the Reichstag who was so active in the seventies of last century. Truth to tell, ever since I heard and saw Otto Hausner in the Austrian Reichstag about the end of the seventies and beginning of the eighties, the picture of this remarkable man has been before my mind's eye. He wore a monocle; he looked at you sharply with the other eye, but all the time the eye behind the monocle was watching for the weak points in his opponent. And while he spoke, he was looking to see whether the dart had struck home.

Now Hausner had a remarkable moustache—in my autobiography I did not want to go into all these details—and he used to accompany what he said with his moustache, so that the moustache made a kind of Eurythmy of the speech he poured out against his opponents!

It is interesting when you picture it all.—Extreme Left, Left, Middle Party, Czech Club (as it was called) and then Extreme Right, Polish Club. Here stood Hausner, and over on the extreme Left were his opponents. That was where all of them were.

The curious thing was that when, over the question of the occupation of Bosnia, Hausner was on the side of Austria, he received tumultuous applause from these people on the Left. When, later, he spoke about the building of the Arlberg railway, the most vehement opposition came from the same people on the extreme Left. And the situation remained so, in regard to everything he said after that.

Very many warnings and prophetic utterances made by Otto Hausner in the seventies and eighties have, however, since proved true. One often has occasion nowadays to look back in thought to what Otto Hausner used to say.

Now there was one feature that appeared in almost every speech Otto Hausner made, and this, among other less significant details in his life, gave me the impulse to investigate the course of his karma. Otto Hausner could hardly make a speech without uttering a kind of panegyric, as it were in parenthesis, on Switzerland. He was forever holding up Switzerland to Austria as a pattern. Because in Switzerland three nationalities get on well together, are indeed quite exemplary in this respect, he wanted the thirteen nationalities of Austria to take example from Switzerland and live together in the same federal unity as do the three nationalities of Switzerland. Again and again he would come back to this theme. It was quite remarkable.

In Hausner's speeches there was irony, there was humour, there was logic—not always, but very often—and there was the panegyric on Switzerland. It was perfectly clear that this panegyric arose out of a pure feeling of sympathy; this feeling gripped hold of him; he wanted to say these things. And moreover he knew how to shape his speech so that no one, except a group of German-Liberals on the Left, was seriously provoked or offended by it.

It was most interesting to see how, when some Left Liberal member had spoken, Otto Hausner would get up to oppose him, and with his monocled eye never turn his gaze aside for a moment but pour upon the Left Wing a perfectly incredible torrent of abuse and scorn. There were men of importance and standing among them, but he spared none. And there was always breadth of view in what he said; he was one of the most cultured members of the Austrian Reichstag.

The karma of such a man may readily arouse interest. I took my start from this passion of his for returning again and again to praise of Switzerland, and further, from the fact that once in a speech subsequently published as a brochure, German Culture and the German Empire, he collected together in a spirit of impishness and yet at the same time with nothing short of genius, all there was to be said for German culture and the German people and against the German Empire. There was really something grandly prophetic about this speech that was made in the early eighties, scuttling the German Empire as it were, saying all manner of harsh things about it, calling it the wrecker and destroyer of the true being and nature of the Germans. That was the second thing—this singular ‘loving hatred’, if I may put it so, and ‘hating love’ for all that is truly German, and for the German Empire.

And the third thing was the extraordinary interest which made itself manifest when Hausner spoke of the Arlberg Tunnel, of the plan to build the Arlberg railway from Austria to Switzerland and thus unite Middle Europe with the West. Needless to say, here too he introduced his song of praise for Switzerland, for the railway was to run into Switzerland. But when he spoke of this railway—and his speech was well-seasoned, though delivered with perfect delicacy—one really had the feeling: the man is basing it all on tendencies and proclivities he must have acquired in some remarkable way in a former earthly life.

Everyone was talking in those days of the enormous advantages that would accrue to European civilisation from the alliance of Germany with Austria. At that very time Hausner was developing in the Austrian Parliament his idea of the Arlberg railway; he was saying, and naturally all the others were going for him hammer and tongs about it, that the Arlberg railway must be built, because a State as he pictured Austria, uniting thirteen nations after the pattern of Switzerland, must have a choice of allies; when it suits her, Austria has Germany, and when it suits her she must also have a strategic route from Middle Europe to the West, so that she may be able to have France for an ally when she wishes. Naturally, when such an opinion was expressed in the Austria of those times, it received short answer! It was reported that Hausner was ironed out flat! In truth, however, it was a marvellous speech, highly spiced and full of poignancy. And this speech, I would have you note, pointed in the direction of the West.

Holding these three things together in mind, I discovered that the individuality of Otto Hausner had wandered across Europe from West to East at the time when Gallus and Columbanus [Not St. Columba, but a slightly younger Irish monk—St. Columbanus (sometimes called Columba the Younger).] were journeying in the same direction. He set out with men who had been inspired by the Irish initiation, for the purpose of bringing Christianity to those regions. In company with them, his aim was to carry Christianity to the East. On the way, somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Alsace of to-day, he found himself extraordinarily attracted by the relics of ancient Germanic paganism, by the old memories of the gods, the old forms of worship, the figures and statues of the gods that he found in Alsace, and also in Germany and Switzerland. He received all this into his heart and mind in a deeply significant way.

Afterwards there developed in him, on the one hand, a liking for the Germanic nature and, on the other hand a counterforce which came from the feeling that he had gone too far in that past life. He underwent a drastic inner change, an inner metamorphosis, and this showed itself in the wide and comprehensive outlook he possessed in this later incarnation. He could speak of the German people and culture and of the German Empire like one who has once had close and intimate contact with these things, and yet who feels all the time that he ought not to have been influenced by them. He should have been spreading Christianity. He had come into these parts while his duty lay elsewhere.—One could hear it in the very tone of his speeches.—And he wanted to go back and make good again! Hence his passion for Switzerland; hence his passion for the building of the Arlberg railway. Even in outward appearance, he did not really look Polish. Hausner himself used often and often to say that he was not a Pole at all by physical descent but only by civilisation and education, and that ‘Raetian-German’ blood flowed in his veins. He had brought over from an earlier incarnation the tendency to look towards the region where once he had been, whither he had accompanied St. Columbanus and St. Gallus with the resolve to spread Christianity, but where, instead, the old Germanic religion and culture had captured him and held him fast. And so it came about that he did his best, as it were, to be born again in a family as little Polish as possible, far away from the land in which he had lived in his earlier life, far removed from it and yet so that he could look longingly towards it.

These are examples which I wanted to unfold before you to-day in order to show you how strange and remarkable is the path of karmic evolution.—In the next lecture we shall consider the question of how good and evil develop through successive incarnations of human beings, and through the course of history. By studying in this way the more important and significant examples that meet us in history, we shall be able to throw light on relationships belonging more to everyday life.

• 1. See Volume 1, lecture X; also Cosmic Christianity lecture II (given by Rudolf Steiner in Torquay, 14th August, 1924).
• 2. See Vol. I, lectures XI and XII.

It is a little difficult to continue what has been given in the last lectures, because so many friends who have not taken part in these studies are here to-day. On the other hand it is hardly possible to make a new beginning, for many things contained in the previous lectures have still to be completed. Friends who have just arrived will have to realise that if some of our thoughts to-day prove somewhat difficult to understand, it is because they are connected—inwardly, though not outwardly—with preceding lectures. At Easter we shall have a self-contained course, but to-day I must continue what has gone before. We did not expect so many friends at this date, although needless to say we are extremely glad that they have come.

In recent lectures we have been speaking of definite karmic relationships—not with the object of finding anything sensational in the successive earthly lives we have studied, but in order to arrive step by step at a really concrete understanding of the connections of destiny in human life.

I have described successive earthly lives of certain historic figures, in order to call forth an idea of how one earthly life works on into the next—and that is not an easy matter.

Again and again it must be emphasised that a new trend has come into the Anthroposophical Movement since the Christmas Foundation Meeting at Dornach. Of this I should now like to say a few introductory words.—You know, my dear friends, that since the year 1918 there have been all manner of undertakings within the Anthroposophical Society. Their origin is clear. When the Anthroposophical Society was founded, this question was really being asked, out of a deep occult impulse: Would the Anthroposophical Society continue to evolve by virtue of the inner strength which (in its members) it had acquired until then? There was only one way to make the test. Until then, I, as General Secretary, had had the leadership of the German Section, which was the form in which the Anthroposophical Movement had existed within the Theosophical Society. The only way now was for me no longer to take in hand the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society but to watch and see how this Society would evolve through its own inherent strength.

You see, my dear friends, that is something quite different from what the position would have been if already at that time (as at our Christmas Foundation Meeting) I had said that I would undertake the leadership of the Society. For the Anthroposophical Society, if led by me, must naturally be an altogether different thing than if led by someone else. Moreover, for certain deep reasons, the Society might have been led all the better if I myself had not had the administrative leadership. Many things might have been done if human hearts had spoken—things which in fact remained undone, or which were even done from outside, often enough under resistance from the anthroposophists.

During the War, of course, we had little opportunity to unfold our forces in all directions. So it came about that after the year 1918, the prevailing state of affairs was taken advantage of by those from many quarters who wanted to do this or that. If I had said at the time, “No, these things shall not be done”, then of course we should hear it said to-day: “If this or that had only been allowed, we should now have numbers of flourishing undertakings.”

For this very reason it was the custom at all times for the leaders of occult movements to let those who wanted to do something try it out and see what became of it, so that convictions might be called forth by the facts themselves. For that is the only way to call forth conviction. And so it had to be in our case too.

The upshot of it all has been that since the year 1918, opposition to our Movement has grown rife, and has brought about the present state of affairs, when it is impossible for me, for instance, to give public lectures in Germany.

At the present moment these facts must in no way be concealed from the Anthroposophical Movement. We must face them with all clarity. As long as we work with unclear situations we shall make no progress.

As you know, all manner of experiments were made in the hope of being ‘truly scientific’—shall we say? Quite naturally so, in view of the characters of those concerned! Scientists who also partake in our Society naturally like to be scientific. But that is the very thing that annoys our opponents. When we say to them, “As scientists we can prove this or that truth”, they come forward with all their so-called scientific claims, and then of course they become furious. We should be under no illusions on this point. Nothing has annoyed our opponents more than the fact that our members have tried to speak on the same subjects as they themselves do, and in the same manner, only—as these our members often used to say—“letting a little Anthroposophy flow into it.” It was precisely this which called forth our opponents in such overwhelming numbers.

Again, we offend most strongly against the life-conditions of Anthroposophy if we give ourselves up to the illusion that we can win over the adherents of various religious communities by saying the same or similar things as they, only once more “letting Anthroposophy flow into it.”

But now, since the Christmas Foundation Meeting, an entirely new element must come into all that is being done in the field of Anthroposophy. Those of you who have observed the way Anthroposophy is now being presented here, or the way it was presented at Prague and again at Stuttgart, will have observed that impulses are now at work which call forth something altogether new, even where our opponents are concerned. If we try to be ‘scientific’ in the ordinary sense of the word—as, unfortunately, many of our members have tried to be—then we are presuming, so to speak, that it is possible to enter into discussion with them. But now take the lectures that have been given here, or the lectures at Prague, or the single lectures at Stuttgart—can you believe for a single moment that there can be any question of entering into discussion with our opponents on these matters? It goes without saying: we can enter into no discussion with our opponents when we speak of these things. How, for example, should we discuss with any representative of the civilisation of to-day the statement, for example, that the soul of Muavija appeared again in the soul of Woodrow Wilson?¹

Thus in the whole Anthroposophical Movement there is now a prevailing quality which can tend to nothing else than this.—We must take it at last in real earnest that there can be no question of entering into discussion or argument with our opponents. For if we do so, it will in any case lead nowhere. Thus we must realise that, with regard to our opponents, it can only be a question of refuting calumnies, untruths and lies. We must not give up ourselves to the illusion that these things can be discussed. They must expand by their own inherent power; they cannot be decided by any dialectic.

Through the whole tenor of the Anthroposophical Movement as it has been since Christmas last, this will perhaps be realised increasingly, even by our members. Henceforth the Anthroposophical Movement will take this attitude: It will no longer pay heed to anything other than what the spiritual world itself requires of it.

It is from this standpoint that I have placed before you various thoughts on karma. Those of you who were here, or who heard my last lecture at Stuttgart, will remember that I tried to show how the individualities who lived in the 8th and 9th centuries A.D. at the Court of Haroun al Raschid in Asia, having continued to evolve after death in different directions, played certain definite parts in their new incarnations. At the time of the Thirty Years' War (and a short time before) we have on the one hand the individuality of Haroun al Raschid, reincarnated in the Englishman, Bacon of Verulam. And a great organiser at the Court of Haroun al Raschid, who had lived at the Court—not indeed as an Initiate, but as the reincarnation of an Initiate—this individuality we found again as Amos Comenius, whose field of action was rather in Middle Europe. From these two streams, much in the spiritual part of modern civilisation flowed together. In the spiritual and intellectual aspect of modern civilisation, the Near East—as it was in the time immediately after Mohammed—lived again, on the one hand through the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid, Bacon of Verulam; and on the other hand through Amos Comenius, who had been his counsellor.

In the present lecture I wish to emphasise the following fact:—The evolution of man does not merely take place when he is here on earth, but also when he is between death and a new birth. Bacon as well as Amos Comenius, having fastened Arabism—so to speak from two different sides—on to the civilisation of Europe, died again and passed into the life between death and a new birth. And there they were together with many souls who came down to earth after their time. Bacon and Amos Comenius, having died in the 17th century, lived on in the spiritual world. Other souls, who came down to earth in the 19th century, were in the spiritual world together with the souls of Bacon and Amos Comenius from the 17th to the 19th. On the one hand there were souls who gathered mainly around the soul of Bacon—Bacon whose work became so dominant. Then there were the souls who gathered around Amos Comenius. And though this is rather a pictorial way of speaking, we must not forget that there are ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’—albeit under quite different conditions—even in the spiritual world which men pass through between death and a new birth. Such individualities as Bacon or Amos Comenius worked not only through what they brought about on earth—through their writings, for example, or through the traditions of them which lived on on earth. No, these leading spirits were also working through the souls whom they sent down, or the souls with whom they were together and who were then sent down; they worked by causing certain tendencies to germinate in these souls in the spiritual world. Thus among the men of the 19th century we find souls who had become dependent already in their evolution in the pre-earthly life on one or other of these two spirits—the discarnate Amos Comenius, and the discarnate Bacon.

As I said, I want to lead you more and more into the concrete way in which karma works. Therefore I will now draw your attention to two personalities of the 19th century whose names will be known to most of you. One of them was especially influenced in his pre-earthly life by Bacon, and the other by Amos Comenius.

If we observe Bacon as he stood in earthly civilisation—in his earthly life as Lord Chancellor in England—if we observe him there, we find that his working was such that an Initiate stood behind him. The whole Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, as it is outwardly pursued by the historians of literature, is appallingly barren. All manner of arguments are brought forward which are supposed to show that Shakespeare the actor did not really write his dramas, but that they were written by Bacon the philosopher and Lord Chancellor, and so on ...

All these things—working with external methods, seeking out similarities in the way of thought in Shakespeare's dramas and Bacon's philosophic works—all these are barren superficialities. They do not get at the real truth. For the truth is that at the time when Bacon, Shakespeare, Jacob Boehme, and a fourth were working on the earth, there was one Initiate who really spoke through all four. Hence their kinship, for in reality it all goes back to one and the same source. Of course, these people who dispute and argue do not argue about the Initiate who stood behind, especially as this Initiate—like many a modern Initiate—is described to us in history as a rather intolerable fellow. But he was not merely so. No doubt he was so sometimes in his external actions, but he was not merely so. He was an individuality from whom immense forces proceeded, and to whom were really due Bacon's philosophic works as well as Shakespeare's dramas and the works of Jacob Boehme, and also the works of the Jesuit, Jacob Balde.

If we bear this in mind, then we must see in Bacon, in the philosophic realm, the instigator of an immense and far-reaching stream of the time.

It is most interesting to observe what could become of a soul who lived throughout the two centuries, in the life beyond the earth, under the influence of the dead Bacon. We must turn our attention to the way in which Bacon himself lived after his death. For our studies of human history it will in fact be more and more important to observe the human beings who have lived on earth not only until the moment of their death but in their working beyond death, where they work on and on upon those souls who are afterwards to descend to earth. This applies especially to those who have themselves been responsible for great spiritual achievements.

No doubt these things may be somewhat shocking for men of the present time. So for instance I remember—if I may make this digression—I remember on one occasion I was standing at the entrance to the railway station in a small German University town with a well-known doctor who went in a great deal for occultism. Around us stood many other people. Presently he warmed up to his subject and out of his enthusiasm said to me in a loud voice, so that many of those who were around could hear him: “I will make you a present of the biography of Robert Blum; but that is a biography which begins only after his death.” Spoken loudly as it was, one could well observe the shock it gave to those who were standing around us! One cannot say without more ado to the people of to-day, “I will make you a present of the biography of a man, but it begins only after his death.”

For the rest—apart from this two-volumed biography of Robert Blum, which begins not with his birth but with his death—little has yet been done in the way of relating the biographies of men after their death. Biographies generally begin at birth and end at death; there are not yet many works that begin with a man's death.

Yet, for the real happenings of the world, what a man does after his death is immensely important, notably when he passes on the results of what he did on earth—translated into the spiritual—to the souls who come down after him. We cannot understand the age which succeeds a given age if we do not observe this side of life.

Now I was specially interested in observing those individualities who surrounded Bacon after his death. Among them were individualities who were subsequently born as natural scientists. But there were also others who were born as historians; and if we observe the influence of the dead Lord Bacon on these souls, we see how the materialism which he founded upon earth—the mere researching into the world of sense (for, as you know, everything else was for him an ‘idol’)—translated into the spiritual, reverts into a kind of radicalism. And so indeed, in the very midst of the spiritual world, these souls received impulses which worked on in such a way that after their birth, having descended to the earth, they would attach no value to anything that was not a concrete fact visible to the senses.

I will now speak in a somewhat popular form, but I beg you not to take my words too literally, for if you do so it will of course be only too easy to say: ‘How grotesque!’ Among these souls there were also some who, by their former tendencies—derived from former earthly lives—were destined to become historians. And among them was one who was the greatest. (I am still speaking of the pre-earthly lives of all these souls). One among them was the greatest. Under the influence of Lord Bacon's impulses, all these souls said to themselves, in effect: It is no longer permissible to write history as it was written in former times, to write it with Ideas, investigating the inner connections. Only the actual facts must now be the object of our research.

Now I ask you, what does this mean? Are not the intentions of men the most important thing in history?—and they are not outwardly real! These souls, however, no longer permitted themselves to think in this way; and least of all did the soul who afterwards appeared again as one of the greatest historians of the 19th century—Leopold von Ranke. Leopold von Ranke was a pre-earthly disciple of Lord Bacon.

Study the earthly career of Leopold von Ranke as a historian. What is his principle? Ranke's principle as a historian is this: nothing must be written in history save what is to be read of in the archives. We must compile all history from the archives—from the actual transactions of the diplomats.

If you read Ranke you will find it so. He is a German and a Protestant, but with his sense of reality this has no effect on him. He works objectively—that is to say, with the objectivity of the archives. So he writes his History of the Popes—the best that has ever been written from the pure standpoint of archives. When we read Ranke we are irritated, nay dreadfully so. It is a barren prospect to imagine the old gentleman—quick and alert as he was until a ripe old age—sitting forever in the archives and merely piecing together the diplomatic transactions. That is no real history. It is history which reckons only with the facts of the sense-world—that is to say, for the historian, with the archives.

And so indeed, precisely by taking into account the life beyond the earth we have the possibility to understand why Ranke became what he was.

But now we can also look across to Amos Comenius, and observe how he worked on the pre-earthly willing of souls who afterwards descended to the earth. For just as Leopold von Ranke became the greatest disciple of Bacon—of Bacon after his death—so did Schlosser become the greatest disciple of Comenius after his death.

Read Schlosser's History; observe the prevailing tone, the fundamental note he strikes. On every page there speaks the moralist—the moralist who would fain seize the human heart and soul—whose object is to speak right into the heart. Often he scarcely succeeds, for he is still rather a pedant. He speaks, in effect, like a pedant speaking to the heart. Nevertheless, being a pre-earthly disciple of Amos Comenius, he has absorbed something of the quality that was in Comenius himself, who was so characteristic by virtue of the peculiar quality of his spirit. For after all, Comenius too came over from Mohammedanism. Though he was very different from the spirits who gathered around Lord Bacon, nevertheless Comenius too, in his incarnation as Comenius, concentrated on the real, outer world. Everywhere he demanded visibility, objectivity, in education. There must always be an underlying picture. He demands vision—object lessons, as it were; he too lays stress on the sense-perceptible, though in quite another way. For Amos Comenius was also one of those who at the time of the Thirty Years' War believed most enthusiastically in the coming of the so-called Millennium. In his Pansophia he wrote down great and world-embracing ideas. He wanted to work for human education by a great impulsive power. This too worked on Schlosser. It is there in Schlosser.

I mention these two figures—Ranke and Schlosser—in order to show you how we can understand what appears as the spiritually productive power in man only if we also take into account his life beyond the earth. Only then do we understand it—just as we have also learnt to understand many things by taking into account repeated lives on earth. For in the thoughts which I have recently placed before you, we have observed this marvellous working across from one incarnation to another. As I said, I give these examples in order that we may then consider how a man can think about his own karma. Before we can dwell on the way in which good and evil—or illnesses or the like—work over from one incarnation to another, we must first learn to perceive how that which afterwards emerges in the spiritual and intellectual life of civilisation also works across from one incarnation to another.

Now my dear friends, I must admit that for me one of the most interesting personalities in modern spiritual life, with regard to his karma, was Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. Anyone who observes him closely will see that his most beautiful works depend on a peculiar fact, namely this: Again and again, in his whole human constitution, there was a kind of tendency for the Ego and astral body to flee from the physical and the etheric bodies.

Morbid conditions appear in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, bordering very nearly on dementia. But these morbid conditions only express in a rather more extreme form what was always present in him in a nascent state. His soul-and-spirit tends to go out—holds to the physical and etheric only by a very loose thread. And in this condition—the soul-and-spirit holding to the physical and etheric by a very loose thread only—the most beautiful of his works originate; I mean the most beautiful of his longer works and of his shorter poems too. Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's most beautiful poems may even be said to have originated half out of the body. There was a peculiar relationship between the four members of his nature. Truly there is a great difference between such a personality and an average man of the present time. With an average man of this materialistic age we generally find a very firm and robust connection of the soul-and-spirit with the physical and etheric. The soul-and-spirit is deeply immersed in the physical and etheric—‘sits tight’, as it were. But in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer it was not so. He had a very tender relation of the soul-and-spirit to the physical and etheric. To describe his psyche is really one of the most interesting tasks one can undertake when studying the developments of modern spiritual life. Many things that emerge in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer appear almost like a dim, cloudy recollection—a recollection which has however grown beautiful in growing dim. When Conrad Ferdinand Meyer writes we always have the feeling: He is remembering something, though not quite exactly. He changes it—but changes it into something beautiful and form-perfected. We can observe this wonderfully, piece by piece, in certain of his works.

Now it is characteristic of the inner karma of a human being when there is such a definite relationship of the four members of his nature—physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. And in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's case, when we trace back this peculiarly intimate connection, we are led, first of all, to the time of the Thirty Years' War. This was the first thing clear to me in his case: there is something of a former earthly life at the time of the Thirty Years' War. And then there is a still earlier life on earth going back into the pre-Carlovingian age, going back quite evidently into the early history of Italy.

When we endeavour to trace Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's karma, the peculiar, intangible fluidity of his being (which none the less expresses itself in such perfection of form)—the peculiar, intangible fluidity of his life somehow communicates itself to our investigation, until at length we feel: We are getting into confusion. I have no other alternative but to describe these things just as they happened in the investigation.

We go back into the time of the 6th century in Italy. There we have the feeling: We are getting into an extraordinarily insecure element. We are driven back again and again, and only gradually we observe that this is not due to ourselves but to the object of our research. There is really in the soul—in the individuality—of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer something that brings us into confusion as we try to investigate him. We are driven to return again and again into his present incarnation or into the one immediately before it. Again and again we must ‘pull ourselves up’ and go back again.

The following was the result.—You must remember, all that has lived in a human soul in former incarnations becomes manifest in the most varied forms—in likenesses which are often quite imperceptible to outer observation. This you will have seen from other instances of reincarnation given here.

So at length we come to an incarnation in Italy in the early Christian centuries—at the end of the first half of the first millennium A.D. Here we come to a halt. We find a soul living in Italy, to a large extent at Ravenna, at the Roman Court. But now we come into confusion. For we must ask ourselves: What was living in that soul? The moment we ask ourselves this question (in order to call forth the further occult investigation), the whole thing is extinguished once again.

We become aware of the experiences which this soul underwent while living at the Court at Ravenna—at the Roman Court. We enter into these experiences and we think we have them, and then again they are extinguished—blotted out from us; and we are driven back again to Conrad Ferdinand Meyer as he lived on earth in the immediate past. At length we perceive that in this later life he obliterates from our vision the content of his soul in the former life. Only after long trouble do we perceive at length how the matter really stands. Conrad Ferdinand Meyer—or rather the individuality who lived in him—was living at that time in a certain relationship to one of the Popes who sent him, among others, to England on a Roman Catholic, Christian Mission.

The individuality who afterwards became Conrad Ferdinand Meyer had first absorbed all that wonderful sense of form which it was possible to absorb in Italy at that time. The Mosaic art of Italy bears witness to it; also the old Italian painting, the greater part, nay practically the whole of which has been destroyed. This art did not continue.

And then he went on a Roman Catholic Christian Mission to the Anglo-Saxons. One of his companions founded the Bishopric of Canterbury. What afterwards took place at Canterbury began essentially with this foundation. The individuality, however, who after-wards appeared as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, was only there as a witness, so to speak. Nevertheless, he was a very active person, and he called forth the ill-will of an Anglo-Saxon chieftain, at whose investigation he was eventually murdered. That is what we find to begin with.

But while he lived in England there was something in the soul of this Conrad Ferdinand Meyer which robbed him of real joy in life. His soul was deeply rooted in the Italian art of his time—or, if we will call it so, in the Italian spiritual life. He gained no happiness in the execution of his missionary work in England. Yet he devoted himself to it with great intensity—so much so that his assassination was a reaction to it.

This constant unhappiness—being repelled from something which he was none the less doing with all force and devotion out of another impulse in his heart—worked on in such a way that when he passed through his next earthly life there ensued a cosmic clouding-over of his memory. The inner impulse was there but it no longer coincided with any clear concept.

And so it came about that in his subsequent incarnation as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, an undefined impulse was at work in him, to this effect: ‘I was once working in England. It is connected somehow with Canterbury. I was murdered owing to my connection with Canterbury.’

So indeed the outer life of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in this incarnation takes its course. He studies outer history, he studies Canterbury, studies what happened in Canterbury, in connection with the history of England. He comes across Thomas à Becket, Chancellor of King Henry II in the 12th century. He learns of the strange destiny of Thomas à Becket, who from being the all-powerful Chancellor of Henry II, was murdered virtually at his instigation. And so in this present incarnation as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, his own half-forgotten destiny appears to him in Thomas à Becket. It comes before him, half-forgotten in his subconsciousness, for I am speaking of course, of the subconscious life which comes to the surface in this way. So he describes his own fate in a far distant time. But he describes it in the story of what actually happened in the 12th century between King Henry II and Thomas à Becket of Canterbury, whose fate he recounts in his poetic work Der Heilige (The Saint). So indeed it is—only all this takes place in the subconscious life which embraces successive incarnations. It is as though within a single earthly life a man had experienced something in his early youth in connection with a certain place. He has forgotten it. He experienced it maybe in the second or third year of his life. It does not emerge, but some other similar destiny emerges. The very same place is named, and as a result he has a peculiar sympathy for this other person's destiny. He feels it differently from one who has no ‘association of ideas’ with the same place.

Just as this may happen within one earthly life, so it took place in the concrete instance I am now giving you. There was the work in Canterbury, the murder of a person connected with Canterbury (for Thomas à Becket was Archbishop of Canterbury), the murder of Thomas à Becket at the instigation of the King of England. All of these schemes work in together. In the descriptions in his poem he is describing his own destiny.

But now the thing goes on—and this is most interesting in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's case. He was born as a woman about the time of the Thirty Years' War—a lively woman, full of spiritual interest in life, a woman who witnessed many an adventure. She married a man who first took part in all the confused events of the Thirty Years' War, but then grew weary of them and emigrated to Switzerland, to Graubünden (Canton Grisons), where he lived a somewhat philistine existence. But his wife was deeply affected and impressed by all that took place in the Graubünden country under the prevailing conditions of the Thirty Years' War.

This too is eclipsed, as though with another layer. For it is so with this individuality: That which is living in him is easily forgotten in the cosmic sense, and yet he calls it forth again in a transmuted form, where it becomes more glorious and more intense. For out of what this woman observed and experienced in that incarnation there arises the wonderful characterisation of Jürg Jenatsch, the man of Graubünden, in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's historic novel. Observing Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in this incarnation, we have indeed no explanation of his peculiarity if we cannot enter into his karma. I must say—speaking with a grain of salt—that I envy the people who ‘understand’ him so light-heartedly. Before I knew his reincarnations, all that I understood was that I did not understand him. This wonderful inner perfection of form, this inner joy in form, this purity of form, all the strength and power that lives in Jürg Jenatsch, and the wonderful personal and living quality in The Saint,—a good deal of superficiality is needed to imagine that one understands all this. Observe his beautiful forms—there is something of clear line in them, almost severe; they are painted and yet not painted. Here live the mosaics of Ravenna. And in The Saint there lives a history which was undergone once upon a time by this individuality himself; but a mist of the soul has spread over it, and out of the mist it emerges in another form.

And again one needs to know: All that is living in his romance of Graubünden, Jürg Jenatsch, was absorbed by the heart and mind of a woman; while in the momentum, the driving power that lives in this romance there lives again the swashbuckler of the Thirty Years' War. The man was pretty much of a philistine, as I said, but he was a swashbuckler. And so, all that comes over from former experiences on earth comes to life again in a peculiar form in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. Only now do we begin to understand him. Now we say to ourselves: In olden times of human evolution, men were not ashamed to speak of Spirits from beyond descending to the earth, or of earthly human beings finding their way upward and working on from spiritual worlds. All this must come again, otherwise man will not get beyond his present outlook of the earthworm. For all that the natural-scientific conception of the world contains, it is the world-outlook of the earth-worm. Men live on earth as though only the earth concerned them, as though it were not true that the whole Cosmos works upon all earthly things and lives again in man. As though it were not true that earlier epochs of history live on, inasmuch as we ourselves carry into later times what we absorbed in former times.

We do not understand karma by talking theoretic concepts about successive earthly incarnations. To understand karma is to feel in our hearts all that we can feel when we see what existed ages ago flowing into the later epochs in the souls of men themselves. When we begin to see how karma works, human life gains quite a new content. We feel ourselves quite differently in human life.

Such a spirit as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer feels his former earthly lives like an undertone—an undertone that sounds from far away. We understand what appears in him only when we develop an understanding for this undertone. The progress of mankind in spiritual life will depend on its ability to regard life in this way, to observe in all detail what flows across from former epochs of the world's evolution into later epochs through the human beings themselves. Then we shall cease, in the childish way of psycho-analysts, to explain the peculiarities of souls by speaking of ‘hidden underlying regions’ and the like. After all, one can ascribe anything one likes to what is ‘hidden’. We shall look for the real causes. In some respects, no doubt, the psycho-analysts do quite good work. But these pursuits remind us of the story of how someone heard that in the year 1749 a son was born to a certain patrician. Afterwards this son emerged as a very gifted man. To this day we can point to the actual birth-place in Frankfurt of the man who afterwards came forth as Wolfgang Goethe. ‘Let us make excavations in the earth and see by dint of what strange emanations his talents came about’. Sometimes the psycho-analysts seem to me just like that. They dig into the earth-realm of the soul, into the hidden regions which they themselves first invent by their hypotheses, whereas in reality one ought to look into the preceding lives on earth and lives between death and a new birth. Then if we do so, a true understanding of human souls is opened out to us. Truly the souls of men are far too rich in content to enable us to understand their content out of a single life alone.

• 1. See Vol. I, lecture X.